Salesforce has a new solution to help financial advisors, retirement plan providers and insurance agents comply with the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule.
On Monday, Salesforce introduced Shield for Financial Services Cloud.
The Salesforce Shield will combine with capabilities of the Financial Services Cloud to provide firms the ability to capture client interactions and provide compliance departments within firms the visibility into communication between clients, advisors, agents and teams.
Salesforce partners, including Deloitte, will help 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," Sean Cunniff, specialist leader at Deloitte, said in a statement. "Salesforce's new 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."
The Salesforce Shield will help advisors and firms supervise fiduciary activity. According to Salesforce, documented processes can be implemented with features such as workflows, email alerts and audit trails to assist in meeting the fiduciary rule's enhanced monitoring and supervisory oversight requirements.
Advisors will also be able to easily access information such as a client's other investments, financial circumstances, tax status and life goals. Having this readily available to advisors gives them the information they need to understand each client's specific goals and make recommendations accordingly.
In addition, the Salesforce Shield can be used by firms to heighten the protection of client data and provide "auditable" client interactions across multiple channels. Firms will also be able to monitor the activity of advisors through a single interconnected platform operating in real time.
The Shield's event monitoring capability allows businesses to identify who is accessing what kind of data and from where, which allows auditors or compliance experts within financial firms to see if users are printing pages, editing records and more.
And while the Financial Services Cloud already had the ability to track, report and archive auditing for changes and updates to fields within a client's profile, notes and other information, extra field-audit, data-retention and event-monitoring capabilities will be available through the Salesforce Shield.
The Salesforce Shield expands what is currently available with standard field-history retention, providing the ability to exceed the fiduciary rule's retention period with up to 10 years of audit trail data for up to 60 fields per object. With the 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.
