How Salesforce Helps Financial Services Firms Build Trust (2024)

Salesforce is the unrivaled leader in the CRM market, boasting over 150,000 active customers, 83% of which are Fortune 500 companies. This powerful CRM platform has been utilized by financial services industry giants such as Western Union, American Express, and Wells Fargo, resulting in an impressive $100 billion in revenue.

So, what makes Salesforce the top choice for these leading companies? It’s simple – Salesforce has developed a complete set of products that cater to the unique needs of financial services organizations, enabling them to streamline their operations and deliver exceptional customer service.

From Sales and Service Clouds to Financial Services Cloud, and CRM (formerly Tableau) Analytics – all share one philosophy – putting the customer at the heart of the business while enhancing employee efficiency.

Through the examples below, we’ll explore how Salesforce for financial services can help companies deliver unparalleled service and achieve success.

Why Companies Choose Salesforce for Financial Services Over Other CRMs

Salesforce is a top choice for financial services organizations as it can enhance productivity, streamline client journeys, and surface key insights on accounts and portfolios. We’ll explore some of the most praised features of Salesforce for the financial services industry.

1.  Centralized Management of Financial Data

Salesforce provides a consolidated view of your business data along with reliable and immediate access to it. This harmonizes business processes by eliminating the need to duplicate client data across multiple systems and helps view investment decisions from the customer’s point of view.

Thanks to this, financial services professionals can personalize their offerings and gain a competitive advantage over other institutions.

2.  Accurate Financial Predictions

Some of the top pain points wealth management and financial services professionals have are renewals forecasting and management, inaccurate sales or financial forecasting, and inaccurate reporting.  Salesforce CRM allows users to access the right client data at the right time and make informed financial decisions and budget forecasts based on it.

It enables financial services executives to predict future income, understand potential risks and opportunities, and take corrective action as needed.

3.  In-depth Data Analysis and Visualization

According to the same Forrester research, 89 % of companies that deploy algorithm-driven financial services for decision-making will gain a significant competitive advantage.

Real-time analytics in Salesforce empowers financial advisors and consultants to accurately budget and forecast outgoings and take instant corrective action as needed. With these analytics tools powered by artificial intelligence, financial advisors can get critical insights and unparalleled visibility into the unique customer journey, customer revenue, retention, and churn.

Additionally, Salesforce CRM visualizes data in a digestible way for easier comprehension in the form of customizable reports and dashboards.

Financial professionals can adjust the metrics they want to display on these reports to track the necessary data exactly when they need it.

4.  Team Coordination

67% of respondents in the Salesforce report believe that effective coordination between finance and sales can improve forecasting and maximize revenue growth.

It’s difficult to find any other CRM for financial services that can hold millions of records and be equally effectively serving financial agents, marketers, and support teams from distributed departments worldwide.

What’s more important, all these teams can have a bird eye view of all customer data regardless of the customer’s and team’s location. It helps connect all data sources and enrich your customer experience profiles to get a comprehensive portrait of your audience and understand client needs.

5.  Platform Flexibility

No other customer relationships management system can offer such a level of flexibility as Salesforce. It allows tweaking CRM functionality to adapt it to the individual needs of wealth management firms, retail banks, insurance agencies, and other financial domains. For example, you can create a customized commission calculator or make the system highlight upcoming events.

Moreover, its click-not-code nature, meaning customizing the platform using pre-defined blocks of code, enables the creation of custom workflows without involving developers.

Such a low-code flow builder helps financial services institutions mimic their real-life processes in the system without spending much time on writing custom code. In addition, this unification of code block collections simplifies future scaling of the system without the risk of breaking the previously created code.

6.  Security & Regulatory Compliance

Salesforce builds security into everything they do to manage security risks and ensure regulatory compliance. It provides numerous security features such as security health checks to regularly perform system audits and inspections after each release.

This CRM for financial services also allows multi-factor authentication to protect your corporate and client data. Thanks to it, your team can perform their tasks confidently and efficiently.

7.  Smooth Integration with Third-Party Solutions

In addition to the product features and strong internal customization capabilities of Salesforce, you can extend its features with over 4,000 add-on products in the AppExchange (Salesforce’s app marketplace).

All these solutions are Salesforce-compatible, meaning that you can be sure that they will seamlessly connect to your platform without extra custom coding or causing system hiccups.

