We have recently appointed Mark Papendieck to the role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). We thought that this was a perfect place to introduce Mark to the Integrated community and have him tell us a little bit about himself and the new role.
Integrated: Mark, before we find out a little bit more about you, many people might be wondering exactly what a CRO is. Can you tell us about the role?
MP: Of course. The Chief Revenue Officer role has really emerged over the last few years as technology reduces the gap between traditional sales, marketing, service and product functions and simultaneously forces companies to rethink how they approach sustainable growth generation.
To make sure that we continue to build lasting relationships and deliver really relevant and valuable services to our clients, we have to operate in a non-siloed manner that generates value for both our clients and our other stakeholders.
Essentially, my role here at Integrated is to make sure that we have a strategy for profitable revenue generation over the longer term. Not surprisingly, this means making sure that we optimise the alignment of all the revenue-related functions in the business including marketing, sales, customer support, pricing, product and revenue management to ensure that we have happy clients and stakeholders.
“Obviously, a key success factor will be continually striving to delight our clients and deliver them a seamless customer experience that enables them – and us – to accelerate sustainable growth. What we want to excel at is automation of the administration of bespoke investment portfolios”.
Integrated: You mention that it’s critical to ensure that clients and stakeholders are happy, can you expand on this?
MP: Well it goes without saying that unless you are delivering products and services that your customers are happy with, then your business wont exist! So let’s take the ‘happy customers’ part as a fundamental non-negotiable. My view is that to be a truly successful Financial Services B2B SaaS business (sorry for the acronyms), we need to deliver excellent technology solutions combined with personal service.
Obviously, our staff are key stakeholders in that equation as well as our shareholders who have together patiently created a sustainable business and an environment in which we can focus on continuing to improve and expand our services to the market.
Integrated: Tell us a little more about your background – this isn’t the first time you’ve worked in the platform or portfolio administration space is it?
MP: It certainly isn’t! Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working in many different parts of our industry – from roles in Dealer Groups, Funds Management companies, Technology Providers and of course platforms. I was the CEO of the first on-line wrap business in Australia (now part of the CFS group) and also worked with Perpetual and Skandia on their platform offerings.
The first dot com boom came at a really influential time in my career and shaped my thinking about how fundamentally impactful technology would be on our industry but also how critical human connection would continue to be.
“Delivering efficiency & improvement through technology combined with human connection is something that I think any successful technology business needs to achieve.”
Integrated: So what drew you to Integrated?
MP: I’ve been following the success of Integrated for a few years and have been really impressed with the niche that we have carved out in what many observers would say is a crowded marketplace.
Interestingly, I actually think it is a crowded marketplace if you are offering a standard custodial platform. The thing is, in the same way that the early platform market had to evolve from trust structures to custodial structures, today’s market simply demands more flexibility than is possible solely under a custodial arrangement. Every Integrated customer is different and their value proposition to their clients is different.
Successful wealth management or investment advisory businesses don’t want to be told by a service provider what their investment universe should look like or what their clients can or can’t invest in. That’s where we are unique in the market and we are seeing more and more wealth managers wanting to pivot their businesses to be more client facing and away from an inefficient back office but without compromising the DNA of their value proposition to their clients.
Integrated: Tell us what we can expect in the future from Integrated?
MP: Clearly, our future will continue to be determined by how well we deliver our service proposition to our clients. Really making sure that we nail our core competencies and continually refine and improve the fundamental services that our clients selected us for has to be at the centre of what we do. Working with our clients to understand how we else we can best help them to have more efficient businesses and a more seamless partnership with us will dictate future developments.
“Essentially, we want to continue to position ourselves to be the partner of choice for businesses that want the efficiency of tech-enabled portfolio administration and reporting without having to compromise their approach to managing their clients’ investments.”
