How to Build Investor Portal with Salesforce Experience Cloud

August 2, 2023
10 min

An investor’s everyday job relates to many risks and uncertainties. And we know how sophisticated your dealmaking lifecycle can be. There are different challenges you struggle with like conducting research and analysis on various investment opportunities, overseeing investment portfolios, or developing financial plans for clients.

Besides that, you should strengthen your current investor relationships with clients, partners, and stakeholders and work on the development of your network. The good news is as a modern investor you can rely on technology and automate most of the mundane tasks and bring a bit more predictability into your volatile business.

Investor portals are one of these technological advances that can remove much of investors’ headaches. And according to a survey by Accenture, 48% of investors already use digital channels (such as online portals and mobile apps) to manage their investments.

In this post, we’ll talk about:

  • Benefits of welcoming investor portals into your organization
  • Why you should develop your investor portal solution using Salesforce
  • How we built an investment portal powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud
  • How you can create a secure real estate investor, private equity, or fund investor portal on top of the Salesforce platform with Ascendix.

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Exploring Investor Portals: Everything You Need to Know

Investor portal software is an excellent tool that provides companies with convenient and secure access to their information delivering the necessary level of transparency and efficiency for investment management. Let’s discuss this technology in greater detail.

 

What is an Investor Portal?

An investor portal is a secure online platform where investors can access their account information, collaborate with colleagues, partners, and stakeholders on investment opportunities, and track overall performance.

Other most common features investment portal software has are the ability to view investment portfolios and display key data and investor statements via investment reporting and dashboards.

 

What Investor Sectors Benefit from Investor Portal Solutions the Most?

Online investor portals are commonly used but not limited to investment stakeholders like:

 

Why an Investor Portal Is Essential for Your Business

In a survey conducted by Salesforce, 82% of employees said that their company’s intranet has a positive impact on their productivity, and 85% said that it helps them collaborate better with their colleagues.

Why an Investor Portal Is Essential for Your Business | Ascendix

Why an Investor Portal Is Essential for Your Business | Ascendix

Investor portal software solutions can benefit financial advisors, real estate, alternative asset managers, and private equity investors in many ways. Let’s speak about some of them:

 

Centralized Management of Investment Information

Within investor portal software, agents and wealth managers can handle portfolio holdings, performance data, and transaction history from a single place. It helps firms make more informed decisions about their portfolios and adjust their investment strategies as needed.

 

Convenience

Investing professionals mustn’t be tied to their desktops anymore. They can reach for any necessary information from anywhere and from any device and stay more focused on investor relations.

 

Consistent Communication

Such investment hubs allow unintermittent communication among fund managers or advisors, enabling them to get answers to their questions and stay informed about the course of the deal.

 

Deal Lifecycle Transparency

With investment portals, wealth, alternative asset managers, and fund admins will get more actionable insights into activities, fees, expenses, and equalization which will be displayed in a structured and more comprehensive way via interactive dashboards.

 

Enhanced Security

Investor portal technology is designed with security in mind, providing a secure environment for limited and general partners to access their investment information and capital notices, securely share documents, and perform transactions. Most of the solutions also allow the design of role-based access models.

But even though most portal software products on the market offer a quite decent set of features, there are still plenty of challenges this typical software can’t handle. Here are some that we’d like to highlight.

Want to Build a Custom Investor Portal?

We will help you create a completely custom investor portal powered by Salesforce without overpaying for unnecessary functionality.

Challenges Investors May Encounter Using Conventional Portal Software

While traditional investor portal software can satisfy most generic demands, if you want to truly disrupt the industry, you should think beyond conventional solutions and adopt the advanced, industry-calibrated technology. Otherwise, you may run into the following limitations of traditional investor portal software:

 

No Space For Personalization

Most investor portals traditionally used by investors are quite rigid in terms of customization. So, if you want, for example, to adjust investor reporting features to showcase the metrics that you find the most useful, your software may not support you in this initiative. And despite having a broad range of tools you may not exactly have the ones your strategy needs.

