Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Standardizes on Salesforce for Wealth Management

Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Standardizes on Salesforce for Wealth
Management
Fortune 500 financial services firm to deploy Salesforce for Wealth Management
and build custom applications using the Force.com Platform

SAN FRANCISCO, July 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com
(NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Thrivent Financial for
Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is
standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management. The company is deploying
Salesforce for Wealth Management and will leverage the Force.com Platform and
the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to improve
client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO)
Thrivent Financial is one of the 43,600 companies of all sizes, industries
and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of
April 30, 2008. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is
delivered.
"Our 2,500 financial representatives are the heart of our business, and
providing them with next generation contact and activity management
capabilities is key to their productivity and our focus on customer
experience," said Betsy Ordal, vice president of Field Development at Thrivent
Financial. "After evaluating multiple solutions in the market, Salesforce
stood out for its rich functionality, delivery model and for the positive
reviews we heard from other firms."
With the help of Salesforce Consulting and salesforce.com partner
Deloitte, Thrivent Financial is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management to
more than 4,500 financial representatives and support staff throughout the
country. The organization is using the Force.com Platform to customize the
solution and integrate it with existing applications, including its corporate
email system. Thrivent Financial is also using Force.com AppExchange
applications to gain additional functionality.
"The Force.com Platform is giving us an important advantage and is behind
the flexibility of our Salesforce solution. We envision the capabilities and
features we want and, if they don't already exist, we build them into
Salesforce," added Kevin Marinan, vice president of IT Strategy and Solutions
at Thrivent Financial. "We're considering building additional applications as
we begin to roll the solution out to our sales organization."
Salesforce for Wealth Management
Salesforce for Wealth Management brings the 21st century desktop to wealth
management advisors. Private banking groups, mass affluent firms, retail
brokers, and independent RIAs of all sizes and geographies such as Merrill
Lynch, Citigroup, E*TRADE, Mizuho and United Capital Financial Advisors are
standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management to manage their
relationships. Built on the Force.com Platform, the world's most powerful and
trusted Platform-as-a-Service, Salesforce for Wealth Management is an industry
tailored solution with unprecedented customization capabilities to streamline
compliance, practice management and approval processes. The Force.com
AppExchange http://www.appexchange.com provides advisors with a large
ecosystem of pre-built partner solutions such as market data, privacy, account
opening and others, that are available for test-drive and installation. For
more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/wm.
Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com reinvents the traditional development, deployment and
distribution of any business application with Platform-as-a-Service.
Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new
generation of Software-as-a-Service applications and deploy them worldwide.
Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed
with a few simple clicks via the Force.com AppExchange marketplace, enabling
all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the
entire Software-as-a-Service community.
The Force.com AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of
customers installing thousands of applications via the AppExchange. Customers
of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional
on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
About Thrivent Financial for Lutherans
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans is a Fortune 500 financial services
membership organization helping nearly 3 million members achieve their
financial goals and give back to their communities. Thrivent Financial and its
affiliates offer a broad range of financial products and services including
life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, disability income insurance, bank
products and more. As a not-for-profit organization, Thrivent Financial
sponsors national outreach programs and activities that support congregations,
schools, charitable organizations and individuals in need. For more
information, visit www.thrivent.com.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's
portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at
http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that
customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The
company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build
powerful business applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy
across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com Platform, available
at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a
few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.
As of April 30, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for
approximately 43,600 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan
Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, and SunTrust Banks. Any
unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or
public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time
or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make
their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and
Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM".
For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call
1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Copyright (c) 2008 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce
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SOURCE salesforce.com

Erin O'Keeffe of salesforce.com, +1-415-536-6150, eokeeffe@salesforce.com