Salesforce announced on Tuesday that it is enhancing its Financial Services Cloud platform with an artificial intelligence component called Einstein, which uses natural language processing and machine learning to determine the health of an advisor's relationship with a client and suggest steps the advisor might need to take with that client.
Salesforce launched its Financial Services Cloud platform about a year ago, Rohit Mahna, senior vice president and general manager of financial services for Salesforce, told ThinkAdvisor prior to the announcement, and has been building on it since then to take the general Salesforce CRM and "[make] it much more appropriate for financial services."
Salesforce is an 18-year-old company with customers in many different industries, including financial services. Mahna said Salesforce is used at nine of the 10 largest wealth managers, like Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, as well as nine of the 10 largest banks.
"They're not just customers. They're really partners," he said. "We're helping them solve not only technology challenges, but real business problems."
One of those problems is how to handle the increasing number and complexity of relationships advisors have with clients and their families.
For example, it's been working with Transamerica for about a year on building a platform to give its agents a single view of each client.
"Everyone is going back to the heart of why they became an insurance firm, why they became a wealth firm, and that is helping their end customers achieve more than just making some money in investments," Mahna said.
Advisors have long known the value they bring clients is in the relationships they build with them, but as their firms have grown, it's been harder to keep up with those relationships.
"The complexities around relationship management are really difficult now," Mahna said. "Gone are the days where the advisor could just know it all in their head."
Compounding that problem is the shift in who owns the assets advisors manage for their clients. There will be an estimated $6 trillion in motion over the next decade, Mahna said, as older clients retire or transfer money to younger generations.
