Industries · Financial services and insurance
Ask the head of distribution at an insurer, a lender or a payments company where next quarter’s revenue will come from and you’ll hear about brokers, introducers, partners and a few large accounts that need watching. Then ask to see it in the CRM. Usually what comes up is a Salesforce instance three admins understand, a spreadsheet of broker production someone rebuilds every month, and a renewal list exported from the policy or loan system.
Production by partner, this quarter vs last
79
financial services and insurance clients
40
on bespoke HubSpot implementations
20
with custom integrations
14
moved off another CRM, including Salesforce
Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and an Anthropic partner. We work with fintech and payments businesses, insurance brokers, agencies and insurtechs, private equity and asset managers, lenders, and corporate finance advisors. Equals Money is one of our largest financial services clients. Across every sector, we’ve delivered 2,000+ projects for 900+ customers from Dublin, London, Rotterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Boston and New York.
The biggest mistake
We’re a financial institution, we have compliance obligations, our board expects enterprise software. So the firm buys Salesforce or Dynamics and customizes it until it fits. Two years later only a specialist admin can change it.
The software was never the problem. Design and execution decide whether a CRM works, and a heavily customized platform makes both harder. We build HubSpot as the revenue nerve center, where distribution partners, customers, product holdings, renewals and market signals meet, while your core systems stay the record for regulated work.
| Area | Customized enterprise CRM | HubSpot, designed well |
|---|---|---|
| Who can change it | A specialist admin, via a backlog | A revenue leader, without raising a ticket |
| Marketing | A separate platform bolted on the side | On the same platform as sales and service |
| Where the numbers live | Rebuilt in a spreadsheet | Read from one place |
| Adoption | Figures nobody wants to show the board | Used outside operations |
Salesforce
Most don’t. If you have fewer than a few hundred CRM users, no in-house Salesforce development team and no deep dependency on an industry-specific Salesforce package, HubSpot will cost less to run and get used by more of your people.
We’ve moved 14 financial services firms off another CRM, six of them off Salesforce or its marketing stack. The pattern is consistent: Salesforce bought for its reputation, Pardot or Marketing Cloud layered on, custom objects for every product line, and no way to change anything quickly.
Also: for a US vehicle warranty administrator, we moved marketing off Salesforce Marketing Cloud, rebuilt every customer journey and migrated 15,000+ contacts while a two-way Salesforce sync kept running. For a US independent insurance agency, we migrated out of Salesforce into a data model built for a personal-lines book, and rebuilt its Twilio SMS logic on Aircall.
1 platform
Core HubSpot and Salesforce consolidated into one new HubSpot portal.
We’ll tell you when moving is the wrong call. If you have a capable Salesforce team, a stable instance people use, and industry packages wired deep into your operations, a migration will burn a year of goodwill for a modest gain. Then we’d rather help you connect HubSpot for marketing, or fix the process problems that made you think the software was the issue.
Structure
Build it around how revenue reaches you: through intermediaries, through direct relationships, or through product usage. Most firms run all three and model only one.
A standard B2B setup assumes a buyer, a deal and a closed date. An insurance policy renews. A loan funds, then refinances. A payments client ramps volume over months. A fund commitment comes from an LP who sits on three other relationships you care about. Products and holdings usually sit in custom objects synced from the system of record, so HubSpot knows what each customer holds without trying to administer it.
Examples: for an alternative investment manager replacing DealCloud, we modeled funds, commitments and entity roll-ups so investor relations could see a family office’s total exposure. For a US structured products business, we built producer tiering dashboards so each wholesaler knew which advisors to prioritize. For a Dutch corporate finance firm, we consolidated three sector teams and a Pipedrive CRM into one database with a parent-child structure.
Revenue reaches you through intermediaries, direct relationships and product usage. Model all three.
