When a foreign financial services firm enters the Chinese market, the digital infrastructure question is not optional. The local economy operates digitally from ticketing to payments to client communication; messaging platforms like WeChat are primary client channels, not auxiliary ones. For wealth managers, fund managers, and capital markets advisors planning a China move, the CRM choice is one of the earliest and most consequential infrastructure decisions — because the CRM is what determines whether the firm can read and act on the digital signal the local market generates by default.For Boman Group, an Australian financial services firm already operating across the Australia-China corridor for over a decade, that infrastructure decision needed to be settled before the next phase of growth.
Company Background
Founded in 2011 by Eric Gao and headquartered in Melbourne, Boman Group (formerly BMYG) holds an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL No. 505332) and operates across wealth management for high-net-worth individuals and families, funds management, and cross-border capital markets services — including M&A advisory, corporate finance, and global listings. The group is also fully licensed in Hong Kong, with offices in Sydney, Hong Kong, and mainland China; its Tianjin office opened in late 2024 as its mainland China headquarters.Boman's funds management focuses on technology, healthcare, and ESG investments; total funds under management exceed AUD 860 million across 100+ deals and products. Its wholly owned subsidiary, ALLFIN®, operates Australia's leading Chinese-language investment research platform, with a global audience of over 300,000.By 2024, Boman had been operating across the Australia–China corridor for over a decade. Its next strategic move — already in execution — was deeper engagement in the Chinese mainland market, anchored by the new Tianjin operation. That move forced a CRM question that had been deferred for years.
The Challenge
Eric Gao describes the China-market decision in straightforward operational terms:
"In China, everything from ticketing to payments to CRMs and decision-making is digital. Going to China — because it's a native digital economy — we need a digital partner. We need a CRM that can connect with WeChat, RedNote, and other social media platforms." — Eric Gao, Founder & CEO, Boman Group
For nearly a decade before Boman selected ShareCRM, the firm's CRM strategy followed the conventional path: pick a leading international enterprise CRM, layer on system integrators where needed, accept the workarounds as the cost of doing business. The group cycled through three international CRM vendors during this period; the largest of these was Salesforce.The structural mismatch was less about Salesforce's capability set and more about its architectural assumptions.
Built for English-language enterprise workflows. Salesforce, like most enterprise CRMs developed for Western markets, was structured around English-language data, English-language client communication channels, and the operational patterns of firms whose business happened primarily in English. Boman Group's reality looked different. Its client communications ran heavily on WeChat and WeCom (Tencent's enterprise messaging platform) — the dominant client channels among Chinese-speaking high-net-worth investors globally. RedNote and other Chinese social platforms increasingly mattered for client signal and brand presence. Salesforce could not natively ingest data from these channels; each integration required custom API work via third-party providers.
The forward problem, not just the current problem. The harder issue was prospective. As Boman prepared to expand deeper into mainland China, the gap between what its existing CRM could do and what its China strategy required was widening — not narrowing. The firm needed not just a CRM that fit today's bilingual workforce, but one positioned for AI-assisted analytics, evolving Chinese ecosystem integrations, and the broader digital signal a China-resident operation would generate.By the time Boman's operations team began formally re-evaluating CRM vendors, the question wasn't whether to switch but what to switch to — and which partner could carry the firm into its next decade.
The Solution
Boman's evaluation process spanned multiple vendors and local consulting firms before the ShareCRM team's pitch landed. Three factors shaped the eventual choice.
- Native integration with the Chinese digital economy. ShareCRM connected natively to the messaging and social platforms Boman's clients actually used — WeChat, WeCom, RedNote, and the broader Chinese ecosystem — alongside conventional enterprise data sources. The integrations that had required third-party engineering on Salesforce came built-in.
- A modular, future-proof architecture. ShareCRM's modular product structure let Boman adopt capabilities as needs evolved, rather than committing to a single all-or-nothing configuration upfront. The platform's AI development direction mattered too: with ShareCRM's emerging AI capabilities mapped onto the CRM data layer, Boman saw a path to use the platform not just for data storage and analysis, but for AI-assisted client insight, internal process optimization, and decision support.
- Implementation depth from the ShareCRM team. ShareCRM's implementation team spent roughly two-thirds of total project time on requirements analysis and customized design — extracting and documenting Boman's actual workflow needs across wealth advisors, fund managers, compliance and legal back-office, and cross-border deal teams. The data migration phase, by Gao's account, was the faster part of the project. The team also surfaced ideas Boman hadn't considered in its original requirements scope — a level of consultative engagement that Gao has since described as agile, flexible, and far more important to the decision than price.
Once deployed, ShareCRM became the operational platform across three distinct functional areas inside Boman.
The client side. Boman gathers prospective client signal through digital channels — search marketing, online events, in-person seminars — and through referrals from its ALLFIN media platform. ShareCRM consolidated these inbound signals against existing client profiles. Wealth advisors now see a unified client view and route resources by client potential rather than by which platform they happened to check first.
The investment side. Boman's deal pipeline aggregates from investment banks, brokerages, private equity, venture capital, and Australian and international channels. ShareCRM became the connective tissue between sourced deals and client profiles, enabling deal-to-client matching that previously required manual cross-referencing.
Internal collaboration. Investment and marketing teams at Boman had historically struggled with operational handoffs — translating technical deal descriptions for teams that needed to position them for clients. With ShareCRM, each team now sees the other's relevant work directly. Cross-departmental communication improved, and CRM usage shifted from compliance behavior to routine workflow.
The Results
Information input grew approximately 35%. As adoption increased, the volume of data captured on the platform expanded substantially — a direct signal of user engagement and a precondition for everything downstream in analytics and decision-making.
Decision-making improved by approximately 70%. This is the most strategically significant gain. For a financial services firm where decisions span client onboarding, investment matching, compliance review, and capital allocation, decision speed translates directly into competitive and operational leverage. ShareCRM's consolidation of client, deal, and operational data into a unified layer is what made faster decision-making structurally possible — and what Gao describes as the gain that matters most for any business operating at Boman's scale.
Forecasted operational cost savings of approximately 15%. Looking forward, Boman expects to realize meaningful reductions in operational cost as ShareCRM's role in the workflow deepens — driven by time saved across data handling, decision routing, and cross-team coordination.
Adoption growth as the underlying signal. Beyond the headline numbers, Boman has observed a qualitative shift: more team members actively using ShareCRM, more data flowing across teams, more cross-functional collaboration anchored on the platform. For Gao, this is the strongest validation that the platform choice was correct — engagement is rising organically, not being enforced.
Conclusion
Boman Group's CRM choice illustrates a sharper version of an underappreciated question in enterprise software: when a global firm expands into a new market, the right CRM is rarely the one with the largest global market share. It's the one whose architectural assumptions match the operational reality of the market the firm is entering.For wealth and capital markets firms expanding into China — or into any market with a deeply localized digital economy — the CRM is not infrastructure. It's a strategic capability tied to the firm's next decade of growth. Boman's selection of ShareCRM wasn't a tool decision and it wasn't a price decision; it was a partner decision, made by a firm that has been crossing the Australia-China corridor long enough to know what working capability on both sides actually requires.Ready to build your China-market CRM foundation on a platform that natively speaks the local digital economy? Talk to a ShareCRM specialist →
