Salesforce have debuted Shield for Financial Services Cloud, a new solution can be used to assist financial advisors, retirement plan providers and insurance agents in complying with existing and emerging industry regulations.
Regulatory changes in the financial services industry are pushing financial professionals to be more transparent in the way they manage their clients’ investments. Recently, the US Department of Labor released its fiduciary rule, which requires fiduciaries, such as financial advisors and insurance agents, to make investment recommendations in the best interests of their clients.
With 43% of US investors stating they don’t understand the methods by which their advisors make investment recommendations, the pressure is on for firms to educate and communicate with their clients in more modern ways, while meeting these new regulatory requirements.
Salesforce Shield for Financial Services Cloud addresses these new regulations by giving firms the ability to capture client interactions and provide their compliance departments with visibility into communications between clients, advisors, agents and teams. Companies are now able to gain 360-degree views of clients with Client Profiles and Client Households within Financial Services Cloud. The ability to easily access information such as a client’s other investments, financial circumstances, tax status and life goals provides advisors with the information they need to understand each client’s specific needs and make recommendations accordingly
“At Salesforce, our business is based on helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways, including helping advisors to act in the best interest of their clients,” said Rohit Mahna, GM of Financial Services, Salesforce. “The opportunity has never been greater for financial services firms to transform and engage with clients in a deeper way.”
Due Diligence & Visibility
Financial firms can leverage Financial Services Cloud’s Advisor Dashboard to gain an instant snapshot of their books of business, including information such as client account changes and activities. Financial Services Cloud also enables advisors to capture decisions and the basis for those decisions in digital records. This real-time information helps assist advisors and their firms in the standardization of due-diligence reviews.
Using Shield’s Event Monitoring capability, businesses can identify who is accessing what kind of data and from where. This allows auditors or compliance experts within financial firms to see if users are printing pages, editing records and more.
Advisors can safely communicate with clients on their investment recommendations, disclosure of costs and compensation, and their consent for certain trades or activities via Private Client Communities within Financial Services Cloud. Communication through any channel can be retained in the Notes feature and maintained with other client information as evidence that clients are appropriately identified and assisted.
Another new feature, Platform Encryption, lets businesses encrypt their most sensitive data while preserving important business functionality and data at rest, such as standard and custom fields, files, and attachments and with Shield’s Field Audit Trail, advisors can go back to see the state and value of data on any date or time for up to a decade.
Shield expands what is currently available with Salesforce’s standard field history retention, providing the ability to exceed the DOL fiduciary rule’s required retention period of six years with up to 10 years of audit trail data and up to 60 fields per object.
Salesforce partners, including Deloitte, will aim to extend the reach of the offering with integration support, training and other expertise.
“To comply with the DOL regulation, the financial industry will need to implement substantial changes in how they interact with clients,” said Sean Cunniff, Specialist Leader, Deloitte. “Salesforce’s solution will help financial services firms accelerate readiness for complying with the rule, while providing personalized advice, encouraging collaboration, and increasing advisor efficiency, all in a scalable and documented manner. We are thrilled to collaborate with Salesforce on this initiative.”
