Meet Financial Deal Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the problem with managing deal data in the investment banking industry.
- Explain the Financial Deal Management feature.
- Describe the Financial Deal data model.
- List the differences between Opportunity and Financial Deal objects.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you complete the following.
Suggested
It’s a Big Deal
If you’ve earned either of the Compliant Data Sharing in Financial Services Cloud or Interaction Summaries in Financial Services Cloud badges, then you know about the key players. Let’s get to know them again.
Cumulus Capital is a leading global investment banking firm that provides a range of financial services, with merger and acquisition (M&A) advisory being the biggest one.
Rob McDonald, the associate at Cumulus, just got Cumulus one of its biggest clients. Thanks to Rob’s hard work, Cumulus is representing Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), an outdoor gear retail giant, in the acquisition of a fitness cafe chain called Dorjelean Kitchen.
Challenges in the Investment Banking Industry
Being a long-time Financial Services Cloud (FSC) user, Cumulus often handles sensitive deal data, also known as material non-public information (MNPI). Collaborating on the data is essential at Cumulus, but so is doing it in an efficient and compliant manner. Any unintended data leaks could lead to insider trading, massive penalties, and loss of business.
Cumulus’s challenges don’t end here. The investment firm has been using a customized solution to capture client data for all of its M&A deals so far. But this solution, consisting of custom code and custom objects, is complex and difficult to maintain. Any error there can lead to accidental sharing of MNPI data.
Instead of spending more time and resources in customizing the existing solution, Cumulus is looking for an all-in-one feature that can help it to tackle the current challenges. And as always, the banking firm turns to its trusty Salesforce admin, Matt O'Brien, for answers.
The Deal with Financial Deal Management
Matt contacts Salesforce support hoping for a solution. The support executive introduces Matt to Financial Deal Management, an out-of-the-box feature in FSC that’s tailor-made for the investment banking industry.
Deal teams can use Financial Deal Management to track and manage the entire lifecycle of a deal—from pitch to closure. Associates like Rob get dedicated apps and components to capture and view various aspects of a deal, like stage, status, success probability, and many more.
And that’s not all. Financial Deal Management works with other Salesforce features to offer advanced functionalities. The feature integrates with Interaction Summaries to let Rob capture meeting minutes, including details like attendees, meeting types, and next steps.
Compliant Data Sharing (CDS) is another Salesforce feature that tightly integrates with Financial Deal Management. CDS provides an easy interface to share deal data containing MNPI with relevant stakeholders in an efficient and compliant manner.
While this module focuses on investment banking, Financial Deal Management can also be used with other FSC subverticals like commercial banking and asset management.
Financial Deal Management Data Model
Matt is excited about Deal Management and wants to set it up in the org. Before setting up the feature for Cumulus, he decides to study the feature’s data model. Let’s follow along.
- Financial Deal: This is the core object in the financial data model and represents the deal that the financial institution is working on. The object has a self-lookup to handle deal hierarchies.
- Financial Deal Participant: This object represents the user or group with whom the deal is shared using CDS.
- Financial Deal Party: This object represents the party that has a stake or is involved in the deal. Examples include legal firms, competitors, and partners. A financial deal party can be either an individual or a company.
- Financial Deal Product: This object represents the services that the financial institution is offering to its client in the deal. Examples include mergers and acquisitions advisory, underwriting, and capital raising.
- Financial Deal Interaction: This junction object is used to associate multiple interactions with multiple financial deals.
- Financial Deal Interaction Summary: This junction object is used to associate multiple interaction summaries with multiple financial deals.
Financial Deal or Opportunity?
Opportunity is a popular Salesforce object that’s used to manage deals. With Financial Deal Management in the picture now, how do you decide which object to use? Check this table with a list of features supported by each object, and select the one that serves your business use case.
| Features | Financial Deal Object | Opportunity Object |
|---|---|---|
|
Role hierarchy-based sharing |
Can be enabled or disabled |
Enabled by default, can’t be disabled |
|
Implicit sharing of parent account |
No |
Yes |
|
Supports Compliant Data Sharing |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Supports Interaction Summaries |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Supports Collaborative Forecasts |
No |
Yes |
|
Supports tracking of deal entities like deal parties |
Yes |
No |
What’s Next
In this unit, Matt studied the fundamentals of deal management and how it's the perfect solution for managing deals at Cumulus. In the next unit, Matt uses this newfound knowledge to set up the org. Let's go!