The News: Salesforce announced in late June its Personalized Financial Engagement solution, which is designed to increase engagement with its customers. The solution incorporates generative and predictive AI, real-time data, and data held within the CRM system to create a unified profile of the customer, which can be used to assist financial institutions with managing their customers’ financial plans and aid in the surfacing of personalized financial insights. When used with Financial Services Cloud, Marketing GPT, and Data Cloud, marketers at financial institutions will be capable of delivering automated, personalized customer experiences powered by generative AI and trusted first-party data.
You can view the release announcing the news from Salesforce here.
Salesforce Leverages AI, CRM, and Real-Time Data to Improve Financial Services CX
Analyst Take: Salesforce announced a new financial services-targeted solution that is designed to drive greater personalization with customers via the incorporation of generative and predictive AI, real-time data, and data held within the CRM system. The solution is designed to enable financial institutions to connect disparate data systems by creating a unified profile of each customer. This allows the delivery of more automated and intelligent customer journeys, which can be augmented by personalized outreach based on this data, using generative AI.
Growing Demand for Personalized Attention in Financial Services
According to a new Salesforce survey published in June 2023, 62% of customers said they would switch financial services providers if they felt treated as a number, not a person, and 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Further, the survey noted that customers are experiencing decreased financial security compared to last year, and 79% of those surveyed indicated that their financial service provider did not fully prepare them for an economic downturn. Moreover, more than a third (37%) said their financial services institution did not help them at all.
The data is not surprising, given that consumers often want help and guidance when dealing with important aspects of their lives, which include healthcare decisions, educational and job decisions, and, of course, financial decisions more broadly. Salesforce’s Personalized Financial Engagement solution appears to be designed to help financial services institutions address the concerns raised in the survey by allowing them to create a unified profile of a customer’s financial activity, both inside and outside of the core institution.
Improving Time-to-Value for Financial Services Firms
Salesforce 360 can be a powerful and complex CRM and engagement tool, and requires a comprehensive understanding of the platform and a clear strategy for how to use it to achieve specific business goals. The use of financial services-focused solution can help organizations quickly leverage the information and data they already have held in various internal and external systems, and then quickly improve personalization, engagement, and revenue, rather than trying to create customized approaches on their own. Customers are demanding a more personalized approach, and organizations that have been struggling to offer these recommendations and insights can implement them quickly and easily.
Reading and Acting Upon Digital Tea Leaves
One of the interesting aspects of the Personalized Financial Engagement solution is the ability to identify and capture a customer’s full unified profile and activity, even incorporating customer activity beyond the core bank. This technique is especially valuable to today’s customers, who often have many financial services providers, including secondary banking accounts, brokerage accounts, digital currency accounts, and specialized savings accounts, such as employer-sponsored 401(k) accounts, 529 college savings accounts, and online betting accounts. A full customer profile of a customer’s financial life can only be achieved by incorporating all data sources.
One potential scenario mentioned in the release announcing the Personalized Financial Engagement solution noted that a banker could be alerted if a customer with a unified profile has a loan with a different financial institution so they can proactively reach out to offer a better loan term. According to Salesforce, this step can be accomplished by pulling transaction data from a core banking system into Data Cloud; querying the data to find payments within a certain range that go to other banks or accounts; and then using this as a proxy for payments to other banks that likely could be classified as a loan. Then, based on these criteria, an insight or alert can be sent from Data Cloud to Financial Services Cloud to alert the banker, who could then reach out to the customer with an offer of a more favorable loan product. If an organization wanted the alert to go directly to a customer, that is where Marketing Cloud and generative AI come in, allowing the automatic creation of a personalized email based on that data to be sent.
Using Data and Insights to Provide Proactive Oversight
Beyond sales opportunities, financial institutions can use tools such as the Personalized Financial Engagement solution to focus on a customer’s overall financial health. With nearly 80% of respondents to the Salesforce survey indicating that their financial service provider did not fully prepare them for an economic downturn, customers may appreciate more oversight and intervention.
Customers may appreciate more automated oversight of their activities via a unified profile, if it is done with the account holder’s explicit consent and control over alert thresholds, frequency, and channels utilized. The same data query process mentioned above could also be used to identify incoming or outgoing payments and transfers on an account, such as ACH wires, direct deposits, or direct debits. Alerts can be automatically sent out if, for example, an increase in credit card usage is detected, if loan payments are being made late, or if there is a rapid increase in spending.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
