Digital Transformation of Banking & Financial Services Leveraging Salesforce

Over the past few years, fintech solutions and companies have significantly transformed the financial services landscape. Open banking enables systems to seamlessly and quickly integrate with new platforms and applications.

As customer expectations change, competition heats up, regulations tighten and pressure to streamline operations increases, companies are driven to innovate and transform themselves in response. Fintech development solutions are rapidly transitioning towards becoming consumer-centric while offering seamless solutions through personalized experiences. Salesforce CRM integrates new technology into existing data sets for more informed decision-making and giving an accurate picture of business performance.

Salesforce allows businesses to do more with its integrated services, marketing and sales solutions. Organizations can centralize all data into Salesforce for an unparalleled view of clients and an understanding of where they stand in the sales process - giving rise to personalized experiences that strengthen client credibility.

Many third parties can integrate directly with Salesforce via an API, providing businesses instantaneous access to critical performance data from customers and staff members - not to mention cutting out the need to switch platforms frequently! In some instances, third-party software can be managed directly, reducing shuffling between platforms.

What Is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform designed to assist financial services organizations in automating, streamlining, and digitizing their operations to enhance customer engagement, drive operational efficiencies and provide differentiated services.

Salesforce allows financial services organizations to develop customized solutions tailored to the unique needs of their customers, giving them an enhanced customer experience. Offering marketing automation, customer service and analytics products as part of its integrated technology platform allows these financial services firms to customize customer interactions, automate workflows and gain insights into customer behaviour - creating personalized customer experiences while automating workflows and gathering intelligence on customer behaviour.

Salesforce's artificial intelligence features allow financial services organizations to quickly analyze data and identify patterns and trends, giving them the tools to remain competitive in an ever-evolving industry. By harnessing Salesforce, these organizations can unlock new possibilities that foster customer engagement and revenue growth while driving customer retention and expansion.

Salesforce is integral to the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry

Salesforce CRM is known for creating highly tailored experiences for users and customers, so choosing it for financial services will help you overcome challenges associated with traditional enterprise systems and develop an ecosystem of Salesforce tools and services that ensure you remain relevant and competitive in today's financial services market.

Here are a few challenges the BFSI industry encounters and how Salesforce CRM for finance can assist.

Conspicuously Poor View of Client Information

Challenge: For BFSI firms, failing to have an unobstructed view of customers and their financial needs poses a formidable challenge when trying to keep pace with customer demands and market trends and make informed decisions, especially when their CRM systems are outdated and enterprise systems don't sync effectively.

Solution: With Salesforce for banking CRM solutions, you gain a full view of each customer and practice role-based access, so only authorized personnel can access these personal details. Furthermore, Salesforce integrates easily with wealth management technologies for an all-encompassing view of every client.

Failing Legacy Software

Challenge: Many BFSI firms still need to rely on outdated legacy software that cannot meet client expectations or functionalities required of sales teams today. With appropriate tools, these firms can deliver the experiences their clients demand.

Solution: Salesforce BFSI solutions enable you to connect your internal systems seamlessly and access all pertinent information at one location. Utilizing its out-of-the-box functions for customization to suit your unique business requirements and AI's power to unlock actionable insights about clients can give your business an edge.

Insights for Engaging Experiences

Challenge: Personalization is key to creating long-lasting customer relationships in today's economy. With appropriate systems and technologies, BFSI firms can gain meaningful insights about their customers based on behaviour analysis and information such as history or demographic data.

Solution: Salesforce for finance services helps you clean, organize, and store large volumes of data. Furthermore, with Salesforce CRM, you gain real-time access to critical client data that enables intuitive insights about their journeys and delivers them exactly what they are searching for - creating a world-class experience that not only pleases but builds trust between yourself and your clients.

Associated Operational Risks

Challenge: Financial firms already collect enormous volumes of customer data. However, due to its unstructured nature, BFSI companies often need help managing this data volume effectively and using it to provide personalized financial solutions to clients.

Solution: Salesforce CRM for Finance solutions centralizes all client data into one dashboard and uses artificial intelligence - Salesforce Einstein AI - to offer real-time recommendations based on past client behaviour to provide tailored financial services and products.

