What

SigFig is a San Francisco-based software company connecting financial advisors and clients virtually to drive financial goals and strategies. Founded in 2006, SigFig has raised over $119M in venture funding, including a $50M Series E in 2019 that saw investment from General Atlantic, UBS, Bain Capital Ventures, Nyca Partners, and others. 

SigFig recently launched Engage, a remote-collaboration tool that helps banks provide personalized and virtual experiences to their customers. The platform offers immersive experiences and workflows that help streamline servicing and sales processes, while also making consumers more active agents in how advice and products are presented to them.

Why

According to Mike Sha, SigFig’s Co-Founder and CEO, Engage is a multi-part effort to bring bank services to the cutting edge. “In the world before Engage, the bank forces you to come into the branch to do business,” Sha said. “As a consumer, we’ve all gotten used to virtual interactions.” 

As banks struggle to sustain productivity across bank branches—let alone staff them—Engage helps banks shift resources in order to optimize how customers are supported. Namely, through virtual tools, banks can reach customers spanning geographies and also offer support outside traditional bank hours. Through Engage’s workflows, furthermore, banks can create a more unified customer experience, ensuring that more bankers provide a superior experience to clients. 

And finally, Engage can function as an internal differentiator during talent-acquisition processes. “In the war for talent, you can start picturing banks saying that if a lot of their client interactions are happening on Engage, maybe bankers can work from home,” Sha said.

How

Key to Engage’s ability to streamline customer experience comes from its efforts to establish rapport between bankers and customers. Through direct integrations into Salesforce in addition to other CRMs, advisors can prepare relevant interactive content modules they want to use during their meetings, and also pull up information about the client they’re meeting with—family members, income, geography, and other variables. 

“Engage is built specifically for financial services, and what that means is that we understand the reasons that financial advisors and clients actually meet in real life,” Sha continued. “So we not only understand what's happening in the meeting, and can then design specialized content experiences that make that meeting more interesting for both parties, but we can also optimize the interface for the different roles that are showing up in the meeting, since the role that a banker plays in a meeting is very different than the role that the client plays.” 

In this respect, Sha thinks Engage turns screens into a powerful tool for customer engagement and retention: Rather than having conversation accompanied by the awkward shuffle of paperwork that defines current in-person banking experiences, the screen itself becomes a tool for communication. 

Engage’s interactive modules function similarly to a Google Doc in that several parties can interact with the same document at the same time. This provides the opportunity for customers to play a more active role in meetings beyond talking and creates, in Sha’s words, “a dynamic conversation” that helps the client feel like they’re really being served. 

The product has only recently launched, so a handful of (unnamed) banks are currently making use of it. Sha anticipates more banks joining the ranks of institutions using Engage. 

“The early adopters are loving being on the cutting edge here—it’s a competitive differentiator,” he said.