Tom Paine
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Salesforce formally launched a
new vertical solution last week, the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC), aimed at wealth management advisors and end users. Originally announced in August, it has now gone into general availability. FSC runs on Salesforce's new Lightning platform.
Salesforce is not simply throwing something out there with a Financial Services label on it. A considerable amount of vertical customization has gone into it.
But its still only a CRM, Salesforce's "first [proprietary] industry-specific relationship management (CRM) product," according to local Salesforce expert and digital integrator LiquidHub. There are existing industry-specific solutions built on top of Salesforce's CRM by others. And its a long way from being a total information management solution for wealth advisors, such as Fidelity Investments' Radnor-based eMoney Advisor.
And in the CRM market among wealth management advisors, Salesforce has been a laggard, having only 12.8% of advisors before FSC's introduction, way behind Redtail CRM with 40.5% of users, according to a survey
conducted by Investment News.
.
Wayne-based LiquidHub, a Salesforce platinum partner, is one of Salesforce's launch partners on FSC, and brings additional functionality to the solution.
LiquidHub announced last week it was offering prebuilt conversion packages to "seamlessly transition wealth management customers, their data and their integrations into the Financial Services Cloud" from other CRMs.
LiquidHub had already introduced Salesforce for Asset Managers, (a certified Salesforce Fullforce solution, but not on the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud), last Spring. "It is based on our experience implementing Salesforce for leading Asset Managers for more than 10 years,” said Brennan Burkhart, Partner and Global Salesforce Practice Lead at LiquidHub, at that time.
It is hard to overlook the fact that Vanguard Group has been one of LiquidHub's largest customers, and presumably LiquidHub has shared or gained considerable domain expertise from that relationship.
But this is LiquidHub's product, and "the offering will be marketed to our general wealth management clients," Burkhart told
Philly Tech News by email.
As for eMoney Advisor, Salesforce's basic CRM has not been supported by eMoney, an eMoney spokesperson told me. But it is in the process of seriously evaluating the new Financial Services Cloud offering for inclusion among CRMs it integrates with. eMoney Advisor does not offer its own CRM, but is open to integratng with CRMs that meet its own criteria and have considerable demand from its wealth management advisor customers, I was told.
