Financial Services Cloud (FSC) has now become the world’s #1 CRM for the financial services industry. Since the onset of the pandemic, there’s been a significant increase in demand for FSC, as companies look to enhance their digital offerings and improve business processes.
In this post, we’ll take an in-depth look at what Financial Services Cloud is and the positive impact it can have on financial services companies.
Originally launched in August Roulette 2015, Financial Services Cloud differs from Sales and Service Cloud in a number of ways and was designed specifically for the Financial Services Industry.
Built on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, Financial Services Cloud includes an enhanced set of features created specifically for client engagement and designed with the needs of advisors in mind.
What’s really helpful is FSC comes out-of-the-box with all the core Sales Cloud features, plus new custom fields and objects modelling financial accounts, assets, liabilities, and goals for both individual clients and across entire households.
Who is Financial Service Cloud for?
From insurance to retail banking to wealth management, FSC provides a 360-degree view of clients’ financial profiles and puts your customer at the centre of every interaction. Getting a holistic view of customers is a huge advantage for financial advisors, brokers and agents alike. This means they can better serve their clients across multiple channels and devices.
With FSC, agents and brokers can get detailed insights into a client’s family wealth ecosystem, which can be extremely beneficial in growing their book of business across multiple networks. Richer contexts help agents and brokers understand their customers and FSC’s productivity tools help them work faster and smarter.
Being a collaborative-based system, FSC allows agents and teams to work together seamlessly. By connecting to other platforms, using Mulesoft or APIs, allows data to be collected, edited and updated in a multitude of places and in real-time.
Lastly, FSC uses Einstein for analysing data, presenting predictions and weighing out risk assessments. This again, helps advisors make informed decisions.
To learn more you can follow the Financial Services Basics Trailmix here.
What are the benefits of Financial Services Cloud?
Below we highlight some of the key benefits companies within the financial services industry can expect from using FSC.
- No more siloed systems – all your client’s financial information in one place. Advisors can focus on building relationships rather than chasing data.
- Real-time access to updated information – Agents & Brokers can work on the most up-to-date data.
- Access the same data on mobile devices – (data is easily managed so controlling security, etc. is made easy)
- Client Relationship Map – Bringing customers networks to life, showing much-needed context to Advisors.
- Drag-and-drop feature in Lightning App Builder – Admins can use this feature to provide advisors with the most relevant information, tailored to the way they work.
- Open APIs – Achieve seamless integrations.
- Easily collaborate with team members
So why should you choose it over the standard Sales Cloud?
The main question mulling over most financial firms is – Will I go with FSC or stick with Sales Cloud and customise it ourselves?
Sales Cloud has been around since the dawn of Salesforce and it is, of course, an amazing product. However, when we take a look at using Sales Cloud to meet the needs for financial services, it is clear that a heavy amount of customisation is required. This customisation is not impossible and with a good partner, can be done well.
However, when we look at the pro’s and con’s of heavy customisation, it is clear that it can lead to longer implementation times, higher costs, prone to bugs and issues and can mean unnecessary additional ongoing maintenance for admins and developers. In short, by adding the FSC managed package, less customisation is required. Many features in FSC are created to meet the needs of firms in the financial sector. FSC has a lot of industry-specific components and features that are available out-of-the-box and it can create an easier transition as firms grow and adapt to current climates.
For example, looking at features like Advisor Analytics in FSC, it has many pre-defined reports and dashboards that can help Advisors make informed decisions faster. These reports and dashboards can of course be customised further if required. Likewise, the Financial Accounts object comes with pre-defined record types for various types of financial accounts.
3 Key features to note why you should choose FSC over Sales cloud:
- The Household Data Model – Particularly important for wealth management firms. This model allows advisors to see all of the clients financially related connections in one place
- Action Plans are specifically great for meeting deadlines. Used to automate some repeatable tasks
- Advisor Analytics – To help advisors make informed decisions.
Sub-Verticals
Wealth & Asset Management Use Case
From a wealth management perspective, FSC provides deep functionality and insights into clients households, wallet share, portfolio optimization, life events tracking, financial goals and accounts. This type of easily accessible information enables the adviser to extend their insight to future generations and improve trust and loyalty with the family.
This ability to view and capture information across client networks, households, etc. in real-time is crucial. This is all made possible by FSC strong relationship intelligence and ‘Next Best Action recommendations, which are, of course, powered by Salesforce Einstein.
Insights & 360 View
One of the main benefits for Wealth Management firms is the ability to get full insights into their clients. There are many parts of FSC that help advisors do this, however, two features that are extremely important for this are Tracking Leads & Referrals and the Client Relationship Map.
-Leads & Referrals
In the Financial industry, it is very important for Advisors to keep track of leads and referrals. FSC includes many referral components to help advisors (and bankers) keep track of all their referrals. These referrals go through multiple stages from start to conversion and follow a Path. This path is similar to an opportunity. An opportunity and account is automatically created when a conversion happens.
-Client Relationship Map
This is specifically designed with advisors in mind. Utilising the Client relationship map, advisors can get a detailed view of the customer’s personal network. Advisors can view each client’s primary household, (eg spouse, children) and other households (parents). With this map, advisors can also see lawyers, accountants, trusts and anyone else who contributes to a customer’s financial world.
Here is an example (from Salesforce) of ‘Rachel Adams’ in the Client Relationship Map. The map shows her relationship tree. It shows her primary household, Symonds household (her & her father) as well as related accounts and contacts. FSC provides a framework for accessing customer data in a richer context, and this is how.
-Better Productivity with Advisor Analytics
It is no secret that analytics (reports & dashboards) empowers advisors to work more efficiently. When Advisors can make informed decisions they can better serve their customers. Some of the reports that come as part of the FSC package include; Financial Accounts with Household report, Relationship Management dashboard and Opportunities with Financial Accounts report. There are a lot of other reports which you can read more about here.
Combine Advisor Analytics, with Einstien AI predictions, a 360-degree view of your customer and easy collaboration/communication and it’s hard not to see serious improvements in the productivity of your advisors.