What is Salesforce Financial Services?

If you work in the financial sector and you like Salesforce as much as we do, it’s likely you’ve heard of the Financial Services Cloud. Even if you haven’t, this is still the blog for you!

In this guide, I’m going to give you a run-through on exactly what the Financial Services Cloud is, and how you can expect to use it if you do ever implement it for your org. So, what is it – and why might you want to use it?

Firstly, I’m going to be using the trial version of the Financial Services Cloud for this blog. If you’d like to give it a try, click on this link and follow the steps to get yourself set up. Salesforce recommends you use an email for this form that you’ve never used to sign into Salesforce with anywhere – so feel free to use a personal email address if you have one spare.

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Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Now, you may have noticed that the Home page for this “Retail Banking” app looks – on the face of it – very similar to what you might see when you log in to the default Home page of the Sales app in Sales Cloud. That’s because the Financial Services Cloud is Salesforce, and this is one of its main benefits.

Put simply, because the Financial Services Cloud is built-in Salesforce, you get to enjoy the flexibility, power, and scalability of Salesforce along with a few extra tools. Let’s go through some of those tools now.

The first additional functionality you’ll notice is these components on the Home page. These give you a little look into the main differences we’ll see between Financial Services Cloud and the Sales Cloud. Let’s have a look at some of the custom objects that Financial Services Cloud is built with out of the box:

Let’s start by looking at the Financial Account – you’ll see it halfway down this list. This is an account that you might manage as a financial institution – it might be a savings account, a current account, or perhaps something like a retirement fund. These Financial Accounts roll up to the “Primary Owner”. This is usually a Contact – and you’ll see that there’s a shiny new “Financials” tab on the Contact screen. It looks like this:

You may have also noticed the “Financial Account Role” object listed above. This is to say when someone might own an account themselves, or perhaps they own it jointly – it might also mention someone who should have access to the account, such as a lawyer or a trust.

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The other objects are still important, of course, and here’s what they do:

• Billing Statements contain any bills that have been sent to a customer
• Cards are any credit cards or debit cards associated with a client
• Charges and Fees are a record of any additional charges applied to an account, such as overdraft fees, transaction fees.
• Assets and Liabilities represent any non-monetary assets that an account holder might own – such as real estate.
• Revenues are the money generated from the customer’s accounts – such as interest, or stock values.
• Securities are similar to assets but are objects like bonds or stocks that can be traded.
• Holdings are investments that the account owner might have. These allow you to track changes to share prices to reflect the value of a customer’s portfolio.

We hope you enjoyed this brief look into the differences between the Financial Services Cloud and Sales Cloud – we’ve really only dipped our toes into how these two platforms differ, so why not load up the trailhead and have a deeper look?