For the number of financial advisors already using Salesforce for their client relationship management needs, the San Francisco-based company’s announcement on Tuesday that it is releasing it’s first piece of financial technology might come as a surprise.
But Salesforce says the new Financial Services Cloud will expand on its platform to allow advisors to make more of the time they spend in front of their clients.
“Advisors spend half of their day preparing for meetings,” says Simon Mulchay, Salesforce’s general manager for financial services. “They want to grow, but many of them are too busy to take more clients. They want to spend more time providing advice to clients, and they’re frustrated by their inability to do this.”
There’s a disconnect between advisors and their clients, said Mulchay -- many investors don’t feel like they’re being served by the industry.
“Most of the market wants to collaborate with an advisor to create a financial plan; they don’t want to be handed an answer or for a plan to be formed and executed elsewhere,” Mulchay says.
The regulatory climate is also forcing more advisors and broker-dealers to pivot towards a relationship-oriented business, Mulchay says, and Salesforce was responding to demands from within the industry.
“In many cases these are things that our customers have already custom built,” Mulchay says. “Now they don’t have to do that anymore, we can do it, and our purview across the whole industry gives us the luxury of doing the best, whatever and wherever the best may be.”
One of those custom-building customers, Newport Beach, Calif.-based United Capital, was part of the coalition of advisors and fintech providers that advised Salesforce during the new platform’s development.
“We’ve built and used our own version of the Salesforce wealth management platform for a decade,” says Gail Graham, United Capital’s chief marketing officer. “We’re focused on the concept of the bionic advisor. For us, advisors who can embrace technology with a human-led solution are best positioned to capture new clients and to scale their business.”
At United Capital, Salesforce is used for back-office functions like workflows and customer records at its home office, middle office functions like workflows and scheduling within advisors’ firms, and front office functions like setting up and preparing for client meetings, Graham says.