Greyfriar Wealth / BG-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Greyfriar Wealth · 29 Sep 2025 15:00
Tom Ashdown ran a discovery call on 2025-09-29 with Fiona Ibbotson and Nick Normanton. Manual client reporting and profitability analysis are the pain. Growth was indicated at about £44k to £50k a year, and a technical discovery was agreed.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Tom Ashdown ran a discovery call on 2025-09-29 with Fiona Ibbotson and Nick Normanton. Manual client reporting and profitability analysis are the pain. Growth was indicated at about £44k to £50k a year, and a technical discovery was agreed.
What happened: Fiona and Nick described manual client reporting across five or six systems and slow internal profitability analysis. They had found a custom consultancy build too costly and analytics platforms too expensive or data-owning.
Customer view: Fiona said real-time visibility "would change how we run the business". Nick called the indicative price "not unreasonable".
Commercial: Tom recommended Growth, quoting a ballpark of £44k to £50k annually plus implementation, roughly £56k for year one. This is an indication, not a proposal.
Watch: The Snowflake ownership point mattered for compliance and confidentiality. The evidence does not show the technical discovery date beyond next week.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Theme
Manual reporting, wealth manager
Importance
upsell
Sentiment
positive
Voice
decision-maker
Who was there
BG-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Tom Ashdown to send a questionnaire to Fiona and Nick.
- Tom Ashdown to run a technical discovery with a solutions engineer the following week.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Price was an indicative range given without full scoping, so the final figure may differ.
- A bespoke consultancy and other analytics platforms were already considered.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Growth tier covering five or six systems and several users in a five-person team.
- Compliance-sensitive buyer who values data staying in their own Snowflake account.
Transcript
Tom AshdownHi Nick, Fiona, how are you both?
Nick NormantonGood, thanks Tom. How was the drive?- Tom AshdownNot too bad. Anyway, I'm keen to understand what you're trying to do with data at Greyfriar. Fiona, you mentioned you're thinking about improving how you report to your clients?
Fiona IbbotsonYeah, that's a big one for us. We're an independent wealth manager, we manage portfolios for a few dozen families and some smaller corporate clients. Right now, when a client asks for a portfolio update or a performance report, we have to pull it from our investment platform, cross-reference it with our CRM data, our email records, any notes from conversations. It's a bit manual.- Tom AshdownAnd how often are you doing that?
- Nick NormantonFairly regularly. Clients call, email, want updates. On average, probably once or twice a week for different clients, sometimes more. And it's usually me or another team member sitting down and compiling it by hand.
- Tom AshdownSo it's a time drain. Who's involved? How many people?
- Fiona IbbotsonWe've got a team of five: that's me, Nick, two relationship managers, and a finance person. We all touch this in various ways. The relationship managers are spending time on it; I'm spending time on it.
- Tom AshdownOkay. Is there anything else you're trying to solve on the data front?
- Fiona IbbotsonYeah, actually. We're looking at our own internal reporting too. We want to understand client lifetime value, which clients are most profitable, where we're making money and where we're not. That's a very manual exercise right now.
- Nick NormantonAnd it's not easy to do quickly. If Fiona wants to know, say, our top ten most profitable clients, it takes a couple of hours of work.
- Tom AshdownRight. What's the impact of that? What would be the value of having that available instantly?
- Fiona IbbotsonIt would change how we run the business, to be honest. We could make better decisions about where to invest our time, we could benchmark performance, we could have a real-time view of the business instead of waiting for a month-end report. It's significant.
- Tom AshdownAnd what systems are you using? How is the data spread?
- Nick NormantonWe've got our investment platform, that's where the portfolio and transaction data lives. We use Salesforce for CRM. We've got Xero for accounting. Email is Google Workspace. And we use a call system because we record client conversations for compliance. So five or six systems.
- Tom AshdownAnd none of those talk to each other?
- Fiona IbbotsonNot in any meaningful way, no. We've looked at APIs and integrations, but it gets expensive and complicated. We just do it manually.
- Tom AshdownI hear that a lot. So what have you considered so far?
- Nick NormantonWe had a conversation with a consultancy about building something custom, but the cost was prohibitive, tens of thousands and months of work. We've looked at some analytics platforms, but most of them want to own the data or they're too expensive for a firm our size. Honestly, we've been a bit stuck.
- Tom AshdownRight. So let me tell you what we do. We build what's called B-Glass, it's an AI-queryable layer that sits on top of your existing systems. Your data stays in your infrastructure, you control it. But you get a single point where you can ask questions across everything. You could ask 'what are my top ten clients by profit', or 'show me all interactions with the Johnson family', and get an answer in seconds instead of hours.
- Fiona IbbotsonAnd where does the data actually live?
- Tom AshdownInside your own Snowflake account. We're not a cloud vendor hoovering up your data. We're a data layer. You own the infrastructure, the data, everything. That's important, especially in wealth management where compliance and confidentiality are critical.
- Nick NormantonThat's reassuring. How does it work practically?
- Tom AshdownSo we'd connect your five or six systems: your investment platform, Salesforce, Xero, Google Workspace, your calls. We'd build connectors for those. Data flows every night into your Snowflake. Then you get access to a portal where you can search and ask questions. You type 'show me portfolio performance for client X' and you get the answer. No dashboards to build unless you want to, no SQL, no technical work. You could give your relationship managers access so they can pull their own client reports. Give your finance person access so they can run profitability reports.
- Fiona IbbotsonHow long would it take to get us up and running?
- Tom AshdownDepends on the tier. For a firm your size, five people, several systems, I'd recommend Growth. That's typically eight to twelve weeks from signature to live. Could be faster, depending on how ready you are with credentials and how much data we're dealing with.
- Fiona IbbotsonAnd what would that cost?
- Tom AshdownRight, so I can't give you a number off the top of my head without knowing more: the systems you're connecting, the amount of data, what level of security or compliance controls you need. But Growth tier is in the ballpark of £44,000 to £50,000 annually, plus an implementation fee. That's roughly £56,000 all-in for the first year, then £44,000 to £50,000 per year after that.
- Nick NormantonThat's not unreasonable.
- Tom AshdownRight. So next step, I'd like to do a proper technical discovery with you. We'd dig into your systems, your data volumes, what questions you want to ask, what connectors you'd need. I'd bring our solutions engineer for that. A couple of hours, maybe next week or the week after?
- Fiona IbbotsonNext week works.
- Tom AshdownBrilliant. I'll send over a questionnaire to fill in, and we'll get the ball rolling. Sound good?
- Fiona IbbotsonYeah, thanks Tom.
- Nick NormantonCheers.
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