Thanks to Salesforce, insurance agents and financial consultants can add necessary functionality, for example, virtual signing of documents, multi-criteria search for financial records, or generation of PDF versions of financial portfolios, making the completion of financial tasks much easier and faster.

Discover the Potential of Salesforce CRM for Various Financial Services Sectors

Salesforce is an incredibly versatile platform that can transform the way financial institutions, advisors, and consultants operate. The biggest players in the financial industry, such as banks, insurance companies, wealth management firms, advisors, and credit unions have already been using Salesforce to their advantage, and we’ll explore this further later.

However, its power extends beyond these domains, and it can also provide significant benefits to other financial agents:

Asset Managers

According to Michael Kitces, a prominent American financial advisor, 46% of advisor time is spent on administrative tasks such as client servicing, planning, and meeting preparation. In today’s competitive market, asset management professionals must focus on their most profitable relationships and be laser-focused on nurturing these clients.

Salesforce provides asset management firms with all the necessary CRM tools to streamline their workflow and improve the prospecting experience for new clients. It also enables them to nurture existing client relationships, prepare financial plans, and manage their client’s financial portfolios efficiently.

With Salesforce, money managers can gain a comprehensive view of their client’s financial profiles, including assets, liabilities, and investments, allowing them to prepare for meetings more effectively and provide personalized financial advice that meets customer demands.

Capital Markets Firms

Capital market firms typically have complex workflows that require much more than a good memory and a spreadsheet to manage. Additionally, the capital markets industry is highly regulated and requires tight security and compliance measures.

The Salesforce platform provides capital markets firms with powerful tools to manage long, complex sales and trading workflows, enabling them to better engage with clients. The platform also helps them mitigate security risks, gain actionable insights into client preferences and behaviors, automate workflows, and provide real-time reporting and analytics.

And if you don’t have enough time or resources to customize your CRM for capital market needs, you can still leverage the Salesforce potential with solutions like AscendixRE for Capital Markets, with all necessary pre-made functions within Salesforce.

Investment Managers

Investors may spend years nurturing their client relationships to get the desired profit. However, during this time, they often accumulate hundreds of Excel files and thousands of notes, making it easy to miss important details.

Salesforce helps to store and manage all the results of networking efforts to make investor relationships with clients stronger and more reliable.

With this platform, private equity and venture investors can accurately segment their client base, execute deal and investment management, and model customer behavior with the help of AI-powered tools.

Investment bankers can easily keep track of details throughout the whole deal and investment cycle, analyze deal stages, investment opportunities, and client engagement on comprehensive dashboards, sourcing better opportunities as a result.

Mortgage Brokers

The management of a mortgage lending business is closely tied to industry challenges such as compliance with security regulations, consistent communication, and prioritization.

Salesforce helps mortgage brokers mitigate risks associated with violations of regulations and data breaches by constantly evolving its security measures.

Furthermore, the centralization of all communication channels in one system will help lenders make interactions more consistent and informed.

Loan officers can also use this CRM system to personalize loan offerings, and recommendations, and manage the loan application process. The platform allows mortgage bankers to gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions, identify new opportunities, and optimize their services.

How Financial Services Companies Use Salesforce

Data Consolidation within Salesforce CRM for Capital Markets for Hanna Commercial

Hanna Commercial is the commercial division of Howard Hanna, which wanted to replace previous CRM systems used by individual offices and unify processes and workflows for the users. Salesforce helped this capital markets firm consolidate various CRM solutions into a cohesive environment, improve efficiency, save money, and create a culture of continuity among all commercial offices.

This CRM platform provided Hanna Commercial with an opportunity to share contact information across market lines and provide background to contacts within their existing network which led to an improved ability to effectively serve their accounts.

Salesforce enabled synchronization of calendars, contacts, and email history and an available mobile interface, and reduced workflows to Contacts, Companies, Tasks, Groups, and Deals. Hanna Commercial now also can track KPIs (key performance indicators), spot trends and inefficiencies, benchmark offices, and faster react to critical situations.

Custom Salesforce Application Development for Western Union

Western Union, a multinational financial services company, implemented Salesforce as the cornerstone of its technology infrastructure to enhance its ability to serve customers across multiple channels, connect 80 offices worldwide, and handle a remarkable 29 transactions per second.

