Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) and Salesforce Sales Cloud are both popular customer relationship management (CRM) platforms offered by Salesforce. While Sales Cloud is a general-purpose CRM platform that can be customized for financial services institutions such as wealth management, insurance, investment banking, and more, taking on that much customization may lead to instability. It might just be too much work and time compared to the benefits of Financial Services Cloud instead, and further customizing it from there.
Choosing the right platform will better position you to meet the several customer needs Salesforce identified in its financial services report, such as a better digital experience and more personalized engagements. The financial services industry is becoming more human-centric, moving away from purely transactional relationships defined by numbers. A client’s finances may be calculated with numbers, but represent emotionally significant stages of their life numbers alone can’t explain.
Large institutions such as RBC Wealth Management have already been using FSC to simplify their advisor and client onboarding processes, improve collaboration, integrate its systems, and more. For example, client meetings took several hours less time to prepare for after Salesforce. This has resulted in strengthened client relationships, which is essential when you’re responsible for one of the more sensitive parts of their lives. Using more modern technology also led to more advisors wanting to work with them as well, which means you’re more likely to attract the employees of your dreams.
Here’s a few benefits of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud that’ll support your organization from your employees to your clients:
1. Industry-specific user experience
Many of FSC’s functions were specifically created for the financial services industry. The platform has been built from the ground up to meet the unique needs of financial services organizations, as such organizations tend to manage their clientele differently, such as sorting customers by household rather than as individuals.
This includes features such as wealth management, portfolio management, and insurance solutions where you can view all financially relevant figures, assets, liabilities, and accounts in a customer’s life neatly mapped out. Financial advisors can view their customers by household and that household’s relationships with a house attorney, accountant, and the details of any other financially relevant relationship. In other words, it’s specifically designed in a way where advisors can best understand how their client’s financial situation is being impacted.
One particular function that stands out with Financial Services Cloud is the ability to set financial goals for your clients. With the ability to organize a case by goal, you can help your clients reach these goals with a convenient way to track their progress and the evolution of these goals. Such goals include paying off student loans, saving up for a house, or building a college fund for a child, and do evolve over time so you can modify the details on your end as well.
2. More specific data insights and analytics:
Just like in other industries, financial services organizations rely on data to make future decisions. FSC is helpful in that it comes with pre-defined reports and dashboards suited to financial services, such as a Financial Accounts with Household report, Relationship Management dashboard, and more. Such reports allow advisors to retrieve the most financially relevant client data at a glance. And yes, they’re still customizable should the organization need any tweaking, because we all know how often financial situations can change.
3. Enhanced compliance and security:
The financial services industry is understandably highly regulated in its own ways, and security and compliance are always critical concerns for anyone working with such sensitive, private data. It can be quite a hassle to figure out whether you’re compliant with current regulations or not, since they evolve over time.
Salesforce FSC offers robust security and compliance features to help financial services organizations meet the strict regulatory requirements of their industry and keep their customer data safe and secure. Its data encryption and regulatory reporting functions cater to the standards of the financial services industry.
4. Integration with other financial tools:
One of Salesforce’s strengths is its ability to integrate with several other tools to enhance its performance. This includes FSC, which integrates seamlessly with a wide range of financial tools and applications, including wealth management systems, portfolio management tools, and insurance solutions. This integration enables financial services organizations to streamline their workflows and avoid having to switch between multiple systems.
While Salesforce Sales Cloud may be a suitable option for some businesses, it does not offer the same level of industry-specific functionality and features that are critical for success in the financial services industry. If you’re looking for a CRM platform that will help you organize sensitive data so you can celebrate your clients’ financial victories with them, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has proven itself with clients such as RBC mentioned earlier as well as Zions Bank.
At SM Innovations, our Financial Services Cloud projects are guided by an experienced Salesforce consultant with several years of experience at banks and wealth management institutions of various sizes, including well-known enterprises. That experience has shown them the distinct needs of such industries and how to fulfill customer expectations, giving your business a competitive edge.
To put this expertise into packages, we’ve set up preconfigured accelerators specifically for banks and wealth management institutions.
Thinking about implementing Financial Services Cloud or modifying what you already have?
Reach out to us anytime to get FSC set up for the first time, or just for a health check, configuration, or integration on the FSC environment you already have.
You can check out this on-demand webinar from Salesforce on the benefit of Financial Services Cloud on banking to catch up on the conversation before we connect you with our banking subject matter experts.
