Winter'21 Release is here! Come, Let Us Unearth the Top 5 Gems of Financial Services Cloud!

Last Updated on August 29, 2020 by Rakesh Gupta

Salesforce launched Financial Services Cloud a few years ago for wealth management firms and institutions. It empowers your advisors, personal bankers, retail banking, assets management firms, tellers, or anyone interacting with clients to deliver the personalized, proactive service that clients expect. It is an extension of the Salesforce Platform. It leverages a number of features that aim to personalize client relationships while giving users a 360-degree view of their company’s financial help. It also helps to accelerate user productivity with technology that helps them engage with clients like never before, and build deeper, lasting, more profitable relationships. It provides wealth management 360-degree visibility into clients’ financial profiles puts your customer at the center of every interaction. Salesforce Unified Financial Services is one single solution catering to all the sub-vertical in the Financial Services Industry. Which covers the followings sub-verticals:

Mortgage & Lending
Insurance
Commercial Banking
Retail & Premiere Banking
Wealth Management

Following are the benefits of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud:

360-View of the Customer
Improve Sales & Cross-sell
Personalize Client Relationships at Scale
Supercharge Advisor Productivity
Make Smarter and Faster Client Decision
Improved Team Collaboration
Using AI Identify Client sentiment, Life events, etc.
… and much much more

With each new release, Financial Services Cloud is adding tons of new functionalities. Which make you more productive, and help you to provide better customer experience. Winter’21 release will give you a plethora of reasons to switch to Financial Services Cloud – if you are still using one of the core cloud (Sales or Service). This release is mainly focused on the Mortgage and Insurance part of Financial Services Cloud.

Currently, Winter’21 release is under the pre-release program. On the 11th & 12th of September, Sandboxes will be upgraded, as a result, your organization will get the look and feel of Winter’21 release.

In case you have not read the entire 531 pages of Salesforce Winter’21 release notes, check out Winter’21 release quick summary written by me.

I combed through the release notes and highlighted the most exciting, interesting, and useful Financial Services Cloud features from Winter’21 release.

Add Policy Records Directly from the Policy Component:- The Policy component has a new New Policy button that lets agents add policy records without leaving the page they’re on. For example, when an agent learns about competitors’ policies with a client, the agent can add records for those policies directly from the Policy component.
Stay Productive with Financial Services Cloud Lightning Components for Mobile:- Boost your user productivity by including Financial Services Cloud Lightning Components in the Salesforce mobile app.
Get Improved Performance and Granular Control Over Batch Record Rollups: – Experience faster record rollups at the household level when performing rollups in batches. The new Record Rollup Configuration custom setting lets you configure various rollup settings for each object individually. For example, you can define a batch size to limit the number of records in each batch. When you run the batch job to roll up records, these settings help improve the performance of the batch job.
Streamline Policy List and Related Metrics: – You can now use record type filters to show different sets of policies on different instances of the Policy component. For example, you can have two instances of the Policy component on a policyholder record page – one for your policies and another for your competitors’ policies. With a side-by-side view of your policies and competitors’ policies, agents can identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Configure a Self-Service Community with the New Financial Services Client Portal: – You can now offer a self-guided loan application and financial account experience for your customers by configuring the Financial Services Client Portal. Enable prebuilt components to start a loan application, browse knowledge base articles, display application summaries, and launch a self-service flow to request help.

Additional enhancements worth noting!

Actionable Relationship Center: Manage Complex Relationships and Related Lists: – You can now create and edit account and contact relationships and other related records in one convenient interface using Actionable Relationship Center (ARC). ARC displays complex relationships and related lists at-a-glance. Now you can create and edit relationships and related records from the same interface. ARC now does nearly everything the Relationship Map component can do and displays related lists also.

First, add the Relationships – Financial Services Cloud standard component to place ARC in a page layout. Then assign the Financial Services Cloud Extension permission to users or user profiles that need access to ARC.
Use the New button on an account, contact, relationship, or related list card to create a record. Take advantage of contextual menus and the Edit Relationship menu item to change relationships and related records.
Customize Your Community with New Financial Services Components: – Three new flow screen components add power and flexibility to your screen flow interactions with users and are available in Experience Build.
1. Open Loan Application shows the most recently updated, non-closed loan application for the user.
2. Mortgage Flow Launcher lets community users launch the financial services cloud flows.
3. Summary View shows summary sections for selected mortgage objects based on the Unified Residential Loan Application (URLA).
Encrypt Identity Document Fields: – You can now encrypt fields on the documents you use to identify Financial Services Cloud clients. When you encrypt the Document Number, Issue Date, and Expiration Date fields, you add another layer of protection to the data your clients entrust to your care.
Use New Summary View Lightning App Builder Component: – Add a financial services or loan application summary to page layouts in Lightning App Builder. Use the Summary View component, which contains records that correspond to sections of the Universal Residential Loan Application, on Residential Loan Application page layouts.