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A year ago Salesforce.com launched Financial Services Cloud for financial planners and wealth advisors. Now the Customer Relationship Management company has enhanced that service by adding elements of artificial intelligence designed to proactively inform financial advisors of their client’s overall “wealth ecosystem” and opportunities to sell more services.
“Financial advisors have more data than they know what to do with. They’ve typed in so much information, now it’s time to make it actionable,” Rohit Mahna, vice president and general manager of Financial Services at Salesforce, told eWEEK. “The opportunity here in financial services is to make the agent smarter with more data at their fingertips.”
The core change with the addition of Einstein AI is a redesigned screen layout that gives the advisor a more graphic or Google Maps-like view of a client’s household and related entities, for example, a business they may own, a family trust and other sources of income.
In a demonstration, Salesforce showed how the system would highlight changes in a client’s financial profile, such as new sources of income or the expansion of a business they own.
By working with a data aggregation company called Yodlee, Mahna says Financial Services Cloud is able to analyze a client’s bank account and other accounts (with the client’s permission) to get a more complete picture of their finances and holdings including accounts the advisor doesn’t manage.
“This is part of an emerging trend where advisors want a more holistic view of where the opportunities are,” said Mahna.
In the demonstration scenario, a financial advisor is hoping to manage the retirement accounts of employees at a client’s business. Based on an analysis of emails to the clients and other information, Einstein sends an alert suggesting a follow up email and ideas as to what content should be included.
Einstein could also be set to automatically lookout for mentions of competitors in a client’s email thread. If Einstein observes a drop off in communication with the client it might send the advisor an alert to nurture the relationship with a follow up email or meeting.
“Einstein shows you when deals are off track and when they are progressing. It’s constantly learning and making suggestions,” says Mahna. “It takes a traditional advisor and helps them be smarter with great analytics.”
Salesforce also announced that Transamerica Financial Network is adopting the Financial Services Cloud for its advisors and agents. That’s in addition to earlier customers to the cloud service that include Perigon, Veterans First Mortgage and Wealth Enhancement Group.
The announcement sends two important messages to the market, said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, told eWEEK in an email. First, it shows how Salesforce is deploying its Einstein AI capabilities across all its cloud services. It also illustrates how Salesforce is attempting to enhance its industry-focused offerings, Kaplan wrote.
Mahna said wealth management and the overall market for financial advisors is enormous. “There are six trillion dollars in client assets in the U.S. and a tidal wave of wealth being exchanged,” he said. “Data tells us that 50 percent of the time the wealth leaves the firm when money transfers between generations, often because advisors don’t have the technology they need to engage with today’s digital investors,” Mahna said.
Since it was announced in September 2016, Salesforce has been steadily infusing Einstein AI capabilities throughout the various applications of its Customer Relationship Management cloud platform such as Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud.