How Salesforce Data Cloud is Powering Smarter Decision-Making in Financial Services

Financial institutions have seen impressive results with Salesforce, achieving a 188% ROI boost and a 15-45% increase in cross-sell and upsell opportunities⁽ⁱ⁾.

It’s no wonder Salesforce was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Financial Services CRM, Q3 2023⁽ⁱⁱ⁾, for driving significant growth in the financial sector.

Despite the benefits of Salesforce Financial Service Cloud, boosting productivity, reducing costs to serve, and driving personalization, financial institutions still face challenges with fragmented data across platforms. This leads to disjointed customer insights, reliance on costly data pipelines, and delays in operations.

This is where Salesforce Data Cloud comes in.

Data Cloud unifies data at scale, creating complete customer profiles and eliminating the need for complex pipelines. It empowers financial institutions to take seamless action within the Financial Services Cloud, leveraging real-time insights, segmentation, and automation. When paired with Financial Service Cloud, it enables secure, AI-driven workflows, ensuring personalized experiences at every touchpoint.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how Salesforce Data Cloud is transforming the financial sector by unifying customer data, enhancing security, and driving innovation.

Why Data Cloud is the Right Choice for Financial Institutions

To deliver exceptional customer experiences, financial institutions need a clear, comprehensive view of their customers. However, data is often fragmented across systems like core banking, insurance, wealth management, and CRM.

Salesforce Data Cloud solves this by unifying data from these sources, matching identities, resolving conflicts, and creating complete customer profiles with a holistic financial view.

Here’s why Data Cloud could be the right choice for your business:

• Advanced Risk Modeling: Salesforce Data Cloud enables banks to leverage diverse datasets, including historical credit data and real-time transactions, to build precise risk models using machine learning. By linking identities and analyzing attributes, it provides predictive insights that allow for confident lending and optimized decision-making.

• Improved Decision-Making: Data Cloud helps to unify data from policies, claims, IoT devices, and customer interactions, creating real-time customer profiles. Advanced analytics suggest the best actions for agents, helping them deliver timely, relevant responses tailored to customer preferences and needs.

• Comprehensive Insights: You can converge data from banking systems, investments, and fintech apps into a single platform, providing wealth advisors with a holistic view of their clients. This enables strategic asset management, personalized financial advice, and meaningful client conversations aligned with their goals.

• Enhanced Fraud Detection: Financial institutions can analyze large datasets from multiple sources to detect fraud early. Since the data is centralized, it enhances the ability to identify and address suspicious activities before they escalate, ensuring robust risk mitigation.

• Meeting Regulatory Compliance Standards: Financial institutions are subject to strict data privacy and security regulations, such as GDPR, to ensure customer protection. Salesforce Data Cloud prioritizes security, offering robust safeguards that help organizations comply with these regulatory demands and protect sensitive data effectively.

• Advanced Data Protection Protocols: Due to the highly sensitive nature of financial data, Data Cloud implements cutting-edge security measures, including encryption, tight access controls, and routine security audits. These protocols help ensure that data is securely protected both during transmission and while stored, reinforcing confidentiality and reducing the risk of data breaches.

Use Cases of Data Cloud in Finance

Data Cloud supports a wide range of use cases within the financial industry. Here are a few examples of how it can drive value for financial institutions:

• Enhancing Customer Insights Through Payment Integration: By connecting Data Cloud to payment processors, financial institutions can gain deeper insights into customer spending patterns. This data can be used to craft customized offers, rewards, and loyalty programs, boosting customer engagement and retention.

• Improving Lending Decisions With Credit Bureau Integration: Connecting Data Cloud to credit bureaus gives financial institutions access to rich data about customer creditworthiness and risk profiles. This helps in making better lending decisions, reducing financial risk, and optimizing portfolio performance.

Simplify Financial Workflows by Integrating Financial Data with Salesforce Data Cloud

With Data Cloud you can pull information from sources like core banking platforms, marketing tools, and third-party providers, including demographic and market data, and consolidate them.