 

Lack of Integration Capabilities

We know that you, as a forward-thinking investor, use numerous tools in your work to stay productive. But not all of them can be seamlessly connected with each other, and, especially, with your CRM. As a result, you’ll have multiple disintegrated data sources containing different information which minimizes your chances to get a comprehensive view of investment opportunities.

 

Insufficient Support and Training

It’s not a rare case when excellent solutions may not have adequate customer support. And when you have a question about investor portal features or have a system issue, you may not have them addressed in time or in the way you need it.

Especially if you try to execute complex investment strategies. The same issue can arise with technical training and educational resources. The investor portal of your choice may lack how-to guides or videos which can make your learning curve even curvier.

 

Learn more about Salesforce Experience Cloud and what you can build with it.

Why Salesforce Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is An Ideal Foundation for Your Investor Portal

Salesforce Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is part of Experience Cloud and offers organizations a suite of tools that unite various elements — personalization, service, privacy, and more — to enhance a digital experience.

What You Can Build With Salesforce Experience Cloud for Investors

Original Feature
Customization Examples
Help Center & FAQ Portal
Investment organizations can build virtual service centers for addressing common borrowers' and lenders' questions.
Customer Account Portals
Lending firms can create a portal for secure collaboration and document management with borrowers.
Partner Portals
Companies involved into investment business can build a centralized platform for managing investors, borrowers, and lenders.
Employee Community
You can create an internal online knowledge base for borrowers, lenders, and investors
Microsites and Landing Pages
Investment brokers can announce about upcoming webinars or conferences on landing pages
Custom Solutions
Investment brokers can turn Experience Cloud portals into detailed property listings, which can be integrated with a website, map services, chats, or online forms.
How You Can Customize Experience Cloud

 

The platform integrates technologies that help build and manage digital interactions, personalize content and improve relations with partners and customers. Among its most notable features are:

 

Limitless Customization Capabilities

Unlike most legacy portal software vendors, Salesforce promotes flexibility in its every product so there is hardly any solution that can compete with it in terms of customization capabilities. So, you can tweak and scale your portal along with your growing needs and investment strategy adjustments. You can use a range of design tools, including pre-built templates and themes to create a professional-looking or completely personalized layout that meets your needs.

Click-not-code nature allows building your investor portal with little or no custom coding, which mitigates the risks of breaking the whole code in the future when you decide to modify your solution. At the end of the day, you will spend much less time creating your portal and as a result, less costs will be involved, too.

 

High Level of Security

Salesforce provides robust security features that protect your web portal and user data from cyber threats. In addition, investment firms can set up user authentication and access controls to ensure that only authorized users can access your portal.

 

Seamless Integrability

A broad Salesforce infrastructure of native products allows you to make your CRM the center of all operations and find a solution that can fill the functional gap and share the same Salesforce potential and philosophy. It can also smoothly connect with 4,500 apps on the AppExchange app marketplace.

 

Mobile Responsiveness

Salesforce Experience Cloud is mobile-responsive, which means that your Salesforce Digital Experience Platform (DXP) will look and function seamlessly on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. This is important as more and more users are using online portals from their mobile devices.

 

Broad Network of Salesforce Consultants and Developers

An enormous community of Salesforce partners around the globe can support your Salesforce solution, and consult on optimization and further enhancement so you’ll never be limited to the support team provided by the software vendor.

Now, it’s time to see Salesforce Digital Experience portals in action.

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How We Helped Innovative Capital Corporation Streamline Operations by Building a Salesforce-Driven Portal

Innovative Capital Corporation a commercial real estate brokerage and private capital lender, excels at coupling clients with a diverse range of funding sources — from private money and institutional capital to venture funds, private equity, and debt funds. They help their clients secure the ideal loans to fuel their business growth.

Yet the company faced a considerable challenge. Managing a substantial and expanding customer base, Innovative Capital grappled with effectively consolidating the data of its lenders and borrowers. Furthermore, they sought a robust solution to not only market their top-tier services but also to refine their lead processing and engagement tools.

More recently, the company launched a private debt fund and needed to expand its Salesforce platform to:

  • Customize Salesforce to meet the needs of investors and investor-related communication.
  • Provide visibility for investors to their contributions and distributions into the fund.
  • Provide visibility into the portfolio of loans and key performance metrics.
  • Manage investors’ access to the portal via Salesforce.
  • Integrate their investor portal into their current CRM implementation to establish a unified data source, ensuring seamless data flow while maintaining a high level of security protection.

