Salesforce has developed Financial Services Cloud (FSC) specifically for the financial services industry — a full-featured suite that rolls up relevant relationships and financial activities under each Household account. While Salesforce Sales Cloud offers the flexibility to build out similar connections, there are a few limitations and configuration tips to consider.
Let’s start with a high-level view of FSC, named for the broad category of financial services that includes insurance, wealth management, and banks to name a few. With FSC, Salesforce has adapted the B2B data model of Sales Cloud to the B2C data model using Person Accounts and Households, which are more common in financial services companies. This data model represents the person along with their relationships and financial activities. In FSC, Households are groups used to connect family members and professional connections. Groups allow members to roll up their information to their Households. Relationships can be defined between other accounts and contacts that can connect the CPA or the lawyer for the Household. These are built out visually with the Relationship Map. The roles people have in the Household record can be defined and configured with reciprocal roles.
This functionality can be replicated in Salesforce Sales Cloud; however, you won’t have access to FSC-specific features like the Relationship Map. To start building related contacts and accounts, turn on the setting to connect Contacts to Multiple Accounts in the Account Settings section of Setup.
Once this setting is enabled in Sales Cloud, the Related Contacts related list appears. Now, roles can be defined for each contact that is part of the group. In the Account Contact Relationships object, edit the roles and add any new roles you need. When you use Contacts to Multiple Accounts, each contact still requires a primary account; that is the direct relationship. However, you can add other accounts to the contact as well, and these secondary account-contact relationships are indirect.
Person Accounts can be enabled in Sales Cloud to store information about individual people by combining certain account and contact fields into one record. This decision is irreversible, so weigh the pros and cons before turning Person Accounts on. The Household/Person Accounts can be simulated by using a Household Account record type to aggregate the information for the Household or by using a combination of Household Account record type and the Contact object for the more personal information like a Person Account. Review integrations to make sure they will work with Person Accounts. You may want to consider training to help your team understand the changes Person Accounts make.
Financial Accounts need to be configured with a custom object and a master-detail relationship so rollup summary fields can be used to put totals on the account. This is not as extensive as the rollups that happen on Financial Accounts in FSC, but it mimics the basic functionality. Record rollups aggregate information from related records for a number of objects in FSC. Rollup By Lookup (RBL) rules aggregate data so that when you edit a financial account record or primary group membership, the corresponding RBL client and group-level summaries are updated. Financial Accounts have fees, roles, transactions, billing statements, holdings, and securities. All these come prebuilt in FSC but will need to be built for your application if desired.
FSC comes with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, so when using Cases for service, there are a lot of connections behind the scenes that connect to Financial Accounts and other objects that will need to be built.
Action Plans are also included with FSC. They capture repeatable tasks in templates that automate sequences. Tasks are assigned and deadlines are set for routine processes like account openings, loan approvals, and claims processing. There is a third-party app from Salesforce Labs that can be installed to give you some of the functionality of Action Plans.
There are many other objects in FSC that can be evaluated and re-created in Sales Cloud if needed. Your decision to invest in FSC or build some of the functionality in Sales Cloud will likely depend on what functions of FSC you require, balanced by the cost to re-create those features based on your business needs. Keep in mind that the cost of FSC isn’t only in the subscription, but also in the transition time as you train staff to work in the different data model. FSC requires customization to make it work for your business processes too. It isn’t ready to use right out of the box, but with FSC the basic financial services functionality is already done, which can save a lot of time and money when rolling out a new CRM for a financial services company.
If you’re ready to evolve your Salesforce solution, ShellBlack can help you evaluate whether FSC or Sales Cloud is the right choice for your business. Give us a call today.
Author credit:
Lisa Kilmer CFP©, Salesforce Consultant at ShellBlack.com
Content contributed by:
Julie Littleton, Director of Delivery at ShellBlack.com