An investment bank CRM has to answer a question no individual banker ever asks: across everything this firm is running, where is it and what is it worth. That answer has to be assembled from records that bankers keep for their own reasons, and the assembly is where these projects fail. Bankers maintain what helps them; partners want what aggregates. This page sets out how to get both out of one object without asking anybody to fill in fields for somebody else's report.
Two readers, one object
The banker opens a mandate to know what to do today. The partner opens every mandate to know where the firm is. If those are two systems, the second is out of date permanently, because nobody updates a system they do not use. The design rule is that the firm-level view must be computed from what the banker records anyway, never from an extra field added for reporting.
Three fields aggregate, and they are already there
Stage, expected value and last movement. A banker records all three because all three help them run the process, and a firm-level view built only from those is one nobody has to feed. Every additional field added for the partner view is a field the banker will skip, and skipping it breaks the report it was added for.
Weight the book rather than counting it
Fourteen live mandates is not a number a partner can act on. Fourteen at a close rate the firm measured, at an average fee the firm can defend, is: $2,940,000 of expected fees on this site's worked example, and $210,000 for any one live mandate. That second figure is what makes a take-it-or-not conversation short.
Let the desk read the whole book
Conflicts, duplicate approaches to the same buyer and useful cross-introductions are almost all found by somebody other than the mandate owner noticing a name. Locking mandates to their owners protects less than it costs on a small desk, and it makes per-seat pricing actively harmful: it charges most for the analyst whose recording the whole system depends on.
Questions people ask about investment bank crm
Can we restrict visibility by team?
Not here, and it is worth saying plainly. Everyone with an account reads the book. A firm that needs walls between teams should buy something else.
Does it do conflicts checking?
Not as a formal clearance workflow. It makes the whole live book readable, which is how conflicts are actually caught on a small desk.
How do we keep the partner view accurate?
Compute it from stage, expected value and last movement. Any field added purely for reporting will be the field that stops being filled in.