Some of the nation’s largest banks have put a little more communications functionality into their personal digital assistants (PDAs) and laptops, which makes their investment sales representatives more productive in client meetings.

Most sales forces, such as those that call on accounts for investment management and commercial customers, rely heavily on PDAs and laptops, which communicate with the home office primarily via e-mail. The complexity of their business has made it too difficult for such salespeople to send and receive critical real-time data.

Now Apresta Inc., a solutions provider based in Campbell, Calif., has launched a product that turns the mobile device into an iPod of sorts for business so users can download data from the back office. Instead of listening to songs, they can scroll through recent listings of client deposits and notes from meetings.

Financial services providers such as Citigroup Inc., ING Group and Lincoln Financial Group have implemented “Apresta for Financial Services” for their investment management sales forces. Apresta, a division of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions provider Saratoga Systems, says it has signed up a dozen firms globally so far.

“Apresta gives our sales team access to vital data in real-time,” says Zafar Mir, an assistant vice president at ING in New York. “If they enter the information, it is almost immediately shared with everyone in the company. Everyone knows what is going on.”

Having access to real-time data helps sales teams avoid having to schedule follow-up visits with clients, says Rich Koch, Apestra’s vice president of marketing. “On a handheld they have all the information they need while in front of the customer.”

As a result, sales teams can avoid having to schedule follow-up visits to convey additional information. “They can close deals faster,” Koch says. “They are not dependent on a long sales cycle.”

PDAs had previously been limited to e-mail communications because downloading programs from complex CRM systems and other back-office platforms proved too cumbersome. The Apresta product uses two key components to overcome this problem, according to Koch.

The Apresta Studio component connects to any backend database such as CRM, trading systems, portfolio accounting databases and industry directories. The Apresta Server sends and receives information to and from the mobile devices.

Apresta charges an annual $295 subscription fee per device, plus a set-up fee of approximately $5,000 per installation. Mir at ING says customization can easily be done in-house; ING had its software running in less than a day, he says.

While Mir looked at an alternative product on the market, he says it would have cost $20,000 to customize over a few weeks. “With other software implementations, we previously received a lot of negative feedback from our sales force,” Mir says. “But on this one, after the beta test, they said ‘Go for it.’”

William Clark, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., says financial service firms are prime candidates for sales force automation given the complexity of information used by reps in the field. “The technology has gotten cheap enough, good enough and easy enough to use,” he says.

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