Salesforce Expands Financial Services Cloud to Unify Experiences Across Consumer and Commercial Lines of Business

Built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, new capabilities — powered by Lightning and Einstein artificial intelligence — enable financial institutions to deliver smarter and more connected experiences

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, announced new advancements in Financial Services Cloud to unify customer experiences across consumer and commercial lines of business in banking, wealth management and insurance. Salesforce introduced Financial Services Cloud to transform the way wealth managers and retail bankers engage with clients and their families. Now, with a new solution for business and commercial bankers, as well as new AI innovations and integrations, financial institutions can unlock customer loyalty by delivering smarter and more connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.

For financial services institutions, customer relationships can be complex, as each individual’s financial needs evolve throughout their personal and professional lives. A client who needs wealth management services today may need a loan to grow her small business tomorrow. In addition, convenience has a growing influence on her choice of financial services providers, as today’s most popular AI-infused consumer apps are setting a new bar for digital experiences. With new entrants now lending billions of dollars per year in business loans, legacy financial institutions are under immense pressure to adapt. But decades of mergers and acquisitions, evolving products that grew up in silos, multiple core systems across different lines of business and an explosion of data have created redundancy and a fractured view of the customer and their needs.

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“The financial services industry is going through a massive convergence as disruptive new entrants are forcing financial institutions to reimagine the entire customer experience across every line of business,” said Rohit Mahna, SVP and GM of Financial Services at Salesforce. “With the new innovation in Financial Services Cloud, financial institutions can now deliver the smart and connected experience that customers demand.”

New Lightning-Powered Innovations Deliver Unified Experiences Across All Lines of Business
Employees at financial institutions traditionally have had a fragmented view of their customer due to siloed and disconnected internal systems. Now, with new Lightning-enabled features in Financial Services Cloud, they can unify the entire customer experience across consumer and commercial lines of business.

• Commercial Banking App gives relationship managers and product specialists a complete view of every customer’s business and commercial accounts, and empowers them to identify and grow the most profitable relationships and streamline the onboarding of new clients. A new homepage provides business and commercial bankers with a single view of their opportunities, accounts and referrals. In addition, a new record type and fields for profiling commercial banking services — such as treasury management — allow relationship managers to see these services in the context of a customer’s profile. Finally, intelligent business referrals allow relationship managers to capture clients’ expressed interest in products and services and route referrals to the correct colleagues in any part of the bank — including other lines of business such as wealth management or retail banking — to unify the entire banking experience.
• Action Plans give financial services professionals an automated and collaborative way to orchestrate tasks on behalf of clients cross-departmentally in a timely and efficient manner. For example, a personal banker onboarding a new customer could use an Action Plan to automatically create and assign tasks to colleagues in other parts of the bank, such as compliance or underwriting.
• Lightning Scheduler allows both relationship managers and clients to easily book inbound and outbound appointments that are embedded into calendaring and standard Salesforce workflows. For example, an insurance agent can book a meeting directly with a customer or on behalf of a colleague, and customers can schedule appointments with their insurance agent through the channel of their choice, such as a firm’s online portal or mobile app. Meeting schedules are also visible to that client’s relationship managers, fostering an even more personalized and collaborative banking experience.
• Salesforce Surveys for Financial Services Cloud capture customer feedback with easy-to-build branded surveys for both personal and commercial customer interactions. Relationship managers can quickly view survey data within their client’s profile or create reports and dashboards and share customer insights internally. For example, a banker can automatically send a timely and customized customer satisfaction survey after a meeting and use the response data to adjust how they engage and deliver services in the future, helping build more personalized relationships.

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New Einstein-Powered Innovations Deliver Intelligent Experiences for Customers and Employees
With new AI-enabled innovations, financial institutions can provide smarter and more impactful services to customers in every aspect of their personal and professional financial lives.

• Einstein Bots for Financial Services Cloud provide retail banking customers with intelligent, self-service bots that help them report lost credit cards or place travel notifications through a bank’s website or mobile app. Einstein Bots will not only deflect and manage routine service inquiries, but will also route more complex issues to the right agent at the right time, delivering the appropriate context so customers don’t have to repeat or re-enter information they already provided through a digital channel.
• Einstein Next Best Action uses predictive and rules-based intelligence to deliver real-time contextual recommendations and offers to financial services professionals and customers at the point of maximum impact. For example, Einstein could recommend that an insurance agent reach out to a specific customer about an umbrella policy based on a combination of life situation data and recent banking interactions, or a customer may receive a recommendation in a bank’s online portal for setting up direct deposit after recently indicating a job change.
• Einstein Analytics for Financial Services Cloud includes pre-built, industry-specific analytics for wealth, retail and business banking. Financial services firms can accelerate their time from data to insights with out-of-the-box data integrations, enriched datasets, curated dashboards, pre-built models and quick start deployment wizards.