The CRM software for the financial services industry proved highly effective in managing evolving regulatory compliance requirements, fluctuating currencies and markets, and ensuring trust and security. With Sales Cloud, Western Union was able to manage the entire lifecycle of more than 500,000 agents worldwide, reduce operational costs, and accelerate revenue growth.

The Salesforce Platform tools allowed Western Union to develop a fully customized application to help clients understand their invoices before making payments while providing advanced analytics tools to measure agent productivity globally and respond to operational trends effectively.

Secure Data Exchange with Salesforce for Investors for Innovative Capital

Innovative Capital Corporation is a commercial real estate brokerage and private capital lender. Salesforce became a secure hub housing all the data of their lenders and borrowers.

Moreover, Innovative Capital now can leverage a custom mechanism for a Lead-Deal conversion, solutions for Post-Close Sales Cadence, and an opportunity to attach documents to a deal (multi-download and multi-deletion) which wouldn’t be possible to build with any other CRM for financial services.

In addition, the company was able to create custom landing page templates and forms with Pardot and improve lead processing and engagement.

Salesforce for Banking: Enhanced Mobile Experience for Barkley’s

Barclays, a London-based bank with approximately 2.1 billion customer interactions per year, leveraged a range of Salesforce products to tap into a vast digital market and provide a superior customer experience.

By using Marketing Cloud, this Salesforce customer can extract marketing insights from customers’ social media posts, conversations with colleagues, and digital interactions with the brand. This enables Barclays to personalize interactions on a massive scale and establish emotional connections with its customers and meet their high expectations for digital experiences.

With the help of Sales Cloud, Barclays is now able to better understand its customers and meet their individual needs. They can personalize everything, from popup ads to mobile app notifications. Additionally, Salesforce has enabled Barclays to enhance its mobile banking experience and offer incentives to users to encourage greater customer engagement.

Advanced Visualization of Pacific Life’s Data with Salesforce for Insurance Agents

With over $158 billion in assets, Pacific Life is a prominent life insurance firm in the United States. To stay ahead of the competition in the rapidly evolving insurance market, the company has embraced technology, using Salesforce to enhance its product offerings.

Pacific Life leverages Marketing Cloud to effectively communicate with financial professionals, boost campaign performance, and monitor lead conversion to sales.

In addition to this tool, Pacific Life has also implemented CRM Analytics, which has enabled the company to make smarter decisions through data analysis. With this solution, Pacific Life can visualize its data, receive real-time updates, and receive recommendations for the next best action.

How Salesforce Financial Services Consulting Helps Maximize Investment

Despite being a fabulous solution on its own, Salesforce may need additional customization to meet individual financial institutions’ needs. You may also feel that your solution doesn’t reflect your business processes, and, in this case, you need an expert touch of Salesforce financial services consultants.

Salesforce financial services consultants usually help with CRM revitalization to meet maximum needs with available functionality, platform customization, and optimization. Additionally, they provide a vast scope of services related to data management such as data import/export, data enrichment, or data cleansing automation.

But all consultancies are different so are their service offerings. Ascendix is a Salesforce Crest Partner with a long track record of leading capital markets, venture, and private equity investors companies to the next chapter of digital transformation and efficiency.

This winning combo of Salesforce and financial market ecosystems understanding allows us to make your solution the true foundation for your fintech transformation. And we help you create your individual implementation roadmap and strategy which considers all your workflow intricacies and system requirements. Besides the above-mentioned services we provide:

• Process, technical, and security assessment to make sure your system is bug-free and remains compliant with Salesforce security standards
• Scaling of Salesforce functionality if you feel that your firm has outgrown your old system
• Customization of your financial reports and dashboards
• Assistance with the selection of the best AppExchange app to fill in the functional gaps and activation of bi-directional synchronization between Salesforce and this solution
• Custom development and upgrade of applications for the AppExchange platform
• Setup of system permission set, user & profile hierarchy, and sharing rules setting
• Ongoing system administration and virtual support to manage new features and upgrades after each release
• User and admin training to shorten the learning curve

Still have questions about Salesforce for financial services institutions? Book a free CRM consulting call and we’ll tell you how to win a competitive edge in the fintech world with Salesforce.