Envestnet
RingCentral is helping this leading financial management tech firm save money in a number of ways
100,000
independent advisors use the company’s financial technology platform
$1 Billion
in adjusted revenue earned in fiscal year 2020
7,106
support calls in March 2021 using RingCentral Contact Center
RingCentral saves us money in several ways. We’ve consolidated services for phone, call center, online meetings, and fax into one bill. We’ve stopped buying physical phones. And we’re no longer wasting staff time on support calls for every telephony change, because RingCentral makes it easy to do things ourselves.
Jace Jones
Service Desk Manager
A true innovator in wealth management
In an industry where many firms claim to take an innovative approach, Envestnet indeed offers its clients services and technologies that they truly cannot find with other financial management firms.
The company’s breakthrough was to create a platform and methodology that enabled financial advisors to offer unified advice to their clients. By leveraging a suite of technologies, and partnering with a wide range of financial institutions, Envestnet has empowered advisors to take a holistic view of their clients’ financial lives—so they can help those clients make better decisions to protect and grow their wealth.
This unique approach has proven wildly successful. In just 20 years since its founding, Envestnet has become one of the largest providers of wealth management solutions to financial advisors. Today, the company serves more than 100,000 advisors across nearly 5,000 companies, including 17 of the 20 largest US banks and 47 of the 50 largest wealth management and brokerage firms.
Year after year, the company earns industry awards for its groundbreaking solutions. The WealthManagement.com Industry Awards has named Envestnet a “Disruptor Technology,” for example, and the company recently won the “Technology Innovation Award” from the Bank Insurance and Securities Association.
But a combination of organic growth and acquisitions left Envestnet facing increasing challenges with one area of its own technology infrastructure.
INDUSTRY
Financial services
HQ
Chicago, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
1999
EMPLOYEES
4,500
A telephony environment delivering a rapidly depreciating return
In the financial-services industry, much of an organization’s business takes place by phone. This makes a wealth management company’s telephony system an important asset to the firm’s success. But Jace Jones, Envestnet’s Service Desk Manager, explains that the company’s previous telephony system was more of a liability.
“The system was extremely unreliable,” Jace says. “I lost count of how many phone outages we experienced. But I can tell you that whatever the number was, it was enough to disrupt our operations.”
Nor was downtime the only challenge. As Jace notes, the phone system had other shortcomings that created serious operational problems. “From an administrative standpoint, the system was so complicated that even to make small adjustments, like adding a new agent to our call center, we had to submit a ticket to the provider, wait for them to respond, and then usually spend an hour on the phone with them.”
Acquisitions led to a portfolio of incompatible phone systems
Jace also points out that Envestnet has grown through both organic expansion and regular, strategic acquisitions. But because Envestnet’s phone system was so unreliable and difficult to operate, the IT team didn’t even attempt to integrate newly acquired firms into the company’s telephony environment.
“With each acquisition, we were picking up new phone solutions and different carrier relationships, and it became more and more difficult to stay united as one company,” he says. “It wasn’t even easy to find a colleague’s phone number in a central directory—because we didn’t have one.”
With RingCentral, the thousands of employees across our company were now on the same telephony platform and in one centralized directory. That’s really helping us to feel like one team, one company.
Jace Jones
Service Desk Manager
RingCentral unifies the company—and adds massive efficiencies
Envestnet solved these and other challenges by migrating to RingCentral’s cloud communications suite—unifying the entire company on an integrated platform for business phone, video conferencing, digital fax, and contact center operations. As Jace explains, the operational benefits were significant and wide-ranging.
“Our old system’s softphone service was difficult to use and unreliable, which forced our salespeople and other employees on the road to forward business calls to their personal phones,” Jace says. “With RingCentral, that became a nonissue, because now everyone could use the RingCentral app to take and make business calls anywhere, either on their computers or their mobile phones.”
Jace also notes that since moving to RingCentral Contact Center, Envestnet’s call center operations run more efficiently than ever.
RingCentral Contact Center is great because it lets us easily set up rules to direct calls to specific agents anytime volume hits a certain amount, to prevent any team from getting overloaded and keeping clients waiting.
Jace Jones
Service Desk Manager
Envestnet is also finding that RingCentral helps reduce the company’s telecommunications costs in a number of ways. As Jace explains, the biggest savings has come from being able to consolidate the company’s previous apps and vendors for phone and online meetings into a single bill. But after his team deployed RingCentral’s unified communications platform, Jace discovered another source of savings.
“I didn’t even think about it at the time we were rolling out RingCentral, but now we had a new digital fax service built into our phone solution,” he says. “That saved us money right away, by letting my team get rid of our old fax service as well as our in-house fax server and its antiquated software.”
But Jace says the biggest operational improvement he’s seen since rolling out RingCentral has been helping to bring the fast-growing, geographically distributed company closer together.
Now that everyone is on the same RingCentral system, I can see in real-time whether or not a coworker in another part of the country is on a call. If not, I can call that person, and if it makes sense, then with one click I can turn that call into a video chat or an online meeting where one of us can share our screen.
Jace Jones
Service Desk Manager
Jace concludes: “The enhanced collaboration we’re enjoying thanks to RingCentral is having such a positive effect on our operations, we’re now looking to recreate that sense of connectedness with other areas of our IT environment.”