What is Financial Services Cloud?
Salesforce introduced Financial Services Cloud back in 2016 as a specific offering for the Wealth Management, Banking and Insurance industries.
Financial Services Cloud adds additional functionality (through both additional features and a financial-services-specific data model) to the core Sales Cloud or Service Cloud CRM products. In this blog we take a more detailed look at who it’s for, what’s included and some considerations for implementing Financial Services Cloud (FSC).
Broadly Financial Services Cloud provides the following core benefits:
360-degree view of customers
Connected end-to-end processes
Best-in-class Partner Ecosystem
Who is Financial Services Cloud for?
The Financial Services Cloud product is targeted at three main industry groups: Wealth Management, Banking & Insurance. Within Financial Services Cloud there are specific features and parts of the FSC data-model which are tailored to each of these industries, and which deliver specific benefits:
Financial Services Cloud for Wealth Management
For Wealth Management the benefits of Financial Services Cloud are extensive but focus on providing the toolset for Financial Advisers to build relationships with Clients, improve productivity and identify gaps in the advice (and products) being provided.
The Financial Services Cloud Data Model provides the foundation for this, surfacing both Financial Accounts and Client Goals and displaying this alongside an enhanced data-model for Relationships, allowing Advisers to see, for example, who makes up a Household or which other professionals may be advising the household.
All of this is surfaced within a number of Financial Services Cloud specific UI components.
Financial Services Cloud for Banking
Salesforce segment the FSC Banking product into a further four areas; Retail Banking, Business Banking, Mortgage Banking and Premier Banking.
The Retail & Business Banking offerings focus on improving Customer Experience and Agent Productivity (think a Banking-specific Service Cloud). The Mortgage Banking offering focuses on extending this relationship and on how Mortgage providers can better work with Brokers through Communities. Finally, the Premier Banking offering is more akin to the Wealth Management set-up, allowing a personal, tailored service to be offered to high-value clients.
In practice, all of these can be provided through a single Financial Services Cloud instance, allowing for a true single-customer view irrespective of what stage of the customer journey an individual is currently part of.
Financial Services Cloud for Insurance
Finally, the Financial Services Cloud offering for Insurance enhances the experience offered to customers from quote through to claim. Insurance Agents and Reps are presented with everything they need to accurately and efficiently manage interactions, allowing them to focus on offering the best possible service.
What’s included with Financial Services Cloud?
As described above, Financial Services Cloud includes several specific components and an extended data-model to support a variety of Financial Services functions.
How these fit together with the wider Salesforce platform and extended Salesforce ecosystem (such as AppExchange) is shown below:
Getting Started with Financial Services Cloud.
There are three approaches to a Financial Services Cloud implementation;
New Salesforce user implementing FSC in a new org (Green Field Implementation)
Existing Salesforce user, implementing FSC in a new org (Green Field with Org-to-Org Integration/Migration)
Existing Salesforce user, implementing FSC in an existing org (Brown Field Implementation)
Green Field Implementation
This is similar to a Sales or Service Cloud implementation, with the FSC package being installed soon after the Org is provisioned. Data will still need to be integrated/migrated from 3rd party systems, and business processes will need to be defined and configured.
Green Field Implementation and Org-to-Org Integration/Migration
This approach follows that of the Green Field Implementation and will result (at least in the short-term) with the concept of an “Old Org” and “New Org”, with data being integrated between the two. The exact requirements will be dependent on the specific architecture in place and the businesses requirements. For example, it may be sufficient that Old Org acts as a master with a one-way integration to New Org.
Brown Field Implementation
The final approach would see the Financial Services Cloud package installed in an existing org. Due to the data-model changes that FSC incorporates this has the potential to be highly disruptive and where possible should be avoided, but may be appropriate for existing orgs with a low volume of data.
Next steps?
We’re proud to have worked with some of the UK’s leading Financial Services organisations and have a number of segment-specific Financial Services Cloud demos available.
If you’d like to discuss how Salesforce Financial Services Cloud may be able to help your business, just get in touch.