Meet Financial Services Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss how Financial Services Cloud fits into the Salesforce Platform.
- Describe the benefits and beneficiaries of Financial Services Cloud.
Get to Know Financial Services Cloud
As a financial services professional, you know that institutions like yours face tremendous challenges. Customers expect consistent and personalized service across all channels of engagement. Bankers, advisers, agents, and brokers need the tools to meet those needs at scale. On top of it all, compliance and regulatory requirements keep changing.
Financial Services Cloud helps you tackle these issues and reach your business goals. It’s a set of features, components, and data models designed specifically for financial institutions. This includes banks, wealth management firms, lenders, insurance companies, and others. 
Built on the Salesforce platform that you know and trust, Financial Services Cloud can unlock data from your entire institution. Core banking, wealth, and insurance divisions can unify around the customer to personalize engagement using purpose-built automation and industry-specific AI.
Solutions for the front-, mid-, and back-office help bankers, advisors, agents, brokers, and operations staff engage with your prospects and customers at scale while building trust to grow long-term, profitable relationships.
In this module, you learn the basics of Financial Services Cloud: what it offers, which segments it serves, and its ready-built solutions for different tasks. Let’s get started!
Understand the Benefits and Beneficiaries
Financial Services Cloud helps you streamline onboarding, personalize engagement, scale service, and improve the experience of many of your institution's stakeholders. Customers benefit greatly from improved service, and Financial Services Cloud can also bring a smile to the faces of bankers, insurers, business leaders, technology staff, and other employees.
Let’s explore the significant benefits for these groups.
Streamline Onboarding
Whether your business is banking, wealth management, or insurance, make positive first impressions with customers as they get started with new financial products and services. Onboarding is traditionally labor-intensive, but with Financial Services Cloud’s automation and integration tools, you can lower costs and save time. For example, reduce onboarding abandonment by simplifying the application process with data and AI.
Personalize Engagement
Build and maintain meaningful client relationships for bankers, advisors, and insurers with a complete view of your customers and their households and assets. Start by unlocking the valuable customer data spread across legacy and third-party systems for a single view that evolves as customers interact with your business. Then use prebuilt calculated insights and create targeted segments to deliver the personalized financial services that your customers expect. Plus, automation can reduce administrative work to free up time to give smarter, more personalized advice.
Scale Service
Make life easier for your service agents by connecting legacy and third-party systems to Financial Services Cloud. Agents can quickly find information to help customers, reduce errors, and deliver service consistently across any channel and on any device. Automation and AI lighten the load on agents and provide customers with the service they expect. Even better, with self-service experiences, customers can quickly and efficiently complete tasks by themselves. This includes updating their address or account details, requesting financial statements, and reporting and replacing lost or stolen cards, to name a few.
Integrate and Analyze Data
If you’re an IT professional, you can integrate core banking and other backend systems to drive overall productivity and satisfaction while protecting customer data. Help bankers, loan officers, advisors, agents, middle- and back-office personnel, and other team members engage with their customers on any channel.
If you’re a business leader, use core analytics on your integrated data to gain insights and quantify business objectives. With purpose-built data models, you can use AI and analytics to answer business questions and make the most of your time and resources.
Explore Financial Services Cloud’s Tools and Features
Financial Services Cloud extends Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to meet the specific needs of financial services institutions like yours. It helps you better know your customers and deliver top-notch customer experiences with tools that integrate data across business systems, automate processes, and store data in purpose-built data models. Plus, all your users get a consistent, modern experience to complete their day-to-day work.
Take a look at the diagram to explore how the solution components fit together.
The diagram shows the solution layers, starting with the foundation and building up.
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Salesforce Platform: The foundational layer is the Salesforce platform. Financial Services Cloud integrates fully with the entire Salesforce universe, so you can enjoy security, power, and scale.
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Integration: Connect and harmonize data from systems across your business with pre-built integrations.
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Automation: Use powerful tools and pre-built templates to automate manual tasks and processes such as reversing a bank fee.
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Sector-Specific Data Models: Tailored to each solution and sector, financial services data models augment and extend core Sales and Service Cloud functionality. For example, the Know Your Customer (KYC) data model tracks specific customer information for security and compliance processes.
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Features: Financial Services Cloud features and tools enable your users to fulfill specific customer needs. For instance, Action Plans automate repeatable tasks and assign task owners and deadlines. Financial Goals and Plans help you address the needs that are most important to your customers’ financial well-being.
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Business Solutions: Financial Services Cloud data models, features, and tools combine to provide ready-made solutions for relationship management, personalized finance, integrated onboarding, and more.
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AI and Analytics: Personalize engagement with AI-powered data and insights.
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Omnichannel Experiences: Connect your entire institution across lines of business, geographies, and channels. From retail banking to wealth management, gain 360-degree visibility into clients’ financial profiles to place your customer at the center of every interaction.
You learn more about how these layers work for different industries and tasks later in this module.
Make the Most of Partner Resources
Financial Services Cloud gives you many great features, and it’s also a starting point for adding your own capabilities. To this end, the Salesforce business partner ecosystem—our network of expert credentialed partners, apps, and developers—has solutions for financial institutions that build on top of Financial Services Cloud.
In the partner ecosystem, find support for your business and technology needs. You can rely on these expert partners throughout your Salesforce journey to bring deep Salesforce know-how and industry best practices to offer solutions across products, industries, and regions.
Plus, AppExchange is the marketplace for all things Salesforce, such as apps, flows, and more. Find electronic forms and tools for financial planning, onboarding, customer profiling, identity verification, compliance, and more.
Now that you understand how Financial Services Cloud can help your financial institution, your users, and your customers at a high level, let’s go a bit deeper. In the next unit, explore how the features cater to an array of financial services sectors.