Streamlining Financial Services with Force.com
Automating the back office in Asset Management and Mortgage Banks
Whilst Salesforce is well known for its CRM capabilities, the force.com platform on which it sits is just as useful in the context of helping streamline and automate back office functions. This can be invaluable to organisations with complex compliance and reporting, especially in Financial Services.
Development on the Force.com platform is quick and solutions provide a robust audit trail – every change is stored. The most powerful aspect though is that it can be stand-alone or an extension of the existing Salesforce CRM – allowing staff to manage all aspects of the customer lifecycle and collaborate over the customer records, or just solve the back office issue if they are not ready for a wider Salesforce solution.
To help illustrate this, let’s take a look at two practical examples – one from the Asset Management world and another for a Mortgage Bank.
Client Reporting in Asset Management
The business had three legacy systems involved in client reporting, none of which communicated directly with the other.
System 1 – recorded what reports a client was due and who was entitled to receive them
System 2 – recorded the progress of a report once it was due
System 3 – produced the reports
The business already had Salesforce to manage the pipeline of new clients and the data model recorded all Intermediaries, Clients, and the individual contacts, so that Salesforce could track new business.
The Force.com solution added new objects and data fields that recorded:
- Reports required (up to 10 different types of report)
- Copies to be sent
- Who was entitled to receive them
- Due dates
A workflow was added to the new data model, which was triggered automatically by Due Dates and recorded each department’s input and Approval to the stages of report dispatch, which even included sending printable labels to the post room printer for the majority of clients that still insisted on paper reports.
The new Force.com platform enabled the retiring of Systems 1 and 2 and provided a much more robust system for audit and compliance. It also reduced numerous unnecessary manual interactions. Salesforce was integrated to System 3 so that reports could be viewed from within the CRM – but valuable data storage was not taken up as Salesforce utilised web links to do this.
IFRS9 Compliance in a Mortgage Bank
Post financial crisis, banks were hit with new and heavy regulations. IFRS9 is the current requirement for lending banks to assess the ‘Impairment’ of loan books.
The lending business in question produced a range of models to assess the impairment values of lending in each of its 5 business units. Models for each business unit had to be created then circulated for approval. All of this was done on email, creating a large administrative burden on the business and huge scope for errors in the process.
The business rapidly developed a stand-alone Force.com solution that had the following business objects:
- Departments: The five different support areas e.g. IT and Finance
- Business Units: The five different business areas e.g. Commercial and Retail
- Models: Ten different ways of assessing Impairment Values
- Reports: By business unit and Model
On top of the business objects, a workflow was constructed based on posting, sharing and approving the different business models. This allowed the support areas to collaborate over models, re-posting new versions and recording on Chatter the conversations that led to the agreement and formal approval of the final version.
Since all the data was within the Force.com platform, the business unit heads could create detailed reports on every aspect of IFRS9 compliance. More importantly, an audit could determine exactly what process the bank went through in assessing its risk.
To understand how the processes in your business could be streamlined through a Force.com solution, get in touch with one of our 2 financial services specialists: Ron D’Mello at [email protected] or Gary Brown at [email protected].
