Salesforce outlines Financial Services Cloud roadmap, single view of customer test bed

Salesforce unveiled updates to its Financial Services Cloud that aims to unify the various silos within financial services companies and provide one holistic view of the customer.

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Rohit Mahna, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce's financial services unit, billed a series of updates as unified financial services. "We've heard from day one that the industry is going from selling to products to relationships to a holistic view of the customer," he said. "It's a journey."

Salesforce in 2016 rolled out its Financial Services Cloud as a way to tap into the financial services and tech market. Like healthcare, Salesforce is targeting specific verticals. So far, Salesforce's Financial Services Cloud has more than 400 customers.

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The strategy with the Financial Services Cloud is to bring industry specific updates as well as innovation from Salesforce's platform to banks, insurers, fintech companies and the like. Like most mature industries, financial services firms grew by acquisition and mergers, have legacy systems, back office operations, retail and commercial units and a complex web of integration points.

Mahna calls it "industry spaghetti." The end result is a fragmented customer experience due to multiple silos, systems and functions. Using Salesforce's Integration Cloud, via the MuleSoft acquisition, the company plans to knit together various systems into one comprehensive view of a customer.

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Now Salesforce isn't going to wave a magic wand to cure technological debt, but aims to be an enabling technology as financial services firms work to simplify. Salesforce's Financial Services cloud can bring some of the experiences from newfangled services such as Volt Bank and Stripe while connecting professional and personal accounts at traditional firms.

Starting with the Winter 2019 update, Financial Services Cloud will get a commercial banking app, action plans, surveys and Einstein bot integration along with recommendation for next best actions. In the Spring 2019 update, Financial Services will get more Einstein Analytics services.

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Ultimately, a relationship manager at a financial services firm will get a dashboard that shows referrers, the customer's various accounts and roles (commercial, personal and professional). Mahna's demo featured a woman who ran a household, was a C-level executive and needed a commercial loan to expand. With one view, a bank could know this one person could leverage multiple client services.

In addition, Salesforce is building out its partner base for Financial Service Cloud with integrations with the likes of Guidewire, Roostify, eMoney, Jemstep and a bevy of other firms touching on everything from mortgages to insurance to loans.

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