This is where we push back hardest. Insurers, lenders and payments companies treat brokers and introducers as a channel and track them in a spreadsheet, yet the broker relationship often decides more revenue than any single end customer. If a top introducer’s submissions drop by half over a quarter, someone should know within a week. We model distribution partners as first-class records with their own pipeline, production history, service levels and health signals.
Fintech and payments
They need the CRM to track revenue after the contract is signed. Most fintechs we work with started on Pipedrive or a light CRM and outgrew it fast: nobody in the commercial team could see whether a client went live, how fast volume ramped, or whether it was quietly moving to a competitor.
Most CRMs stop tracking at "Deal". A payments or fintech deal is worth nothing until volume flows.
For a Dutch payment processor, we moved the business off Pipedrive into Sales Hub and Marketing Hub, set up the Zendesk and Exact Online integrations, advised on a custom integration to its business management platform, and ran Embedded RevOps from month three.
For a capital markets data company, we rebuilt the HubSpot foundation after an acquisition, fed governed data into Snowflake and Power BI, and connected Demandbase for account-based marketing. For a digital assets business, we set up HubSpot with a secure Jira integration and migrated its data from FreshSales.
System boundaries
HubSpot should handle winning, growing and keeping customers. Your policy admin, loan, core banking, payments or fund administration platform should handle the regulated work itself. Some firms give sales nothing to work with; others start rebuilding underwriting or servicing inside HubSpot. Neither ends well.
HubSpot sees everything here.
| Job | System of record | What HubSpot sees |
|---|---|---|
| Policies, quotes on risk, underwriting | Policy admin or broker management (e.g. Novidea) | Policy summary, product, premium, renewal date, status |
| Loans and asset finance agreements | Loan origination or servicing (e.g. Athena) | Facility type, amount, funded date, maturity or refinance date |
| Payments accounts and processing | Payments platform or data warehouse | Live status, monthly volume, trend against prior period |
| Funds, commitments and holdings | Fund administration or portfolio system | Commitment totals, vehicle, entity roll-up |
| KYC, AML and onboarding checks | Compliance or onboarding tool | Check status, so sales knows where onboarding is stuck |
| Invoicing, ledger, revenue recognition | ERP: NetSuite, Business Central, Sage, Exact Online | Billed revenue and outstanding balance by customer |
One rule sits behind that table: data comes into HubSpot only if it drives an action or a decision. A renewal date triggers a broker conversation. A volume drop triggers an account review. A stalled KYC check triggers a chase. Ten thousand transaction records tell a salesperson nothing, so they stay in the warehouse.
Integrations
Start with the core system that holds your products, then finance, then data and telephony. Anything HubSpot can’t see, it can’t act on, and neither can your agents. See our integration approach.
Insurance
Insurers need renewal dates, policy status and premium in front of the relationship owner. We integrated HubSpot with Novidea for a UK insurance business, designed the data architecture for a US commercial trucking insurer’s future real-time policy feed, and built AWS and REST API integration work for an insurer on its own bespoke platform.
Lending
For a UK asset finance company, we mapped the data and built the integration between HubSpot and its Athena system, tested it against real scenarios and supported go-live. For a US agricultural lender, we replaced Google Sheets and Outlook workflows and built mobile pipelines for loan officers in the field.
Migration
We’ve migrated firms from Salesforce, SugarCRM, Pipedrive, FreshSales and DealCloud, and integrated Singletrack and Dynamics 365 where they needed to stay. For a UK investment bank, we consolidated dotdigital, Canva and a WordPress intranet into Marketing Hub and Content Hub.
Finance
We’ve connected HubSpot to Oracle NetSuite, Business Central, Sage and Exact Online, and moved data between portals when groups restructured. Finance owns the ledger; HubSpot gets billed revenue and outstanding balances at customer level.
Data
We feed governed HubSpot data into Snowflake and Power BI and bring results back where they drive action. We’ve connected Aircall, Twilio, Gong and Stripe, so calls, conversations and payments land against the right record.
