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.

“We integrate Salesforce across every point of our business, from operational to managerial,” Graham says. ”The platform is an enabling factor that helps bionic advisors to be more attuned to their client.”

The Financial Services Cloud brings portfolio management, prospecting, data management, aggregation and practice scheduling tools onto a single interface with a high degree of automation.

Mulchay says that Salesforce was inspired by interfaces designed by Google and Intuit -- those inspirations come through in the user experience with pop-over scheduling and messaging windows and interactive pie charts that could ease information entry and readability.

“We want the information to be proactive, so advisors can use this information to grow their business assets,” Mulchay says. “A lot of this information is captured in a new and exciting way.”

The Financial Services Cloud allows advisors to view clients by household, enabling a broader view of a family’s finances and expanding opportunities to prospect for new clients. By setting "client life goals," advisors are able to create goals-based financial plans for their clients’ families or extended network.

Because the tool allows advisors to move between views of their entire book of business and dashboards showing a comprehensive picture of individual client’s demographics and finances, the Financial Services Cloud may also aid firms in recruiting and training new talent, Mulchay says.

“The industry needs to recruit new talent, and new talent needs new tools,” Mulchay says. “Even baby boomers are frustrated by old-school technology that doesn’t deliver the right experience. Advisors are demanding proper, up-to-date digital tools.”

The platform launches with a list of integrations including account aggregation from Athene Group and Envestnet/Yodlee, document management through DocuSign and eSignLive, data aggregation through Informatica and MuleSoft, portfolio management through Orion, rebalancing through Advisor Software, prospecting through Ideo and WealthEngine, and security and compliance through CipherCloud, Blue Coat and Smarsh.

SalesForce has priced the new platform at $150 per user per month.