AscendixRE as a Centralized Mortgage Data Management Tool for Talonvest Capital

Talonvest sought a comprehensive solution to serve as a unified data management platform. AscendixRE for Capital Markets emerged as the solution of choice. The Ascendix professional services team and key Talonvest stakeholders first underwent a discovery phase. The discovery phase was key to identifying specific needs of the business and providing in-depth project guidance as Talonvest looked to embark on a firm wide system adoption of AscendixRE for Capital Markets.

After learning more about Talonvest’s current system challenges and desired enhancements in the discovery phase, Ascendix team members prepared a detailed project proposal based on the information captured to promote a successful system implementation.

Data Import:

Bringing together information across the firm for Talonvest into one central location was fundamental to gaining user adoption. Ascendix imported and assisted with clean-up of company data that previously resided within multiple large excel files out on a shared folder. Outlook contact files, company information and notes from each team member were tagged, categorized and inserted into the system.

Pertinent details such as top prospect records and top clients were tagged and inserted into the system as well for easy reporting and searchability. System go live was a great success as team members resonated with familiar data across deals and clients they work with on a regular basis.

Deal Stage Task Tracking:

Talonvest was interested in keeping similar functionality that Asana provided, however needed a centralized solution. This solution needed to capture information related to individual tasks within each stage of a deal. Ascendix consultants tactically pitched an idea to implement and customize Action Plans, a task tracking tool. Tasks are customized and automatically assigned to team members throughout the deal stages. This provides visibility across the deal process for Talonvest team members and executives. The customization behind automated messaging and automated Chatter posts allows for increased team collaboration within the AscendixRE system.

Team members can now easily manage relationships, deals and their own personal tasks within one centralized system. This opens capabilities for key stakeholders to report and search on information to guide data driven decision making across the firm. As the firm grows rapidly, having a tool such as Ascendix to capture and manage information allows deal team members to be more reactive to their clients and form deeper relationships through dependable customer service. Ascendix provides the ability to track Task completion KPI’s for executive leadership. Executives now have a more in-depth look into how deals are progressing by simply opening a report.

Additional Custom Configuration:

Ascendix customized specific details for Deals, Deal Sources, Capital Programs, Account and Contact structures already offered by the AscendixRE system to better adhere to specific needs of Talonvest. New fields were created to capture additional points of data and labels of fields were modified to familiarize items for Talonvest.

Ascendix provided layout customization to help move user adoption forward by strategically exposing frequently used data across records. Ascendix created a custom solution allowing for adding multiple properties to a deal. This customization helped to support the deal data model of the firm and provides flexibility for capturing these property details.

Talonvest needed the ability to easily track categorized data such as Hot Lenders, Clients and Prospects across the firm. Ascendix created a custom solution along with reports to help track and manage this important data. For Talonvest, this custom solution helps drive company initiatives and increases visibility on key accounts for executive leadership and individual team members.

Ascendix also added a custom repository for capturing specific equity capital program details separate from that of the debt capital program records. This expands the team’s ability to capture new information regarding different capital programs and provides visibility into these details across the firm. Furthermore, providing a straightforward location for users to track this data increases the value of the system for future initiatives.

Duplication:

Ascendix assisted the Talonvest team by utilizing a combination of the Salesforce Duplicate Management tool and Duplicate Check* AppExchange tool across capital programs, contacts and accounts to avoid duplicated data. Ascendix knew that without accurate and clean data, the Talonvest team would run into reporting errors and decreased confidence in the system.

Reporting:

Ascendix created dashboards and reports specialized to the needs of each team to help provide collaboration across team members and allow them to quickly find the information they need. Both business execution and business development teams leverage a dashboard that provides them transparency across deals where individual team members are part of, and what role they are assigned. This provides detail around the volume of work spread across teams and helps to guide executive assignment decisions with potential new deals.

The business executive team dashboard provides insight into newly added capital source records to the system, segmented by the team member adding them. This is part of an initiative set forth by executives to increase the number of capital sources within the system, adding an element of gamification and transparency.

The business development team utilizes a dashboard that showcases the Top Clients & Prospects across the system and corresponding assigned team members. Now, team members and executives can easily track key clients and prospect records in one central location.

Automated Lender Matrix, Composer Tool:

As many commercial real estate firms understand, putting together a lender matrix can be very time consuming. Marrying together professional services strategy with the Composer Tool offered by Ascendix, we were able to provide Talonvest with a custom solution. Now, with the click of a button, a Lender Matrix can be generated automatically with customized formatting off each deal record.

Outlook to AscendixRE:

A major component of the Talonvest business process resides within Outlook. This is not an unfamiliar scenario for most businesses. Ascendix partners with Revenue Grid, a tool that offers an easy user-friendly sync of data between Outlook and Ascendix.

The use of Revenue Grid for Talonvest brought the ability to sync meetings with clients, email correspondence and contact details directly from Outlook to their Ascendix system through a plug in. This aided in diminishing the gap between a decentralized approach in Outlook and their existing workflow.

User Adoption and Training:

Key stakeholders and Ascendix spent a significant amount of time together strategically aligning the needs of the business with system appearance and functionality. It was imperative that the system was well received by team members.

Ascendix provided multiple live training sessions with live Q&A. We broke into team sessions so that functionality and key information was directed at what the individual team members would need out of the system. Ascendix also provided and continue to provide short How-To video clips that Talonvest can watch ad-hoc and save. Once the team had started using the system, Ascendix professional services was alongside to ensure that any post go-live additional change requests were appropriately addressed.

Current and Future Phase:

Ascendix continues to meet regularly with Tom and Carole to discuss requests, questions and possible issues that arise from team members across the system. Together, we discuss and plan around the impacts of new system changes. Ascendix professional services provides strategies for addressing enhancements by working closely with key stakeholders. Our goal is to ensure that the system not only supports their business needs but promotes new ideas and actionable data for the team.

As rapidly as a business must have the ability to pivot, it is key that the system also pivots to help support changing business needs. Through this discovery and implementation, we have formed a partnership of trust and reliability in consulting and in system knowledge.

As a system implementation progresses there are often many new ideas that evolve along the way. Ascendix has captured a handful of future initiatives that the Talonvest team would like to explore in future phases. Such as exploring options for integrating Chatham Financial Treasury Index values into the system. Talonvest has also expressed interest in exploring the possibilities of incorporating Yardi data and functionality currently used in Yardi, looking for ways to improve data centralization.