To address these needs, Innovative Capital hired Ascendix to create an investor portal software utilizing the advanced capabilities of the Salesforce Experience Cloud. Our team helped the company build this portal which seamlessly integrated with Salesforce CRM, sharing a unified database of contacts, loan details, and activity outcomes. The portal design also echoes the company’s custom branding, maintaining a consistent visual identity across all platforms.

 

Investor Portal Dashboard

Investor Portal for Innovative Capital | Ascendix

 

Moreover, the investor portal software solution we created is powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud which means that it:

  • Is highly customizable and can be modified and extended as needed.
  • Can seamlessly integrate with other Salesforce products like Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Pardot (aka MC Account Engagement) and shares the same database of contacts, investors, loan information, and activities.
  • Can be accessed from Salesforce with controlled permissions to protect sensitive information.
  • Can be accessed via desktop and mobile devices.
  • Shares the same custom branding and logo as the company website and the rest of the Salesforce apps.
  • Displays the relevant financial information for each investor.

Additionally, the investor portal’s home page is built to showcase the most essential information related to each loan in the portfolio such as loan type, loan position, appraised value, and monthly payments.

 

Active Loans Summary in Investor Portal | Ascendix

Active Loans Summary in Investor Portal | Ascendix

 

In this solution, the investors will also see the table with additional details about the loan such as:

  • Property type
  • Funding and maturity dates
  • Appraisal at closing
  • Loan amount and Loan-to-value ratios
  • Property address

And a summary of total loans, monthly payments, and overall yield.

Innovative Capital also requested to link the most essential loan information like the appraisal at closing to PDF documents so investors could quickly click and see more details; and have an address linked to the exact listing of the property on external platforms like Zillow, Redfin, or Google Maps.

Also, at our client’s request, we added the ability to upload documents via the Contact record in Salesforce right to the web portal so that the investor could view all necessary documents in one place along with monthly updates.

 

How to Upload Documents to Investor Portal | Ascendix

How to Upload Documents to Investor Portal | Ascendix

 

Now, all the documents are stored within the Salesforce Digital Experience portal, streamlining the process of file management.

 

Investor Contact Data in Salesforce | Ascendix

Investor Contact Data in Salesforce | Ascendix

 

Read a full case study of how we helped Innovative Capital maximize Salesforce’s potential.

 

How Ascendix Can Help You Build an Investor Portal

While Salesforce offers you an excellent digital platform with the required functionality for creating an engaging and personalized experience for your users, we, as a certified Salesforce consultant and development company can help you maximize your investment.

Our professionals will help you:

  • Build a secure self-service investor portal for borrowers, investor, lenders, and partners with carefully calibrated user role hierarchy, sharing rules, permission sets, and access levels
  • Create custom fields and objects and map data between systems and also help you with records export/import to the system
  • Customize reporting experience and dashboards to display essential information for your borrowers, investors, lenders , or referral partners
  • Harmonize the connection between native Salesforce solutions and third-party systems
  • Customize the look and feel of your portal to improve the digital experiences of your customers, investors, and partners and ensure that feel comfortable using it
  • Facilitate collaboration via accessible document display and sharing
  • Scale your portal functionality along with your changing needs and company structure
  • Virtual support and training to ensure your users can freely use and manage the portal’s features.

Want to adapt Salesforce Experience Cloud to the growing needs of your business? Book a free CRM consulting call and we’ll help you maximize your investment in Salesforce.

Investor Portal FAQs

What is an investor portal?

An investor portal is an online platform that provides a secure space for investors to access their account information. The platform enables investors to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and stakeholders on potential investment opportunities, as well as track their overall investment performance.

What should I look for in an investor portal?

When you look for an investor portal, you need to consider the following factors: customization capabilities, platform security, integrability with other solutions, storage limits, reporting tools, price, and platform support.

How to create an investor portal?

To create an investor portal, you need to define your business and functional requirements, design the portal interface, customize features and reports, integrate it with other systems, test, deploy, maintain and upgrade.

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