Introducing Powerful New Financial Services Integration Capabilities
With MuleSoft, financial institutions can bring together apps, third-party data and devices across multiple orgs and systems using API-led connectivity. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™ helps financial institutions modernize legacy systems and unlock enterprise data, bringing together critical information across organizational silos to deliver new revenue channels, participate in new value chains and provide smarter and more personalized customer experiences. For example, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform unlocks legacy accounting, transaction and billing data that extend to wealth managers through Financial Services Cloud and connect to multiple custodians, allowing financial advisors to grow their book of business through integration.

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Salesforce’s Partner Ecosystem Continues to Extend the Power of Financial Services Cloud
According to an IDC¹ study, between 2016 and 2022 Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will create more than 548,000 jobs and enable more than $164 billion in new business in financial services worldwide. Salesforce partners are building new applications fully integrated with Financial Services Cloud that will be available in the Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise cloud marketplace. These solutions include:

• Blend will offer an end-to-end digital solution built on Financial Services Cloud which allows a lending organization to create data transparency across the entire borrower journey from inquiry to close, providing a robust borrower financial profile that supports customer needs across multiple products and increases lenders’ total addressable market.
• eMoney will offer bi-directional integration between platforms to streamline a wealth management firm’s financial planning, analytics and reporting needs.
• Jemstep will provide a digital advice solution to advisory firms to guide investors through the advisory lifecycle, providing both home office and advisor views to help grow assets under management, reduce the cost to serve clients and gain actionable insights through data and analytics.
• Guidewire offers ProducerEngage and ServiceRepEngage for Financial Services Cloud to empower captive agents and customer service representatives to better engage with their customers through stronger alignment between marketing, sales, and service, while surfacing actionable insights through the integration of policyholder data between Guidewire and Salesforce applications.
• Vlocity Insurance & Financial Services delivers a complete digital insurance platform on Financial Services Cloud, including quoting, policy administration, claims management and digital portals.
• Finxact is integrating their Core as a Service solution with Financial Services Cloud to facilitate account opening and real-time financial account balances and transactions.
• Fenergo offers relationship managers a client onboarding and lifecycle management solution that is integrated into Salesforce’s customer engagement layer to modernize the end-to-end client experience.
• PrecisionLender will offer a connector solution for Financial Services Cloud that provides commercial bankers with actionable, in-the-moment insights and coaching so they can build relationships that advance profitability and growth while improving the customer experience.
• Roostify will provide an intelligent consumer lending platform, powering the customer experience from acquisition through loan fulfillment and designed to build the ideal service for your customers in a secure, compliant manner while improving both customer satisfaction and loan cycle times.

Comments on the news

• “It’s in BBVA’s DNA to provide a world-class banking experience for our customers, so it’s vitally important that we are using the most innovative tools to serve them in the best ways possible,” said Derek White, Global Head of Customer Solutions, BBVA. “Salesforce Financial Services Cloud provides modern productivity tools that help our relationship managers collaborate and personalize the banking experience to build customer loyalty.”
• “This latest round of enhancements to the Financial Services Cloud sees Salesforce continue to improve its proposition for institutions offering services in commercial and retail banking, as well as wealth management and insurance,” said Kieran Hines, Head of Industries, Ovum. “In addition to a strengthened offering for each individual business line, a process that has been accelerated through expansion in the partner network, the emphasis on breaking down traditional organisational silos within an institution – and the benefits this can bring for customer servicing in particular – is an area that stands out.”
• “Historically, CRM technology in the banking industry was used by independent lines of business, with little to no collaboration. Differing customer engagement platforms, conflicting budgets and an extremely complex spiderweb of technology led to further separation,” said Tanner Shamrock, Partner, PwC. “Today, the industry is changing and is leveraging solutions like Financial Services Cloud to break down the silos among business lines, so that institutions can operate as one bank. Now, armed with standardized processes and capabilities at the enterprise-level, including reusable components, out of the box feature sets, and a focus on reducing technical debt, financial institutions of all types can coexist in a way they never could have before.”

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Availability and Pricing

• The Commercial Banking App, Action Plans and Surveys will be generally available in October 2018 and included with a Financial Services Cloud license.
• Einstein Bots for Financial Service Cloud will be generally available in October 2018 and included for customers with Financial Services Cloud Unlimited Edition and customers with Live Agent licenses.
• Einstein Analytics for Financial Services Cloud will be generally available February 2019. Pricing information will be made available at general availability.
• Einstein Next Best Action will be generally available in 2019. Pricing information will be made available at general availability.
• Lightning Scheduler will be generally available February 2019. Pricing information will be made available at general availability.

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