Salesforce Launches Shield for Financial Services Cloud

Salesforce Launches Shield for Financial Services Cloud

Salesforce the cloud based CRM platform company, today introduced Shield for Financial Services Cloud. The new solution can be used to assist financial advisors, retirement plan providers and insurance agents in complying with existing and emerging industry regulations such as the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Fiduciary Rule. Salesforce Shield is not new; it was originally released approximately one year ago, but this marks the first time that Shield is being incorporated in to the Salesforce  Financial Services Cloud offering.

According to Salesforce “Regulatory changes in the financial services industry are requiring financial professionals to be more transparent in the way they manage their clients’ investments. Financial Services Cloud combined with Salesforce Shield can support firms with visibility into interactions between clients, advisors, agents, and teams. Financial services firms can now rely on Salesforce to assist them in putting their clients’ best interest at the center of everything they do”.

Salesforce Shield helps firms meet their regulatory obligations in a number of ways:

  • Gain 360-degree views of clients: With Client Profiles and Client Households within Financial Services Cloud, advisors can gain panoramic views of clients and their extended networks. The ability to easily access information such as a client’s other investments, financial circumstances, tax status and life goals provides advisors with the information they need to understand each client’s specific needs and make recommendations accordingly.
  • Stay on top of due-diligence reviews: Financial firms can leverage Financial Services Cloud’s Advisor Dashboard to gain an instant snapshot of their books of business, including information such as client account changes and activities. Financial Services Cloud also enables advisors to capture decisions and the basis for those decisions in digital records. This real-time information helps assist advisors and their firms in the standardization of due-diligence reviews.
  • Gain visibility into activity and usage: Using Shield’s Event Monitoring capability, businesses can identify who is accessing what kind of data and from where. This allows auditors or compliance experts within financial firms to see if users are printing pages, editing records and more.
  • Create and record communications: Advisors can safely communicate with clients on their investment recommendations, disclosure of costs and compensation, and their consent for certain trades or activities via Private Client Communities within Financial Services Cloud. Communication through any channel can be retained in the Notes feature and maintained with other client information as evidence that clients are appropriately identified and assisted.
  • Protect records: Platform Encryption lets businesses encrypt their most sensitive data while preserving important business functionality and data at rest, such as standard and custom fields, files, and attachments.
  • Supervise fiduciary activity: With Shield’s Field Audit Trail, advisors can go back to see the state and value of data on any date or time for up to a decade. Shield expands what is currently available with Salesforce’s standard field history retention, providing the ability to exceed the DOL fiduciary rule’s required retention period of six years with up to 10 years of audit trail data and up to 60 fields per object.

The pricing of Salesforce Cloud starts at $150 per user per month. Salesforce Shield is priced at a percentage of a customer’s total Salesforce licensing fee. Customers can purchase components of Salesforce Shield together or individually.

For further information, visit www.salesforce.com

Joel Bruckenstein
Joel Bruckenstein
Joel P. Bruckenstein, CFP®, is Publisher of the T3 Tech Hub (formerly the T3 newsletter) and the producer of the Technology Tools for Today (T3) Advisor Conference, the only annual technology conference for independent advisors, as well as the Technology Tools for Today (T3) Enterprise Conference. He also hosts other technology summits in partnership with thought leaders in the financial services industry (e.g., Brian Hamburger of MarketCounsel) and his own by-invitation-only fintech summit every summer. In 2020, Bruckenstein will produce for the first time a new one-day intensive called T3 Cyber University. Bruckenstein is an internationally acclaimed expert on applied technology as it relates to the financial service industry. He is the co-author of three books: Virtual Office Tools for a High Margin Practice, Tools and Techniques of Practice Management, and Technology Tools for Today’s High Margin Practice. Bruckenstein’s monthly technology columns appeared in Financial Advisor magazine and Financial Planning magazine for many years. In addition, he works in tandem with industry influential Bob Veres, publisher of Inside Information, to produce an annual technology survey for the financial planning community. Bruckenstein accepted the fifth annual Leadership Award bestowed by Bob Veres' Insider's Forum, a conference that brings together the leading figures of the financial planning profession during a main stage presentation at the Insider's Forum held September 6-8, 2017 in Nashville, TN. Bruckenstein has for more than twenty years advised financial service firms of all sizes on improving their technologies, processes and workflows. For more information about Joel Bruckenstein and the services his firm offers, please visit www.JoelBruckenstein.com.

Leave a Reply