Financial Services Cloud FAQ

How is the Financial Services Cloud (FSC) Data Model different from Sales Cloud? Sales Cloud was designed as a generic template that can be customized to meet the needs of many types of industries. Salesforce built Financial Services Cloud specifically to meet the needs of people in the Financial Services industry. Today FSC supports Wealth Management/RIAs and Retail Banking and has a data model to track both individuals and organizations/companies/households. With this pre-built data model, it is easy to have individual client records rollup to a household and designate by financial account, which ones roll up to the household.

What is Financial Services Cloud?

FSC is a data model that Salesforce designed exclusively for the Financial Industry that addresses wealth management advisors and retail banking areas first. FSC launched in 2016, replacing the Wealth Management Template that the Sales Cloud license originally included.

Why is data on individuals spread across the account and contact record?

The FSC data model uses code to marry an account and a related contact to use the best features of both to form an Individual. A contact on its own is not searchable and is considered an orphaned record, but is necessary as it is used in campaigns, marketing applications, and support cases. An Individual allows users to utilize fields and functionality on either record; a custom redirect built into the client page layout allows users to focus on the Individual they’re managing rather than focusing on the account versus contact portion of the record.

What are the benefits of the Financial Services Cloud?

The Financial Services Cloud relationship tree illustrates how clients and prospects are related to one another and to other people and institutions in the database. The activity panel on household and client records allows firms to quickly create and manage activities and meetings. Sub-tabs within households and individuals illustrate financial summaries and provide quick access to the record’s most important information, such as financial goals and sales opportunities.

How do I use the Financial Services Cloud Goals object?

The idea of the Goals object is to document what your client’s goals are and update them every time you meet. This will allow you to truly understand your clients’ motivations and thus to best help them.

How does Financial Services Cloud manage Held Away Assets?

Held Away Assets are assets that a client may have. However, the Advisor using FSC does not manage these assets. These assets are important to know about as they both provide you with a picture of the clients’ true asset value as well as it is an opportunity to manage that money for them. FSC gives you the ability to note which Financial Accounts are Held Away and this filter can be used for your data rollups and client reporting.

How do I associate one person to multiple households/accounts?

This is a great feature of Financial Services Cloud where you can now associate an individual to more than one household/account. As you setup these associations, you have the ability to note whether the financial accounts should rollup to the household/account also. By being able to track your individual client and their relationships to the household, their employer, any Boards they sit on, etc., it allows you to build out a complex relationship map that can help you grow your business.

What are the challenges in moving to Financial Services Cloud?

Data Migration is always at the top of the list when migrating to Financial Services Cloud. Some organizations do not have householding in their current CRM System and thus, you won’t get the full value of FSC until this householding component can be setup. Additionally, migrating data from various legacy systems do not present the data in a format that makes it easy to migrate into a new data model. Clients often overlook the amount of work it takes to prepare their data before migration.

How do I bring in Custodian data into Financial Services Cloud?

Bringing in this data is critical as it provides information on the clients’ financial accounts and holdings. Many financial institutions have either written or are writing their integrations to bring in your clients’ data into the FSC Data Model. There are also products on the Salesforce AppExchange that consolidate a lot of this data and can bring it into Financial Services Cloud.

If you have a question about whether your financial institution can bring in your clients’ data, please contact us at any time!