Wealthbox accelerates time to market with the Nylas Email API

The Nylas Email API provides Wealthbox with a single and secure point of integration to connect to email

Wealthbox is a fast-growing CRM (customer relationship management platform) for financial advisors. The founders, CEO John Rourke and CTO Dan Ferranti, saw an opportunity to create a modernized CRM in the wealth-tech space by building their platform with their target customer in mind: financial advisors.

The Wealthbox team built their CRM on a modern, cloud-based infrastructure and introduced features that make financial advisors more efficient than ever before. In addition to the time-saving features they built, Wealthbox also innovated on traditional CRMs in the space by building integrations with modern work tools, including Slack, Zapier, and Twilio.

More recently, the team decided to build an embedded email client on the Wealthbox platform, called Wealthbox Mail, to send email and sync with users’ email systems – and they turned to the Nylas APIs to do it.

Challenges:

Need for a single, secure point of integration

Email is the foundation of most customer relationships, which makes it a critical feature in every CRM. “We always knew that a successful CRM needed a tight email integration, but that’s easier said than done. Fusing everything together with great product design in mind — from a user’s emails to their contacts, and calendar — in the CRM platform was hard to do because there were so many different email providers we needed to connect to, such as Gmail, Office 365, and Exchange just for starters,” says Rourke.

Solution:

The Nylas APIs provided Wealthbox with a single and secure point of integration that sits on top of all of the other email APIs out there, allowing the engineers to only build one integration rather than many. But that wasn’t the only benefit.

Wealthbox is building a modern CRM for financial advisors. With the help of the Nylas APIs, they produced key email features that  meet financial advisor’s needs for security and productivity.

Two-way email sync & send

The Nylas APIs provide two-way email, calendar, and contacts sync between a single user’s inbox and the Wealthbox CRM. Users can even compose and send email from within the Wealthbox platform, saving financial advisors time by reducing the need for context switching and eliminating the need for manual data entry between the user’s inbox and the CRM. With elegant email-to-CRM workflows, productivity is enhanced in Wealthbox’s unique product design.

Email templates for financial advisors

National advisory networks struggle to manage the hundreds of registered independent advisors (RIAs) they work with around the country. These large network firms need a CRM that allows independent offices to work in different workspaces but use the same email templates to standardize prospect and client communications. Nylas powers Wealthbox email templates with these features. “The Wealthbox Mail feature [powered by the Nylas APIs] is amazing,” says Jason Wenk, CEO of FormulaFolios, an RIA network and Inc.’s 10th fastest private growing US company. “It allows us to standardize and optimize our email communications with clients in a super simple way.”

Results:

Group email accounts

With the help of the Nylas API, the Wealthbox CRM allows users to create group email accounts so that financial advisory practices with client service teams can collaborate better and work with their customers more efficiently. Now, if an advisor is out on vacation or sick for the day, any team member can log into the CRM, see the most recent communications with clients, and respond via email (powered by the Nylas APIs) — all within the Wealthbox CRM.

For Wealthbox, the Nylas APIs are like Stripe for email

Nylas works a layer of abstraction that saves engineers the headache of working with APIs from legacy email providers. “I think of Nylas as the Stripe for email. Before Stripe existed, you had to dig into APIs that you really just didn’t want to work with (they weren’t rest APIs, http or JSON APIs). When Stripe came along, they built a layer of abstraction in front of the complicated legacy APIs, and their version was straight simplicity. Nylas has done exactly that for us — we now have one email API to work with as opposed to many, which made it drastically simpler for us to build this integration,” says Ferranti.