Salesforce introduced Financial Services Cloud (FSC) in 2016 and it was the first industry-specific offering, aiming to provide a way for financial advisers to closely knit programs together, such as those that involve rebalancing of clients’ investment portfolios or updates on their financial goals.
Powered by Lightning, at its heart Financial Services Cloud is a combination of Sales and Service Cloud plus a managed package that extends the platform with a number of features that are useful in different scenarios within the Financial Services Industry. What is important to realise though, is that FSC is not (at least for today and the foreseeable future) a bank-in-box (or an insurance company in a box for that matter). The extensions that come with FSC primarily work within the relationship management space and the workflow/case management space; in other words, they tailor Sales and Service Cloud for this particular vertical.
As this article will be one of a series, I have grouped these extensions into certain categories of my own devising, to allow them to be discussed in isolation as well as in conjunction (as some functionality has relatively specific use cases whilst others are more generic). I will also be touching upon this in a fairly UK-centric way as one of things to note about FSC is that originates, primarily, in the North American market and more specifically Wealth Management, and those origins still show in a number of ways (particularly terminology and some of the pre-built flows).
Extension categories
So, what do you actually get with Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud? Well that obviously depends on your edition, but you can find out more on that from Salesforce themselves. In this blog series, we will look at the full “Unlimited” edition in order to cover the full range.
Custom data objects and data models – there are approximately 90 custom objects (at the time of writing, Summer 21 release) added as part of FSC, plus custom fields to a handful of standard objects so you do get a significant extension to the data model.
Custom components – there is a stack of extra components that come with FSC to help visualise things like relationship data (through ARC and Life Events for example) and even some Flow specific components like a multi select table. Some of these are actually very clever and something I hope to see more of on other objects in Salesforce.
Permission sets and licenses – although there is a main Financial Services Standard license, you do get a whole range of others in the package, some of which are based around the user’s job (for example there is a Teller license which provides restricted functionality) and some of which provide access to specific functions (like Action Plans).
Functions and features – this is where FSC will really adds its value as anyone can create custom data models and components. In this area we will look at items such as rollup by look up configuration (allowing financial data to be summarised).
Technical – custom triggers, metadata, APIs and the Data Processing Engine.
As you can see FSC is large and so the purpose of this series will be to examine the overall capabilities and consider both the strengths (with some practical examples in the banking world) and weaknesses in the current state and some discussion on the future for FSC and where it may (and hopefully should) develop further.