Three key trends are shaping the relationship between financial services providers and their customers:

Humanized Experiences: Customers are unique individuals. They want a personalized experience at every touch point. With almost 1 billion people expected to use digital banking by the end of 2024, providing trustworthy and meaningful interactions could make the difference between customer retention and attrition. The data is revealing and strongly indicates the coming need: In the US, 46 percent of bank customers did not write a physical check in the past year; ~1 in 4 did not visit their bank in person. Customers, used to the responsiveness, expertise, and comfort of human interaction, will increasingly demand similar experiences in their digital interactions with their service provider, especially for complex transactions that require expertise and insight. They expect their service providers to understand their unique financial behavior, their priorities, life events, and the impact of offers on their lives.

Accessibility: The change in access to financial services has been steady since 2017, with the decline in ATMs offering the first glimpse of the change. In 2017, the number of ATMs peaked at 3.28 million before declining steadily. By the end of 2024, with society becoming increasingly cashless, the number will fall to 3.22 million. Mobile and internet banking are now becoming all-pervasive, with even social media sites such as Instagram and mobile applications such as WhatsApp becoming points of sales. The International Monetary Fund’s 2023 Financial Access Survey – Trends and Developments says mobile banking and Internet banking transactions per 1,000 adults went up by 24 percent and 29 percent in Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively, in 2022. The report records similar trends in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific regions. The value of these transactions is also on the rise.

Composability: The changes—with customers opting for remote access to their financial futures—are making it imperative that service providers adopt flexible and cost-effective approaches to the services they offer. As a result, in recent years, composable banking has taken root, letting banks combine independent software and application components with business modules to create new solutions instead of using what one vendor offers. This mix-and-match approach helps simplify services and ensures banks can leverage new business models at scale. Gartner calls composable technology “a top banking trend for 2024,” saying those adopting the approach “can drive shorter development cycles and demonstrate higher value to their bank customers.” One of the additional drivers for the adoption of composable technology by legacy service providers is competition from neobanks and fintechs. Using composable banking, they can match the nimble fintechs.

What are the implications of these three trends?

Each of these trends drives specific vectors of transformation:

Humanized Experience: Integrated data orchestration is a clear priority for banks that want to offer hyper-personalized services and create humanized experiences.

Accessibility: Cloud adoption is central to the efficient, flexible, and seamless delivery of digital omnichannel services at scale.

Composability: Open APIs, modular architecture, and functional decoupling are critical to achieving agility, collaborating with partners/developers to expand the offering catalog, and improving compliance and security.

Why put money on a platform?

The CIO’s key challenge in the financial services industry is to meet rapid technological disruption. The CIO should quickly be able to deliver technological innovation to meet the organization’s changing business and strategic goals. This means staying flexible without compromising on scalability and enabling high-speed releases of new products without custom development becoming a hindrance. The solution is to use technology platforms with an ecosystem of self-contained, modular features that can be easily orchestrated and linked using APIs. The more advanced the platform, the easier it is to configure new and innovative solutions with almost zero to negligible new code.

Platforms can allow providers to focus unwaveringly on customer needs, experiment with solutions, and quickly pivot based on customer feedback. They simplify onboarding, offer self-service options, improve financial inclusion (through partnerships), and provide humanized customer support.

Data is the foundation for platform success. Service providers use the vast amount of data generated by platforms for analytics and machine learning to study customer behavior and preferences and be able to make accurate predictions on customer needs. This helps create personalized recommendations and offerings relevant to each customer.

Platforms have come to the rescue in a world where customers are becoming more demanding, and regulations like PSD2 in Europe drive open banking. They enable providers to open their APIs to third-party institutions, allowing the creation of innovative financial products and services. Open banking makes it possible for banks to securely share data on customer transactions and financial health, creating highly targeted and competitive services.

Finally, platforms are designed to manage security and regulatory compliance by integrating comprehensive geo-specific security solutions across offerings. Additionally, the platforms are regularly updated to meet evolving compliance needs.

The Salesforce Advantage

As a pioneer in cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) for the financial services industry, Salesforce has considerable experience in developing flexible and scalable segment-specific (retail and commercial banking, mortgage and lending, insurance, wealth and asset management) platforms that orchestrate every aspect of the financial services life cycle across channels.

Salesforce provides API-based integration features enabling seamless connectivity with other systems, applications, and data sources. These features help organizations synchronize data, automate processes, and enhance collaboration across platforms.

The extensive range of products on the Salesforce AppExchange, let service providers accelerate time-to-sale, identify securities-based lending prospects, determine creditworthiness, predict default, leverage banking APIs that help banks build and deploy competitive products and services, manage relationships, create reporting, etc. In addition, Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite of security features designed to protect data, ensure user authentication, and maintain compliance with complex regulatory requirements.|

Why Salesforce Financial Services Cloud?

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is purpose-built and designed to create long-lasting customer relationships. The platform automates routine tasks and uses client data models, personal account data models, and household models to handle complex customer relationships, centers of influence, and business accounts. The models help visualize customer needs and relationships to craft engagement and support, unlocking new opportunities and driving business action. With hundreds of pre-built components (lead and referral tracking, customer onboarding, reports, dashboards, etc.), the FSC can deliver faster time to value.

In one instance, a Salesforce Financial Services Cloud customer implemented a loan deferment portal within two weeks that enabled its members experiencing financial difficulty to ask for temporary financial relief and skip payments.

Salesforce FSC delivers innovations three times a year, incorporating valuable customer feedback. This means a consistent pipeline of enhanced security features, increased operational efficiency, intelligent virtual assistants, tools to automate workflows, etc., are available to customers—each aimed at deepening the customer relationship, improving margins, and delivering predictable revenue.

One of the key advantages of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is that it is built natively on the world’s #1 enterprise cloud infrastructure and business engine force.com platform from Salesforce. FSC leverages force.com’s sophisticated security, enterprise scalability, and flexible business engine and integrates easily with thousands of other enterprise applications that are part of the Salesforce AppExchange ecosystem.

For the industry struggling to create a Single System of Record, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud provides one. This means customer data is extracted from a single, up-to-date, consistent data source maintained securely on the cloud while meeting every compliance requirement (such as SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS, among others).

However, Salesforce FSC’s open architecture could be considered the central feature that makes the platform a winner. The open architecture permits extensive customization, integration, and extension of its platform to deliver solutions within weeks that make brands stand out.

In an environment where financial products are becoming commoditized, the only differentiators are customer experience and rapid value creation. The Salesforce Financial Services Cloud supports both using data, an ecosystem of collaborators, and an open architecture that helps create and scale new products easily.