A Zapier connection between your loan platform and HubSpot will pass testing. Six months later it hits a rate limit, stops syncing without telling anyone, and the renewal workflow that depended on it never fires. Nobody notices until a broker calls to say a competitor picked up the client.
We build business-critical connections on Azure or AWS, with the access controls your IT, risk and compliance teams will ask about. For an aviation asset manager, we migrated an AI document-extraction solution into its own Azure environment, so sensitive documents never left its tenancy.
The decision
It depends on who runs it, who uses it and what it’s wired into. Here’s how we decide.
Ask which system your revenue leaders would open first thing on a Monday. If the answer is a spreadsheet, the CRM has already failed.
Go-to-market data
Track the signals that come from customers and partners you already have. Renewals, product holdings and partner production predict most of your next revenue, and most firms leave them in exports.
01
Policy renewals, loan maturities, refinance windows and contract end dates, with workflows that start the conversation 90 or 120 days out.
02
Submissions, quotes, bound policies or funded deals by broker and introducer, with alerts when a top partner’s numbers drop.
03
The commercial client with one policy line when they could hold three. The payments customer using one currency corridor.
04
For payments and fintech, falling transaction volume is the earliest churn signal you’ll get. We route it to an owner.
05
When a CFO or treasurer who chose you moves on, you have the warmest introduction available. When a key contact leaves, the account is at risk.
06
Funding rounds, acquisitions, new markets and leadership changes, brought in through enrichment and Claude-based research agents.
07
Account plans and business review data for larger clients. We built this layer for a regulatory compliance software company.
Our GTM Engineering team builds outreach, enrichment and AI agents on your customer and partner context.
Compliance
Design consent, permissions, approved content and audit trails into the build from day one, and keep regulated decisions in the systems built for them. Good design makes compliance easier:
For a US health insurance brokerage, we built compliant nurture workflows, a Salesforce integration and direct-to-consumer campaign infrastructure for heavily regulated retention marketing, followed by Embedded RevOps. HubSpot needs the outcome of a KYC or suitability check; the check stays where it is.
AI with Claude
They read documents, prepare relationship managers, flag risk in the book and draft outreach, provided the context underneath them is sound. Through our Anthropic partnership, we build Claude automations that bring that context into HubSpot:
On a CRM full of stale contacts and missing holdings, agents give your team wrong answers with total confidence, so we build the context layer first.
Private equity and roll-ups
Private equity is consolidating insurance brokers, wealth managers, lenders and fintechs quickly. Every acquisition brings another CRM, another core system and another team convinced its way is right. We help groups build one CRM, with a repeatable playbook for bringing each new business into it.
For a US private equity firm, we ran a phased migration from SugarCRM to HubSpot across a portfolio company’s group businesses, with integration advisory for Zint, Qvidian and CoStar. For an investment management holding company, we rolled out a standardized HubSpot architecture across eight portfolio companies, each with its own instance on the same design.
1,200 users
The largest HubSpot implementation in EMEA.
Some firms want a new CRM when the real problem is a distribution strategy nobody has agreed, or a product team that can’t get data out of its own platform. A CRM fixes neither, and we say so. Sometimes the right first project is a few weeks of design work. Sometimes it’s staying on the platform you have. Sometimes your team can carry the build and needs an advisor: for an alternative investment manager replacing DealCloud, we designed the data model, guided the cleanse and supported cutover while its own people did the configuration. We’d rather sell you the smaller project that works than the bigger one that doesn’t.
Who works on your project
Every Periti project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops with your distribution, sales, marketing and operations leaders, and make the hard calls.
When a project needs integration with your policy, loan, payments or finance systems, we assign dedicated engineers rather than stretching consultants into developer roles. Our directors review the work and hold every project to the same standard.
How a project runs
01
Map how revenue reaches you through partners, direct sales, existing customers and product usage. Design the data model, boundaries, integrations, permissions, compliance controls and AI.
