8 Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Finance Cloud over Sales Cloud for Financial Institutions
5 min
There has been growing pressure on financial institutions necessitating digital transformation due to disruptive competition, evolving customer expectations, and regulatory complexity. This is why Financial institutions might get caught in a selection dilemma: Choosing between Sales Cloud and Financial Services Cloud.
- Financial institutions such as commercial banking, investment banking, insurance agencies, and wealth management firms leverage Financial Services-specific CRM software to;
- Access customer information in one system with a pre-build data model.
- Build and maintain customer relationships as business grows.
- Increase productivity with real-time actions and more innovative insights.
- Engage and collaborate with clients easily across all platforms.
- Check out the best Financial Services CRM software in 2022 here.
So, what value would Financial Services Cloud add on top of the Sales Cloud, the core Salesforce product?
Why Financial Services Cloud over Sales Cloud?
While Sales Cloud makes it easier to boost sales and scale any business, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is built especially for financial services striving to keep customer relationships strong.
Finance Cloud comes out of the box with all the core Sales Cloud features plus new apps, custom fields, advanced analytics, and objects modeling financial accounts, assets, liabilities, and goals for clients, advisors, and business partners.
It is an industry-specific managed package that enhances and extends the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud features and functionality combined to better meet the needs of wealth management firms, insurance companies, banks, and mortgages. It provides a holistic view of client activity and can help quickly pivot sales strategies to serve them best.
Despite its flexibility being a plus, Sales Cloud requires heavy customization to meet the financial industry's needs. Customization can lead to implementation challenges and ongoing maintenance costs that burden Salesforce administrators, developers, and the whole business. With the Finance Cloud package added to Sales Cloud, firms can have peace of mind with plug-and-play industry-specific features.
Now let’s dive deep into eight main reasons for choosing Salesforce finance cloud over sales cloud for financial institutions;
- Financial services with householding and relationships mapping
- Native relational data modeling
- Supercharges employee productivity
- Secured financial services with privacy level compliance
- Leveraging the power of AI with Tableau CRM
- Working smarter action plans
- Tracking financial business opportunities
- Unify all of your financial products and services on one platform
1. Financial services with householding and relationships mapping
One of the cool features I like about Finance Cloud is householding and relationship mapping tailored for financial institutions. With Finance Cloud, you can obtain a 360 holistic view of your customer's financial information, need-based products, and what they need to achieve their life goals.
It's important to have client profiles, including financial accounts, relationships, goals, and opportunities, integrated and accessed in a single platform that caters to all financial institutions. The view addresses the most significant challenge that advisors, insurance agents, and bankers face in driving customer loyalty when managing investment opportunities from one generation to the next.
2. Native relational data modeling
Another impressive feature specifically designed to support financial institutions with Financial Services Cloud is Native relational data models.
Whether you are into wealth management, the banking sector, or are selling insurance policies to individuals, you are dealing with clients. Let us pick a client in the banking industry as an example. The client profile contains financial data easily managed and accessible in Finance cloud.
This financial information may include banking accounts, personal loans, financial goals, and relationships with the different contacts. This information enables the financial advisor to provide an excellent customer experience and create opportunities backed by intelligent referrals.
3. Supercharges employee productivity
Finance Cloud offers pre-built data models that integrate and automate financial processes in real-time to boost overall business productivity.
- SFC data models helps:
- Advisors and bankers to kick start each day with a tailored list of tasks, client life events, and opportunities with a click of a button.
- Wealth advisors and managers to access client metrics and let them grow and manage their book of business.
- Insurance agents, brokers, and service reps agents prioritize their activities and track performance as they keep serving their clients.
- To streamline mortgage lending by delivering a fast and seamless lending experience with a single view of each borrower's loan processing.
In order to achieve this, data models have components, templates, tailored portals, and apps furnished with proactive engagement cards, dashboards, and in-context collaboration.
4. Secured financial services with privacy level compliance
Financial institutions are heavily regulated since they work and share sensitive client data. To stay compliant, they need to have strict company policies. With the compliant data sharing feature in Finance cloud, you can share client engagement and deal data containing material non-public information in a compliant manner. You do this by defining which client-related data can be shared with specific users based on the role in the context of a client engagement.
Compliance managers and Salesforce administrators can enable compliant data sharing for the account and opportunity objects using participant roles. For example, a relationship manager role can get full read/write access to an opportunity while an associate role gets read-only access. With participant roles, compliant data sharing makes it easier and seamless to control who can access specific records without overriding sharing behavior from existing features.
5. Leveraging the power of AI with Tableau CRM
Financial Services Cloud uses artificial intelligence in Salesforce to offer advanced analytics solutions based on Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics). Tableau CRM for Financial Services, a comprehensive set of Tableau CRM dashboards, help financial service executives and managers, advisors, and personal bankers manage their 'books of business' with insights about customer goals, satisfaction, and opportunities. Additionally, the Client Segmentation App, which is available by a license that provides restricted access to Tableau CRM features, helps financial advisors identify high-potential clients for outreach and financial business growth.
6. Working smarter action plans
Another unique feature of the Finance cloud is the action plans. They enable setting up and automating repetitive tasks/actions into templates and workflows with different subjects and priorities to power consistent customer experiences.
For example, you can create an action plan template to perform an auto review and car insurance policy renewal for a client. This way, you create and automate tasks with attributes like the due date for review and approval. Once completed, the actions plan template is published, shared, and can be cloned for re-use.
Action plans help financial institutions to work smarter, and increase productivity and day-to-day operational effectiveness.
7. Tracking financial business opportunities
With Finance Cloud, leads and opportunities can be related to the referral business process, so employees and customers can refer other potential customers with related opportunities. The Financial Services Cloud tracks leads and referrals until the financial institution meets the customer's need.
You can source referrals across different lines of business with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. For instance, a wealth advisor can source a referral and pass it to a banker. Using end-to-end workflows for assigning, accepting, rejecting, and authorizing referrals to the SFC provides a referral score so the banker can nurture the relationship with people that bring in the most business. The lightinng components with the Financial Services Cloud enables creating new referrals in a few clicks and quickly start the cross-selling process.
With the leads and referrals tracking feature combined with the relationship builder and map, advisors can get full visibility of a client’s complete financial status as well as their entire tracking history.
8. Unify all of your financial products and services on one platform
It's easier to track accounts and set goals for clients with Financial Services Cloud. The Financial Account object has pre-defined record types for different financial account details: investment accounts, insurance policies, bank deposits, and loan accounts, for instance.
Financial account data helps advisors discover client investment opportunities like the purchase of a car or home, paying off a student loan, or starting a career job. Each of these opportunities is documented as a financial goal allowing advisors to suggest flexible payment plans to clients with convenience and affordability hence maintaining loyalty.
Takeaway
We can now say Financial Services Cloud is more suitable for financial institutions over the Sales Cloud using the following three principles to help your business succeed;
First, focus on your customers and cater to their individual needs. Expectations are high, and having Financial Services Cloud can be a game-changer in earning some competitive edge.
Second, bringing things together and unifying your system's efficiency and resource use are essential measures of employee success, enhanced by getting everyone working on the one platform.
Finally, step into the modern innovations and tailor your business by listening to your customer. Salesforce has designed a product that fits your needs. At the same time, we recognize your need to customize it and integrate it with other systems.
