Skip to main content

Explore Financial Account Roles and Financial Goals

Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Describe and create a financial account role.
  • Create a financial goal.

What’s a Financial Account Role

A financial account role describes the nature of a client’s involvement with a financial account, such as joint owner, beneficiary, or trustee.

Here are some examples of financial account roles in the sample data found in your org.

  • Rachel Adams is the primary owner of the Bank of BAS checking account.
  • The Adams Charitable Trust is the primary owner of the cash account.
  • Rachel Adams is the joint owner of Nigel Adams’ investment account.

You set up a financial account role for Claire Johnson when you created her brokerage account in the previous unit (she’s the primary owner).

Out of the box, Financial Services Cloud provides the following financial account roles.

  • Primary Owner
  • Joint Owner
  • Beneficiary
  • Accountant
  • Trustee
  • Corporation
  • Foundation
  • Grantor
  • Business Manager

You can also add new financial account roles to meet your client or business requirements. Talk to your Salesforce admin to make that happen.

The Special Case of Primary and Joint Owners

Of the out-of-the-box financial account roles, primary and joint owners are deactivated by default and managed directly by Salesforce. What this means is that you won’t see these two roles as options when you create a new financial account role (we’ll cover this in the next section of this unit).

However, when you create a new financial account, at a minimum, you must assign at least a primary owner—even in the case of an individual account. In the case of a joint or trust account, you must also assign a joint owner.

Let’s revisit Nigel’s Investment Account to see this in action. Here, Nigel is the primary owner of the financial account while Rachel is a joint owner.

Screenshot of Nigel’s Investment Account showing Nigel Adams as the primary owner and Rachel Adams as the joint owner

It’s important to note that you can’t assign a joint owner to an account whose ownership type is Individual. Set an account’s ownership type to either Joint or Trust before setting up a joint owner.

More Deets on Financial Account Roles

Financial account roles are extremely versatile—you can use them to slice and dice the same data in different ways. But what if you want to see all the financial account roles associated with a financial account?

Let’s dive a little deeper into Nigel Adams’ investment account and find out. Click through the Related tab and scroll down to the Financial Account Roles section. You’ll find that while Nigel and Rachel are joint owners—primary and secondary, respectively—Neil Symonds is a beneficiary.

A screenshot of Nigel’s Investment Account with a red box around the Financial Account Roles section

How’s that for a 360-degree customer view!

Looking at the Financial Account Roles, you’re probably wondering: why is the Joint Owner role listed three times, but assigned to Rachel Adams only twice? That’s because it’s not a bug, but a feature! Click View All under the Financial Account Roles section for an expanded view and you’ll see some interesting things going on there.

Detailed view of the financial account roles associated with Nigel’s Investment Account

First, check out the Active flag next to each role. This tells you that of the given roles, only three are active: Nigel as primary owner, Rachel as joint owner, and Neil as beneficiary. Now, look at the start and end dates for each role. The active roles don’t have an end date, which makes sense since they’re still active. You’ll see that only the inactive roles have an end date associated with them. By working through those dates chronologically, you have a clear audit trail of the various roles associated with this account over time—all readily available at your fingertips. Rachel started out initially as the account’s joint owner. She was then replaced by Angela briefly, but finally, Rachel reverted to a joint ownership role for Nigel’s investment account.

Any changes made to the roles associated with a financial account are automatically reflected in the Financial Account Roles related list of that account. Now that you know how financial account roles work, let’s create one!

Create a Financial Account Role

You can create a new financial account role easily from the Financial Account Roles related list on either of the following objects:

  • Account
  • Financial Account
Note

Financial account roles are supported as two record types: account roles and contact roles. Choose account roles for institutions (say, the Adams Charitable Trust) and contact roles for individuals, such as Rachel or Nigel Adams.

Let’s see how we can do this from a financial account.

  1. From the App Launcher (App Launcher icon), find and select Wealth Management.
  2. In the Financial Accounts view, select Claire Investment Account, then click the Related tab.
  3. Scroll to the Financial Account Roles section and click New.
  4. Provide the following information:
    • Record Type: Account Role
    • Related Account: Rachel Adams (Sample)
    • Role: Beneficiary
    • Financial Account: Claire Investment Account

Screenshot of creating a new Financial Account Role: Contact Role page, where Rachel Adams has been set up in the beneficiary role for Nigel’s Investment Account

  1. Click Save.

And just like that, you’ve set up Rachel Adams as a beneficiary of her sister Claire’s investment account. Easy peasy.

Create a Financial Goal

We’ve talked a fair bit about financial account roles. Let’s now see how financial advisors and retail bankers can help clients identify and meet financial goals.

Your client can create a goal before funding it. The actual value of the amount a client has put aside for a goal can be zero.

The New Financial Goal page with some details filled out for Rachel Adams

Remember Claire? She wants to buy a second home in Maui. The condos she likes cost around $750,000. Her goal is to save a 20% down payment by 2025.

Let’s set up that financial goal for Claire.

  1. In Accounts, click Claire Johnson, and go to her Goals tab.
  2. Click New.
  3. Fill in the appropriate information.
    • Financial Goal Name: Vacation home
    • Type: Home Purchase
    • Primary Owner: Claire Johnson
    • Target Value: $150,000
    • Target Date: January 1, 2025
    • Actual Value: $97,000
  1. Click Save.

Claire can now make sure she’s on target to move into that vacation home in 2025.

To learn more about creating and maintaining financial account records, check out the Resources section. In the next unit, we connect to clients by logging calls and tasks.

Resources

Keep learning for
free!
Sign up for an account to continue.
What’s in it for you?
  • Get personalized recommendations for your career goals
  • Practice your skills with hands-on challenges and quizzes
  • Track and share your progress with employers
  • Connect to mentorship and career opportunities