Cloud-based software company Salesforce announced this week it will acquire robotic process automation (RPA) provider Servicetrace in a move that will boost Salesforce’s function-specific offerings, especially with regard to finance.

The German RPA provider will become part of Salesforce-owned MuleSoft, which offers API management and other integration solutions. While few details on the acquisition were included in Monday’s announcement, the deal is expected to be finalized by the end of the third quarter.

“Automation has become critical to business and IT: According to Salesforce’s Trends in Workflow Automation report, 95% of IT and engineering leaders say their organizations are prioritizing workflow automation,” MuleSoft CEO Brent Hayward wrote in announcing the deal. “The combination of integration, API management and automation is required for companies to scale and increase the speed of work — from streamlining sales operations to speeding up customer case resolution.”

Servicetrace is more than just an RPA provider, offering domain knowledge in finance, customer service, HR, procurement, and other functions embedded into its toolset, said Bernhard Schaffrik, principal analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester. German financial services company MLP Group, with assets of more than $56.8 billion, is among Servicetrace’s financial services clients, according to the company’s website.

The function-specific knowledge bases will complement Salesforce’s applications, including those targeted to financial institutions, Schraffrik said. This will allow Salesforce to offer “function-specific automations for users interested in pre-packaged functional best practices,” he added.

Salesforce’s domain-specific packaged applications serve a business need, as does its low-code/no-code application development platform, according to Schaffrik. But where Salesforce falls short is in helping customers connect its applications to other systems, he added. Such integrations typically require an implementation project for the customer’s IT team.

RPA can bridge the gap between legacy applications and public cloud-based applications by automating manual and repetitive tasks in a way Einstein, Salesforce’s AI analytics tool, cannot, Schaffrik said, adding that has been a business demand for a while now.

MuleSoft, which offers open-source integration tools including an API management platform, will provide a feature-rich, heavy-lifting data integration layer that can outperform what RPA alone can accomplish, Schaffrik explained.

“Advanced RPA users are frequently tapping into the need to shuffle large amounts of data from left to right as they aim at building powerful bots,” Schaffrik said. “However, RPA from a technological point of view isn’t performant and feature-rich enough for such tasks. MuleSoft provides exactly that missing piece, though on another technological layer.

Seventy percent of automation initiatives are hindered by security concerns and data silos, according to a July study by MuleSoft that was conducted with Coleman Parkes Research. The survey queried 2,400 IT and business decision-makers across the globe about their priorities for the next 12 months.

Another reason to couple MuleSoft and Servicetrace is to create “a powerful automation platform attractive” for companies that may not be Salesforce.com customers, Schaffrik said.

While Forrester did not rank Servicetrace in its most recent “RPA Wave” report, research and advisory firm Gartner did rank the company as a visionary, along with WorkFusion, PegaSystems and Appian in its most recent “Magic Quadrant” report.

Schaffrik predicted other digital players such as Google will acquire an RPA player sooner rather than later. “It has been overdue for Salesforce to acquire an RPA vendor, in my opinion,” he said.

Salesforce [NYSE: CRM] was trading at $244.17, up 1.26% from market open, as of 4:02 p.m. Wednesday.