This unified data approach helps create a comprehensive customer profile, eliminating data discrepancies and ensuring more efficient engagement efforts. By gaining deeper insights into customer spending habits, preferences, behaviors, and lifestyle trends, you can drive more personalized and effective interactions.

Here’s how Data Cloud drives innovation:

Creating a Unified View of Financial Data

Consolidate your financial data effortlessly with Data Cloud by utilizing prebuilt data model objects for core banking, insurance policies, and claims. Access a comprehensive library of financial insights to track essential metrics like spending, earnings, savings, and net worth, offering a clearer view of your customers’ financial health. These insights enable deeper household income, expenditures, and net worth analysis within the Financial Services Cloud.

Proactively Addressing Churn and Enhancing Satisfaction

Salesforce Data Cloud helps identify customers at risk of churn by analyzing early warning signals, enabling proactive issue resolution. By leveraging this data, you can enhance customer experiences, ensuring they are more efficient and personalized, boosting satisfaction across touchpoints.

You can trigger personalized onboarding journeys using financial and household insights, providing customers with the most relevant resources and tips. AI further enhances this by detecting when a customer may need assistance, based on their web engagement on your self-service site.

Through seamless CRM integration with Data Cloud, you can access real-time merchant alerts and transaction enrichment data, allowing you to resolve issues directly within Salesforce.

Boosting Growth Through Targeted Prospecting

Utilize data from Data Cloud and Actionable Segmentation within Financial Services Cloud to create targeted lists that resonate with your prospects and customers. Focus on key milestones in their financial journey, like purchasing a home or car, so you can send personalized messages aligned with their unique goals.

By analyzing spending, savings patterns, and significant life events like retirement or home buying, you can uncover valuable upsell and cross-sell opportunities. For example, after a policyholder buys a home, it’s the perfect time to suggest home insurance or mortgage protection. This data powers AI-driven insights, such as real-time financial wellness scores and tailored recommendations for customer engagement.

These insights enable Financial Services Cloud to deliver timely, relevant, and impactful notifications, improving customer experience and ensuring your communications hit the mark.

Driving Personalized Experiences Across Channels

With Salesforce Data Cloud, financial services teams can integrate marketing, sales, service, and campaign performance data into unified customer profiles. This seamless integration empowers marketers to define target audience segments and engage them across multiple channels through an intuitive, AI-driven platform.

By connecting CRM data with real-time engagement signals from websites, social media, and marketing campaigns, Salesforce Data Cloud enables the automation of personalized customer journeys. Messaging, content, and offers are dynamically adjusted based on customer and prospect behaviors.

Furthermore, Data Cloud provides a complete performance analysis by combining marketing data, insights from the Financial Services Cloud, and third-party advertising data into one unified view. This integration helps optimize audience engagement and campaign outcomes.

Visualizing Client Financial Insights in Real-Time

Salesforce Data Cloud offers interactive visualizations of client financial data through FlexCards and Dynamic Dashboards. These features allow financial institutions to create customized views of a client’s income, expenses, and financial habits. For example, the FSCDataCloudShowIncomeExpenses FlexCard displays monthly income and expense breakdowns, while the FSCDataCloudCashFlowByCategory FlexCard shows categorized spending. These visual tools pull data from calculated insights and Data Streams, providing real-time, easy-to-understand visualizations that help track trends and inform financial decisions.

Conclusion

Salesforce Data Cloud is a powerful solution for financial services companies, enabling personalized experiences, reducing risks, and optimizing operations.

By seamlessly integrating with core banking systems, payment processors, credit bureaus, and fraud detection systems, Data Cloud offers a comprehensive 360-degree view of customers. This unified approach enhances fraud detection, ensures regulatory compliance, and boosts scalability.

Additionally, by consolidating financial accounts, transactional data, and behavioral insights, firms can increase revenue through effective cross-selling and upselling strategies. The platform also empowers relationship managers with personalized portfolio recommendations and automated alerts, fostering stronger client relationships.

Statistics References:

⁽ⁱ⁾ Salesforce
⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ Salesforce