The Financial Services Cloud from Salesforce has moved into general availability along with over 20 partners including the likes of Informatica, Accenture, Deloitte and CipherCloud.
Along with the general availability release of the cloud platform that is tailored specifically to the needs of financial services professionals, Salesforce has revealed over 20 ISVs and SIs that will be joining the ecosystem.
Among those are implementation services provided by the likes of Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and PwC. Data aggregation services are provided by the likes of Informatica and MuleSoft and document management is on offer from DocuSign and eSignLive.
Figures coming out from Salesforce Connected Investor Report go some way to highlighting the potential opportunity that the company is seeing.
Based on the responses of more than 7,900 adults, 4,944 of which currently have money invested, it was found that 51% of UK investors don’t understand the process by which their advisor makes recommendations.
It was also found that 70% want the relationship with their current financial advisor to be more collaborative and that 43% keep their financial records in a folder, shoe box or some other kind of physical storage.
These desires and problems play into why Salesforce feels there is an opportunity in the space, not only would it be more secure and convenient for collaboration to store records in Salesforce than a shoe box, but it also aims to meet the changing requirements of financial services organisations.
Raj Mistry, SVP Solutions Engineering, Salesforce EMEA told CBR: "We’ve arrived at a perfect storm scenario, what’s happened with the industry, what we’ve been creating through cloud computing, social mobile, what investors are looking for in this new economy has led to this result of going to market with Financial Services cloud."
Mistry said that the financial services industry is being disrupted by technology changes, regulatory and changes that are being forced by expectations of digital citizens.
Mistry said: "The first true area of products we are releasing are around wealth management, that area is probably most closely aligned to what we as an organization have been doing for many years are client relationship management. Changing the way customers connect, their expectations around that connection.
"Over time extend that to retail banking, insurance and a broader range of services."
Mistry said that financial services are being forced to be more productive and that they need to have a set of tools to achieve that.
Basically this boils down to Salesforce helping financial advisors to deal with individuals that have different sets of expectations but then also deal with regulatory services that are asking them to work differently.
Powered by Salesforce Lightning, it plans to offer capabilities that will enable the building of 1-to-1 client relationships, increased productivity through automated admin tasks and mobile and social capabilities.
With Client Profiles and Client Households the company says that advisors will have a panoramic view of each client and be capable of accessing a full picture of the customer’s household and extended network.
Wealth Home Page offers automated administration tasks so advisors will be able to quickly scan their daily agendas, prioritise client tasks and track client opportunities. In addition to this it will offer real-time analytics so that users can analyse data and use it to reach out to clients based on interests or service models.
One of the companies which has extended its capabilities to the financial services cloud is Informatica with its cloud. Informatica Cloud will connect to the offering and offer core back-end systems such as asset management, portfolio management and risk and trust operations to aggregae investment data in the cloud.
Informatica will help to connect data from on-premises systems, SaaS applications and enterprise databases to wealth managers.
Ronen Schwartz, SVP and GM, Informatica Cloud said: "In order to transform the client-advisor relationship for the digital age, financial advisors and their clients require seamless access to the data they need, when they need it."
The offering will leverage the Salesforce platform across mobile and social so it can be used on the go.
The service is available today with prices starting at $150 per use, per month.