Deliver Tailored Experiences for Clients

Challenge: Modern clients need to be more tech-savvy and expect more from their financial advisors. To provide custom solutions for these clients, advisors require access to all financial data and tracking capabilities for accounts and live communication channels - which legacy CRM solutions cannot meet.

Solution: Salesforce for banking CRM allows you to manage client data efficiently, streamline operational processes and leverage live chat to service customers 24/7. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud implementation features provide competitive tools and capabilities that facilitate digital transformation while offering clients easy access and use solutions.

Staying Abreast of Evolving Regulatory Compliances and Standards

Challenge: The Businesses operating within the BFSI industry face an ongoing challenge of keeping up with all necessary industry compliances to avoid legal issues, protect client data from cyber criminals and meet all required financial standards.

Solution: Salesforce BFSI Cloud ecosystem tools integrate compliance, safety and regulations seamlessly into every aspect of operations. Every communication can be tracked easily between teams; creating internal processes is also straightforward. Custom reports and dashboards help monitor ongoing operations, set compliance expiration deadlines to avoid missing them, and bring all information together in one central place for convenient viewing.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud helps banking and Financial Services go hybrid

Hybrid banking combines digital and on-premise services into a customer-centric banking ecosystem designed to meet customers' evolving banking needs by accessing various services through any touchpoints they prefer. It aims to meet customers' evolving banking requirements by giving them access to different services across any touchpoints available to them.

Financial Services Cloud facilitates a secure, scalable, and robust hybrid banking model by:

Create a Unified Customer View

Instantly access customer data in one central place so you don't waste time looking for information across various sources. Plus, with its feature-rich customizable mobile app, you'll have instantaneous access and update customer data anywhere, anytime.

Automating Routine Tasks

Use automation tools to streamline repetitive and time-consuming tasks like processing documents and checking financial statements, freeing you up for more important work like planning customers' finances with them or reaching out with new tailored offerings.

Delivering experiences that drive customer loyalty

Enhance customer experiences that increase loyalty utilizing strategic customer insights and engagement tools to understand customers' engagement patterns and engage them on specific physical or digital channels. With real-time insights, you can personalize engagement in real time to delight your customers and delight customers!

Deepen Engagement and Expand Business

Gain more visibility into existing household opportunities and an overview of managed and held away assets. Keep track of referrals to transform your customer base into an active referral network. Additionally, cross-sell and upsell through service teams at multiple touchpoints.

Providing smart recommendations

Salesforce Einstein's Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine uses predictive scoring based on 360-degree customer views to offer smart recommendations to your customers and help them meet their financial goals.

Salesforce Solutions for the Banking and Finance Industry to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Salesforce offers many applications outside its financial service cloud that provide exceptional customer experiences at each touchpoint.

Pardot for financial services

According to Salesforce research, 80% of finance industry customers place equal weight on experience as on products and services.

Customers have transformed how they research and purchase financial products, expecting consistent, personalized experiences across all digital channels. Financial organizations embracing Pardot software as part of their strategy for staying successful in an environment filled with connected customers - marketing automation guarantees seamless connections with customers, improved engagement with quality leads, and the success of marketing efforts.

Marketers need a complete view of customers to provide personalized experiences and build stronger client relationships through prospect scoring, follow-ups, content delivery at the right time and customized content delivery at just the right time.

Pardot's client nurture app now allows teams to send pre-approved emails from acquisition to retention - strengthening client relationships while providing tailored engagement experiences.

Real-time engagement of potential prospects with financial services companies occurs via alerts sent directly from financial websites when customers take an interest or open emails. Using Pardot's Email Builder, create personalized messages that engage and excite them further.

Pardot's ability to track marketing campaigns and produce reports on customer engagement and ROI helps optimize customer experience, providing valuable insight into whether there's an opportunity for marketing investment maximization.

Marketing Cloud

Financial industry businesses face a gap in digital marketing defined by a lack of trust, personalized messages, and in-person interactions with customers. Marketing cloud software from the Salesforce financial service CRM platform addresses this problem by cultivating customer relationships through tailored advertising messages.

Under the umbrella of marketing cloud technology, customers receive timely messages relevant to them, ensuring exceptional communication, customer loyalty, and lasting relationships.

