Salesforce Adds AI To Its Financial Services CRMSalesforce Adds AI To Its Financial Services CRM

Salesforce has updated its Financial Services Cloud client relationship management (CRM) service with Einstein, the San Francisco company’s artificial intelligence engine. The idea is to help advisors take advantage of machine learning, predictive data analytics and natural language processing to unearth new opportunities across their entire book of business.

For an extra $50 a month, advisors can have the Einstein AI crawl through their client data and communications, looking for important life updates, mentions of competitors and client sentiment. It can then recommend suggested actions the advisor can take.

For example, if a client notes that she was granted power of attorney by her parents, Einstein can recommend within the Salesforce activity stream that they can automatically add that information to the client’s record.

Another example shown by Rohit Mahna, senior vice president and general manager of financial services at Salesforce, was a client mentioning a different financial service firm within an email correspondence. Einstein can connect that information with the fact that the client cancelled a meeting two weeks ago to suggest that the account may be in trouble.

Within the Financial Services Cloud, advisors can create a new email with a suggested subject line and talking points suggested by Einstein (an advisor can customize these). The algorithm can go so far as recommend a meeting place based on previous interactions with the client.

The goal is to help advisors be more proactive with clients. Families are bigger and more complex, and with the coming transfer of wealth, “relationships have never been more important,” Mahna said. He added the AI suggestions can help advisors prioritize their time and optimize each client interaction.

To that end, Saleforce also introduced a number of new features around adding new client and household information, and linking clients to multiple households, trusts and business groups. Salesforce also has a new “Relationship Map” to help visualize a client’s family wealth ecosystem and accounts in a single, family tree-style snapshot. All of these features are available to advisors at no added charge.

Mahna said nine of the top 10 wealth management firms in the U.S. and Europe are using Salesforce, and the company sees the Financial Services Cloud as being the single platform that their large teams of advisors can use to handle a variety of clients.

As an example, Mahna pointed to a new partnership with Transamerica Financial Network, which is deploying the Financial Services Cloud and the Einstein AI to thousands of advisors and agents who previously sold multicarrier insurance and investment solutions across several customer systems. According to a statement, Transamerica plans to use the AI engine to draw on data across its entire network to better predict consumer behaviors.

“I truly feel that the power of AI is about enhancing the current relationships out there,” Mahna said. “Machines are not going to replace the advisor, only make the advisor smarter.”