Equisoft Acquires Grendel of US

Equisoft, a global leader offering innovative front-end applications, extensive back-office services and a unique data migration expertise, on Wednesday made it public that it has acquired Grendel, a privately-owned US-based company offering an industry-leading customer relationship management system (CRM) purpose-built for the wealth management industry. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Grendel is a high-end development firm specializing in the financial services industry with a wide variety of industry connections and relationships. Equisoft, on its parts, is a global provider of advanced digital solutions in life insurance and wealth management and is recognized as a valued partner by over 50 of the world’s leading financial institutions in 15 countries.

According to statistics, the Wealth Management industry in India is valued at approximately INR 100 lakh crore (USD 1.5 trillion) and is expected to double in the next five years. The Wealth Management industry today is facing challenges across various domains including prospect identification, safe navigation through complex regulatory requirements, proactive client life event identification, creation of customized pitches to clients, improving the hit rate of product pitches without infringing on regulations around suitability of investments, enhanced development of investments and clear and insightful client reporting. This is where Equisoft’s cutting edge digital solutions are being seen as a powerful answer to accelerate the overall growth of the Wealth Management industry in India and APAC.

With Grendel on board, Equisoft’s wealth management solutions are completely equipped to address all the roadblocks existing in the industry. Interestingly, the main application suite of Grendel is all but an advanced web-based and mobile practice management solution, which is built for financial advisors, broker-dealers, RIAs, and their clients. Different modules of Grendel include exhaustive client information management, compliance management, wealth management, account aggregation, email and file archive, client portal, practice management tools, advanced analytics capabilities, to mention a few. 

Commenting on the acquisition announcement, Rana Biswas, APAC Sales Director at Equisoft, said that the Grendel acquisition advances Equisoft’s global growth strategy and the company’s plans to further develop the CRM and wealth technologies verticals. The robust and scalable CRM platform of Grendel will be a great complement to Equisoft’s existing CRM platform which is more insurance focused. The broad suite of related products such as WealthElements will highly benefit their customers and will bring end-to-end seamless experiences for their clients in the wealth management industries, he said.

Grendel’s CEO Aaron Guidotti said that their team is thrilled to become part of Equisoft and we couldn’t be more excited as to what that means for our customers. Equisoft is a fast-growing global powerhouse – and the resulting combination of their respective platforms is an ecosystem unmatched in their industry. This is a win-win that will allow them to evolve while staying true to the mission that has guided them so far: making advisors’ lives easier, he said.  

According to a Celent report dated May 2018, Grendel ranks among the top technology vendors offering “premier CRM solutions for the North American wealth management market”. Consulting firm Aite identified Grendel as a firm to “acquire and engage with”.  

Mind you that Grendel features a strong lineup of integration partnerships with leading custodians and other third-party data providers. Besides, it offers one of the most comprehensive CRM-centric systems available to advisors today. And in the process, advisors can manage client relationships, execute trades, handle compliance tasks, generate performance reports, and e-sign documents all in one place, just by leveraging the platform’s integrations. And that translates into great efficiency gains.

Equisoft has invested in expanding its solutions with several acquisitions in recent years, all of which are contributing to build end-to-end and seamless experiences for their clients in both the insurance and wealth management industries.