Are you thinking about upgrading to Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, but not sure if it’s right for your company? We're often asked by existing Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud users if an upgrade makes sense. Here are some key considerations to help you decide.
What is Salesforce Financial Services Cloud?
Financial Services Cloud is a customer relationship management solution designed to meet the specific needs of the financial industry. It's sold as a managed package on top of Sales Cloud and runs only in Lightning, Salesforce's application development platform. It offers targeted packages for specific industries, including Wealth Management, Retail Banking, and Insurance. It helps firms deliver a more engaging client experience, strengthen relationships, and generate new business.
There’s no question that Financial Services Cloud is an amazing platform for companies in the financial services industry. So, should everyone implement it? Not necessarily. Although Financial Services Cloud has benefits for both B2C and B2B markets, the determining factor is the cost-benefit analysis. What are you getting for what you’re paying?
Generally speaking, if you’re a B2C company with more than a handful of employees, you’d be well advised to implement Financial Service Cloud. With its robust client relationship capabilities, you’ll gain a holistic 360⁰ view of your clients along with a wide range of client engagement tools, analytics capabilities, and a long list of other valuable features that make it a sound investment that should pay off for your business in terms of client satisfaction and growth.
For B2B firms, the client relationship component is extremely valuable as well. But there are also other factors that come into play in this space. If you're a B2B firm with a relatively straightforward offering then working with Sales Cloud may be sufficient.
For example, B2B companies selling to institutions rely on various types of financial account records. This is the kind of thing they could build on their own as a custom piece and an update wouldn’t really be missed. However, if your business requires a number of specific features, then an upgrade to Financial Services Cloud will undoubtedly be money well spent.
Indicators you’d benefit from Financial Services Cloud
Note: If none of these statements apply, then sticking with Sales Cloud might be the right option for your business.
Your business is complex with different types of advisors and clients
The main benefit of Financial Services Cloud is that it’s built specifically for the financial services industry. For example, in the wealth management package, most of the features and data models that RIAs, Broker Dealers and Asset Managers need to work with their clients are available right out of the box.
Your business needs a variety of different features
The industry-specific packages within Financial Services Cloud provide most of the features a business in your industry would want. For example, the Wealth Management package includes key features such as:
- Household Data Model
- Financial Accounts and Goals
- Action Plan
- Wealth Reports and Dashboards
- Advisor Analytics
Householding is a good example of a feature that is of value for most financial organizations. With Financial Services Cloud, the data model and relationship mapping to categorize clients into households is all there, and you can further enhance it as required.
Now this functionality can definitely be built on Sales Cloud. Many wealth management firms have already done so and may question the necessity of reinventing the wheel. However, from a cost-benefit standpoint, it’s important to consider the future cost, time and effort it’s going to take to maintain and update a custom householding solution.
You want to avoid incurring technical debt
When you create custom solutions on Sales Cloud that are similar to what’s offered on Financial Services Cloud, there’s the risk of incurring technical debt. Over time, your custom solutions will cost you more and more to maintain, to the point where you would have been better off to have implemented Financial Services Cloud instead.
Also, when you build something custom, you’re out of the loop for updates or product enhancements from Salesforce. For example, what happens when Salesforce creates an amazing UI to view households and continues to iterate on that? You should consider if your team will be able to continuously improve your homegrown householding solution at the same pace as Salesforce.
Making the switch allows you to shift the impact of that technical debt off of your business and, essentially, get more value out of your investment in Salesforce.
You anticipate your future roadmap will translate into more complex needs
If you see your business evolving and your products or solutions becoming more complex in the future, and if your plans align with the development road map of Financial Services Cloud, then now may be the right time to convert.
For companies that don’t foresee major changes on their road map to their structure or offering, then it probably makes sense to stick with Sales Cloud for the time being and continue to build whatever custom features you need on top of that.
How we help you decide
We can help your firm determine which Salesforce solution will best meet your goals and if it’s worth it to upgrade. We’ll then work with you to build and implement the optimum cloud-based applications for your business.If you’d like to review your Salesforce options, please get in touch with us at sales@purefacts.com or 1-888-596-9338.
About PureFacts Financial Solutions
Ranked a WealthTech100 Company, we provide enterprise wealth management and asset management solutions for the financial services industry in Canada, United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. As CRM and Data Consulting experts, we excel at delivering guidance and implementation support to help our clients unlock the power of cloud-based business applications.
Our mission is to create meaningful wealth solutions that help people live their best lives. We provide our clients with transformational WealthTech solutions to future-proof their business and accelerate growth by leveraging our expertise in wealth management data aggregation, complex calculations, artificial intelligence and machine learning. www.purefacts.com