02
Configure in sprints and demo regularly, so your team sees progress early and can correct course while changes are cheap.
03
Bring in the data that serves a purpose, connect core and finance systems, and test against real customer and partner scenarios.
04
Train relationship managers, distribution teams, marketing and operations by role, on your own customers and data.
05
Agree a roadmap so the system keeps pace as you add products, markets and acquisitions.
Where to start
Most firms
Where most of our financial services engagements start. You leave with a design your leadership team agrees on, whoever builds it.
Fast start
Our industry-specific HubSpot onboarding package. A low-risk way to go live quickly on a proven configuration.
Ongoing
Ongoing support from a team that knows your portal. 15 of our financial services clients are on it today.
Ongoing
An experienced Periti operator runs your revenue operations as part of your team, without a full-time hire.
Growth
Outreach, enrichment and AI agents built on your customer and partner context, for firms ready to grow beyond their existing book.
Firms we work with
Fintech, payments and capital markets technology is our largest segment, followed by insurance brokers, agencies, carriers and insurtechs, then private equity, asset and wealth management and investment holding companies.
Questions
Yes, for most firms with 200 to 2,000 employees. It handles distribution partners, customer relationships, marketing and service on one platform, and it's far easier to change than a heavily customized enterprise CRM. Keep regulated processing in your core systems and connect them to HubSpot.
No. Regulation shapes how you design consent, permissions and audit trails, and you can build those properly in HubSpot. Most firms that chose Salesforce for regulatory comfort ended up with a system that's harder to govern because so few people can change it.
If you run separate sales and marketing platforms, depend on a partner for every change, or report from spreadsheets, usually yes. If you have a stable instance, an in-house admin team and high adoption, stay and fix what's broken. We've moved six financial services firms off Salesforce or its marketing stack.
Yes. We've integrated HubSpot with Novidea and with bespoke insurance platforms over AWS and REST APIs. We bring in policy summaries, premium, status and renewal dates, and leave underwriting and policy administration where they are.
Yes. We've built an integration between HubSpot and Athena for a UK asset finance company. HubSpot sees facility details, funded dates and maturity or refinance dates, so relationship managers can act on them.
As first-class records with their own pipeline, production history and health signals. For most firms that rely on intermediaries, partner production is the most valuable view in the CRM and the one most often missing.
Sync volume, usage or active account data from your platform or warehouse into HubSpot at account level. Build separate pipelines for SME, mid-market and enterprise motions, and report MRR and ARR from real revenue rather than deal amounts.
We build consent, suppression, role-based permissions, approved templates, activity logging and retention rules into the design from the start, working with your compliance team. KYC, AML and suitability checks stay in their own systems, and HubSpot receives the outcome.
No. Transaction-level data adds noise and slows the system. Sync monthly volume, trends and thresholds at account level, because those trigger account reviews and churn conversations.
The most useful ones extract data from documents, prepare relationship managers for renewals and meetings, monitor the book for churn signals and draft outreach grounded in your data. They depend on good context in the CRM, so we build that first.
Yes. We've rolled out a standard HubSpot architecture across eight portfolio companies for one investment holding company, and migrated a PE-backed group off SugarCRM in phases. Our largest rollout, for Franchise Brands, brought 1,200 users across multiple brands and countries into one environment.
With a single data model and agreed definitions, then a phased migration onto one platform. Equals Money consolidated core HubSpot and Salesforce into one new HubSpot portal with dual pipelines and a single revenue framework.
With a Design and Strategy project. We map how revenue reaches your business and design the data model, integrations, compliance controls and reporting before anything is built. Firms that want a faster start can use LaunchRight, our industry-specific onboarding package.
You might be leaving Salesforce, connecting HubSpot to your policy, loan or payments platform, bringing acquired businesses onto one CRM, or trying to get distribution and relationship teams to use the system you already pay for. Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you how we’d get you there, including the parts you might not want to hear.