Salesforce Expands Its Financial Services Offerings for Corporate and Investment Banking

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today announced Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud, new technology to help bankers and deal teams deepen relationships with clients, manage deal interactions on one platform and compliantly collaborate and share sensitive information relevant to a deal.

As the pandemic made clear, industries need to innovate fast to stay relevant. Financial services are no exception; investment bankers need digital technology to drive efficiency, build and deepen relationships with customers, and win more deals. They also require a single view of large amounts of client data, integrated in one platform, to help avoid mismanagement and improve quality. 

In addition, compliance officers are working in a banking landscape wrought with regulatory complexities, including managing sensitive information like material nonpublic information and assessing potential conflicts of interest. Banks can suffer reputation damage, business disruption, regulatory fines and revenue loss if sensitive information is mismanaged, conflicts of interest are not caught in time, or compliance is not securely maintained.

Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM of Salesforce Industries said, “Bankers are asking for new ways to deepen relationships with clients, facilitate warm introductions, and develop new business through data-driven client insights.

“With Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud, we’re providing bankers with new ways to build and deepen relationships with customers and manage key accounts by leveraging artificial intelligence. With these new innovations from Salesforce, bankers can spend their time as trusted advisors for their clients by accelerating deal pipelines and better managing sensitive information to ensure they remain compliant through every step of the deal.”

“We work in a highly competitive and dynamic industry, requiring that our bankers have relevant information at their fingertips,” said Tim LaLonde, Chief Operating Officer of Investment Banking at Evercore. “We are designing and implementing our Salesforce CRM to function as a central nervous system for our advisory business, enabling us to provide critical and timely advice to our clients.”

Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud is designed to deliver a complete experience across the client journey, and supports new integrations with Tableau CRM and Einstein Relationship Insights (ERI) to provide bankers with purpose-built technology. This includes:

• Maximizing banker efficiency and productivity. Investment bankerscan manage the entire deal lifecycle while tracking deal activities and client interactions on one platform from anywhere. Using Salesforce low code tools, they can automate deal execution processes related to M&A, capital raising and corporate restructuring. With the power of Tableau CRM for Financial Services, bankers can use deal analytics to optimize their deal pipeline and client engagement with access to historical client data, previous pitches and meeting notes all in one place — and from the device of their choice.

• Uncovering relationships with an AI-based research tool. ERI is a new relationship discovery tool integrated with Financial Services Cloud. It automatically highlights relevant personnel or companies in sources such as a press release, news article, or email, to surface relevant connections and discover unanticipated relationships. For example, if a banker wants an introduction to a prospective client, ERI is able to search unstructured data and text on the web, such as a new board member announcement, uncovering that the prospect sits on the same non-profit board as one of the banker’s connections, providing the opportunity for a warm introduction. 
• Ensuring compliance for client engagement. Investment banks can maintain compliance by ensuring sensitive client or deal data is only shared with relevant stakeholders. For example, if a banker is working on a sensitive M&A deal, she can ensure her colleagues trading related stocks do not have a view into the prospective M&A deal under consideration. Also, a banker can initiate the client onboarding process from Salesforce, and track the progress with partner solutions.
• Leveraging data as a strategic advantage. Bankers often need to log into seven or eight systems to access relevant information to their deal. Now, bankers can integrate internal data on deal mandates with external market data from partners — such as S&P Global — for a full view of their clients. Bankers can access company valuation from S&P Global while viewing information such as revenue, employee salaries, and other potential risks all within Salesforce, avoiding the need to switch between multiple applications.

“Investment bankers today spend an inordinate amount of time trying to gather information to prepare pitch decks, capture call reports, manage deal lifecycles, and track compliance processes,” said Spencer Mindlin, Capital Markets Industry Analyst, Aite Group. “To address this, banks must employ automation and AI to improve processes associated with prospect management, information collection, deal management, and legal operations. These innovations free up bankers to spend more time with clients and are key to staying competitive.”