Living with Financial Services Cloud
In May of this year, I accepted a job at a financial services company. My new role entailed customising and implementing Salesforce, as well as integrating with other systems, rolling out Pardot, and employing extensive process automation. Pretty cool, right?
There were, however, two small issues to be addressed:
1. I had never heard of Salesforce, or any CRM, for that matter. Really.
2. My employer decided to go ahead with the brand-new Salesforce managed package, Financial Services Cloud.
Life was about to get very interesting in a hurry.
As far as my personal journey as a total Salesforce novice that was thrown into the high-tech lion’s den, see my Trailblazer story –
So, what has it been like living with Financial Services Cloud (FSC)? Let me summarise my experiences with five words:
1. Complexity
The data model of FSC makes it unique – and uniquely complex. The client / household model, the roll-up of financial data to the household record, and other features of the FSC package make it rather convoluted. FSC is significantly different to work with compared to Sales Cloud, with its traditional and familiar account / contact structure. There are also many things happening in the background that affect what you may and may not do within FSC. Read the FSC Implementation Guide and you’ll see what I mean.
2. Potential
The idea of creating a managed packaged to better serve the financial services industry makes great sense on many levels. Catering to individual clients and their households is very different from working with business customers with many contacts each. The ability to view the total AUM for clients and households (FUM for my fellow Aussies), or to see the value of all individual and household financial accounts, is pretty cool. FSC has great potential, much of which is yet to be realised.
3. Adaptation
I have spent much of my time customising FSC, even though it is a package that has been structured for our industry. This has befuddled my manager and me. Why has this been the case?
First, financial services in the USA is very different from financial services in Australia. Try modelling a SMSF (Self-Managed Super Fund) in FSC, or even explaining to Salesforce Support what this strange beast is.
Second, our goal in implementing FSC was to radically improve the way that we work in our business, and this meant implementing as much automation as possible, especially around the key area of compliance. This is where I see the greatest ROI for our project.
4. Creativity
The online resources that are available for FSC are paltry compared to Sales Cloud, which is no surprise when you consider that FSC is still in its infancy. Therefore, a FSC admin must be creative and innovative, perhaps more so than your typical Salesforce admin. With the help of my trusty Salesforce Solutions Engineer, I have had to solve many tricky problems and find ways of doing what seemed impossible. There any many great blogs out there for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud admins, but not so for FSC. It is simply too new and untried.
5. Patience
The rigidity of FSC makes it rather challenging to work with at times, as you are limited in what you can change. Salesforce does not seem settled on how they want FSC to work, so they have a habit of changing the structure at each new release. This can be good, but it can also make more work for the admin, and undo solutions that have been engineered and implemented prior to the release.
What if you are thinking of migrating over to Financial Services Cloud? The license fees are considerably higher than those for Sales Cloud. Is it worth it?
If I were you, I would ask these questions:
- What does FSC offer me that I cannot get from a well-implemented Sales Cloud org?
- Who am I going to use to customise and implement FSC? Many consultants are not yet familiar with this embryonic package.
- Does my business case justify the extra expense of FSC?
- Will the long-term benefits of FSC, fully implemented and automated, outweigh the inherent challenges and costs?
If I could do it all over, would I go back and choose Sales Cloud over FSC? It’s hard to say, and it’s immaterial, because I’m on this FSC journey now. For better, for worse.
The only constant in the technology industry is change. Marc Benioff
Mark Tossell
CRM Project Manager, Fusion Group
Sydney Australia
Twitter: @marktossell