Dispatches from Dreamforce 2022 (2)

Andrés Catalán -

As a practitioner with a stake in the Financial Services industry for the past six years, today I was keenly interested in what Salesforce had to say about how yesterday's announcements would project onto Financial Services Cloud. There were two sessions in which this was discussed: the keynote and the roadmap review.

Making Genie useful for all financial institutions

In a departure from the traditional keynote structure, this session was frontloaded with a panel of 3 customers discussing applications of real-time insights within the industry:

  • Standard Bank, the largest bank in Africa
  • The payments division of JPMorgan
  • The AAA with a discussion of how real-time data can assist their alert center from an FSL lens

The discussion did bring home the idea that there are financial institutions that will hands-down benefit from adopting Genie. However, it also made me think that for other industry players the value proposition may be over a longer time frame. Consider institutions that operate in developed countries, with legacy systems that talk to other systems through nightly ETL jobs — for them, the immediate impact of using a Customer/Client Data Platform is going to be smaller unless they engage in a serious rearchitecture of their data strategy and a deliberate upgrade of their data culture.

Financial health

As part of their keynote presentation, Salesforce defined a very smart conceptual rally point around the idea of a "financial health pulse". Not only is it relevant or desirable from a societal perspective (financial literacy levels are unacceptably low), it is also easy to see that it is a metric that would be made possible by a data platform like Genie. A very engaging application of the product. It also jives with ideas that we have already seen in the market through apps like CreditKarma or Fidelity's Aspire, which align with the expectations of the "Robinhood generation".

What is next for FSC

It has been a long way since Financial Services Cloud started as a mere industry accelerator in 2016. Since then, it has spread to cover different segments of the industry, from wealth management, to insurance, to banking. In the roadmap session, Salesforce announced that FSC would shift from spreading to more industry niches and specializations to providing more depth to support internal processes and increase efficiency, starting with client onboarding and account opening.

Of course, many of the features that we will be using to that end will come from the Vlocity/OmniStudio toolkit, which is now baked into FSC:

  • The Discovery Framework, to build questionnaires (released recently)
  • A Know Your Client data model, with integrations (upcoming)
  • A product catalog (upcoming)
  • The Business Rules Engine (added as part of OmniStudio)
  • Intelligent Document Automation (part of OmniStudio, to be improved over time)
  • Integration with core systems and custodial services (upcoming, via MuleSoft)
  • Flow Orchestrator as the "process glue" that connects everything together (and that we should expect to continue to be a freemium offering in the immediate future)