Journey Builder allows for targeted marketing campaign creation by connecting customer touchpoints such as websites, mobile applications, emails, and ads. It facilitates random adjustments of marketing campaigns depending on customer behaviours such as interest levels, satisfaction and engagement levels.

The Interaction Studio allows customers to collect customer interactions across various touchpoints in real-time for data-driven decision-making, conversion rate optimization and increasing customer lifetime value. It enables new customer engagement techniques before their competition.

Experience cloud

A digital experience platform created for Salesforce that digitally engages and connects customers across various customer touch points.

Utilizing data collected across customer touchpoints helps enhance the customer experience across each channel and better adapt to changing financial trends. With its seamless connection between CRM data and business processes, CRM allows instantaneous response time while being tailored specifically for each customer.

Experience consistency across multichannel journeys will not lead customers to feel they have left the financial organization ecosystem; they trust it and won't look further for offerings similar to what was provided before their first digital experience. Digital interactions create bonds within ecosystems.

Benefits of Salesforce in Banking and Financial Services

Salesforce has enabled financial institutions to adapt, thrive, and easily meet their customers' ever-evolving demands. Below are the key benefits of Salesforce for banking and financial services institutions:

Benefit 1: Customized Customer Experiences

Customer service has become an essential differentiator across industries. Salesforce provides banks with tools and finance software solutions to gain a 360-degree view of their customers, better comprehending their preferences, needs, and behaviours.

Salesforce CRM can easily integrate with various banking systems, including core banking, loan origination and online banking platforms, for seamless data flow between multiple touchpoints. With such data, banks can deliver customized product recommendations, targeted marketing campaigns and timely notifications tailored specifically for individual customers to create strong relationships and foster greater customer loyalty.

Benefit 2: Comprehensive Data Analysis and Visualization

According to Forrester's research, 89% of companies that utilize algorithm-driven financial services for decision-making gain an important competitive edge.

Data is at the core of financial industry success, providing essential customer insights and future decisions. Salesforce banking CRM aggregates this information, giving you a consolidated view of each client, their behaviour and history, most-requested solutions, expected financial services, etc. You can then customize solutions using BFSI to offer personalized financial experiences to each client - making sure every experience counts!

Real-time analytics in Salesforce enable financial advisors and consultants to budget accurately, forecast outgoings and take immediate corrective action when necessary. By harnessing artificial intelligence-powered analytics tools, financial advisors gain critical insights and unprecedented visibility into customer journeys, customer revenue retention, and churn rates - giving them essential advantages over competitors.

Salesforce CRM also makes data easily digestible through customizable reports and dashboards, enabling financial professionals to adjust the metrics displayed to access needed information quickly.

Benefit 3: Accurate Financial Predictions

Wealth management and financial services professionals often need help forecasting renewals forecasting, sales or financial forecasting accuracy issues and inaccurate reporting. Salesforce CRM gives users access to client data at the right time to make informed financial decisions and budget forecasts based on that information.

Financial services executives can use it to forecast future income, identify potential risks and opportunities, and take corrective actions as required.

Benefit 4: Enhance Sales and Marketing Capabilities

Salesforce provides outstanding marketing capabilities through its Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution, enabling businesses to execute data-driven marketing campaigns while developing long-term customer relationships. In banking applications specifically, Salesforce for banking helps improve the efficiency of sales funnels while automatically providing omnichannel solutions across channels.

This powerful CRM platform equips banks with sophisticated sales and marketing tools that can be tailored specifically to their needs, including lead generation, sales forecasting, opportunity management, and revenue-driving features. Banks can streamline their sales processes through these features while driving greater revenues.

Marketing teams can also utilize Salesforce's marketing automation features to design targeted campaigns, track customer interactions and measure campaign effectiveness - ultimately optimizing their efforts and increasing efficiency.

Benefit 5: Improved Customer Service and Support

Excellent customer service is at the core of any successful banking institution. Salesforce CRM for Finance stands out with its stellar service offerings like Salesforce Service Cloud to manage customer experiences effectively.

Salesforce for financial services is also an ideal option for organizations looking to retain customers by providing exceptional customer service across touchpoints and integrating various channels like phone, email and social media into one seamless omnichannel experience for customers using Service Cloud.

