4 Financial Service Trends for Businesses and FSIs | Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

Digital adoption has increased in the past few years, especially across banking, insurance, and wealth management segments. It has shown a steady growth despite the long-lasting pandemic followed by ever-increasing inflation. This digital growth also makes one thing clear financial services customers prefer business online and are not going back to pre-pandemic ways.

A recent survey conducted by Deloitte reveals business leaders’ expectations with respect to rising digital enablement in recent years. As per the survey, wealth managers expect around 75 percent of engagement to be digital in the next two years — double existing numbers. Keeping a note of the current financial services trend, business leaders are trying hard to make their services digitally visible and consumable. 

As a financial business, you would want to step up your services and make them more digitally consumable in upcoming years. But this can happen only when you enhance your customer interactions. Since Financial Services Cloud Solutions are primarily used for customer management, the innovation and change in business strategy should begin with solution infrastructure.

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In this blog, we have listed 4 major trends that can help financial businesses and institutions improve service delivery and customer experience. Let’s discuss these trends one by one.

• Offer Easy and Transparent Experiences

No customer wants to go through a multiple-step process, it is just too tiring and frustrating. If this was not the case, Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) won’t be losing customers to businesses with a better online experience. In a survey conducted by Salesforce, more than 40 per cent of respondents put intuitive UI, navigation, and fast onboarding as the top priorities in a financial solution.

Transparency is another reason that is prompting existing customers to switch to a new service provider. Many financial institutions charge hidden fees and inexplicable fines that add to customer distrust. Offering easy and transparent experiences through financial services cloud solutions are necessary for customers and without that, they will be looking for better alternatives.

• Usage of Predictive Personalization

Customers don’t just want the products and services of financial institutions. They want to work with a partner that cares about their financial health and business growth. A recent report published on Salesforce suggests that only 11 per cent of banking, 11 per cent of insurance, and 18 per cent of wealth management customers agree that their FSIs are interested in their financial interests, showcasing distrust of consumers in financial institutions. 

Using predictive analytics capabilities of advanced financial services cloud solutions can help FSIs to share beneficial recommendations for consumers. These solutions leverage AI and ML capabilities and can be used to offer predictive personalization based on the customer's journey.

• Using Automation in Backchannels

Customers are largely not aware of the impact of automation that happens behind the scenes. However, most of the digital interactions we design at Damco are a result of automation where tons of data move from one data to another. While end-to-end automation may be difficult to accomplish for most FSIs, one can automate selective process areas to get maximum results.

UK’s Ascot Group reduced underwriting time by 60 per cent by using the Salesforce platform for automation.

If your processes are semi-automated and you are finding difficulty in serving customers or reaching your productivity goals, consider integrating it with a dynamic solution like Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. By doing this, you can make use of Salesforce’s automation workflows, visual analytics, and more capabilities offering customers better than what other businesses with similar toolkits will offer. 

Check out another amazing blog by Alok here: 7 Steps In an Ideal Salesforce Change Management Process

• Get Creative with Customer Data

For most Financial businesses, customer data is segregated which creates roadblocks to getting a comprehensive view of customers. If you are a financial business that does not have access to first-party data (which most retailers do) or has acquired a business, you will be aware of the data challenges. 

The best way to deal with this challenge is to get creative with user metrics. Here are some tips to do that:

1. Establish partnerships with external data providers who can offer better data insights. 
2. Track customer journeys by looking at their behaviour at every stage. You can easily do that with a solution like Salesforce Financial Services Cloud which comes with Journey Builder and more such tools.
3. Invite design partners like Damco to access the customer journey and add some value to your CRM through suitable migration, integration, or customization.

Securing a Digital Future With Financial Services Cloud Solutions

To boost service delivery and raise the experience of customers, FSIs need to make small changes in their infrastructure and process functioning. Implementing advanced Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Solutions can help in reducing reliance on manual workflows which ultimately will improve your organization’s productivity and service delivery. Since digital adoption is quite high in the country and customers will largely rely on digital platforms in the coming years, it would be wise to invest in new solutions and innovation trends.