Salesforce's AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle everyday customer inquiries more efficiently, freeing human agents to address more complex issues. Not only does this enhance efficiency, but it also provides real-time support, speeding response times and improving overall customer experiences.

Benefit 6: Accelerating Digital Transformation

As digitalization continues to be a must in banking, Salesforce is essential in speeding up financial institutions' digital transformation journeys. Thanks to its cloud architecture, financial institutions can adopt agile and scalable solutions without an extensive IT infrastructure.

Salesforce's AppExchange ecosystem of pre-built applications provides banks with access to industry-specific tools and integrations designed specifically for them, helping banks add new functionalities, expand service offerings, stay ahead of competitors and stay ahead of market forces. Banks can use Salesforce's AppExchange to add mobile banking capabilities, streamline loan processing or launch innovative financial products quickly - any solution for every need exists within its ecosystem of pre-built apps!

Financial advisors frequently face several steps that must be repeated for every client. Not only does this lower productivity, it wastes much time that could have been better used on meaningful operations. Salesforce for financial services offers automation solutions to streamline repetitive flow steps and accelerate processes and procedures.

Benefit 7: Strengthened Data Security and Compliance

Compliance is paramount in banking, so Salesforce has invested significantly in data security by offering advanced features to protect sensitive information and prevent unwarranted access. In addition, their platform adheres to industry-standard security protocols and regularly conducts security audits to maintain data integrity.

Salesforce can assist banks with meeting various regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA by offering tools to manage customer data, privacy preferences and consent settings. This proactive approach to data security and compliance helps build trust between the bank, its customers, and regulators.

Benefit 8: Team Coordination

According to the Salesforce report, 67% of respondents believe effective coordination between finance and sales teams can enhance forecasting accuracy and maximize revenue growth. No other financial services CRM holds millions of records while serving economic agents, marketers and support teams from distributed departments worldwide.

What's more, teams from various locations can access customer data regardless of customer or team location, allowing for a comprehensive view of client needs and experience profiles. It connects all data sources and enriches them to create customer experience profiles that give an in-depth picture of your audience while understanding client demands.

Benefit 9: Platform Flexibility

Salesforce stands alone regarding customer relationship management systems in terms of its flexibility. Users can customize CRM functionality according to individual firm, retail bank, or insurance agency needs by creating personalized commission calculators or using them to highlight upcoming events in their calendars.

Additionally, its click-not-code nature - customizing the platform using predefined blocks of code - enables the creation of customized workflows without involving developers.

Such low-code flow builders enable Salesforce development services to mimic their real-life processes without spending too much time writing custom code. Furthermore, unifying code block collections simplifies future scaling of the system without the risk of breaking previous code created for scaling purposes.

Benefit 10: Seamless Integration with Third-Party Solutions

Salesforce provides its products with robust customization features yet can easily integrate with third-party solutions through its AppExchange marketplace of over 4,000 add-on products available through this marketplace.

All these solutions are Salesforce-compliant, so you can trust they will integrate smoothly with your platform without extra custom coding or system disruptions.

Salesforce allows insurance agents and financial consultants to add essential functions, such as the virtual signing of documents, multi-criteria search of financial records or creating PDF versions of portfolios, making completing financial tasks much simpler and faster.

Conclusion

Customers expect their financial services to be as digital and cutting-edge as anything else, especially given tech companies are already disrupting the sector. An integrated CRM software tool is more efficient, saving time in data gathering while customizing customer experiences more effectively.

According to a Salesforce investor report, 65% of millennials and 45% of Gen Xers want the ability to manage their savings and investments via mobile app, according to Salesforce research. With digital transformation in financial services companies' practices, customers' expectations will be met, businesses will succeed, and customers will recover. Partner CRMs like Salesforce can make all the difference for financial service companies looking to meet customer demands effectively.

With so much data at our fingertips, custom Salesforce integrations provide summaries and visualizations highlighting what's most essential. They can assist in prioritizing information, managing pipelines and keeping open lines of communication with customers.

Salesforce makes integrating apps with today's revolutionary technologies (IoT, blockchain) easy and quick, adapting quickly to customers' ever-evolving and technologically advanced demands. BFSI institutes can leverage custom process management features tailored specifically to this industry, unlike regular CRMs that lack this feature.