Financial institutions can see the terms of a loan being offered by a competitor with a new platform launched Thursday by Salesforce. 

The San Francisco-based Salesforce’s Data Cloud combines data across systems to give banks a more complete picture of consumer activities, according to Salesforce. The integration gives financial institutions access to data ranging from transactions to interactions and even behavior across multiple systems. 

“Data Cloud is not just a data store. It has an ingestion capability that can take inputs from data sets or streaming services in real-time or batch and massive scale,” Greg Jacobi, vice president and general manager of banking and lending at Salesforce, told Bank Automation News. “Credit bureau providers all have these services.”  

For example, an adviser could use real-time credit report activity to proactively respond to a loan offer from a competitor to woo a potential customer, he said. 

“Since Data Cloud is integrated with our clouds, such as Financial Services Cloud and Marketing Cloud, a customer that shows activity on a credit report of applying for a loan can be a calculated insight and immediately trigger … a marketing campaign or banker outreach,” Jacobi said, noting that the process “takes seconds.”

Cautious integration 

The Data Cloud is part of Salesforce’s Personalized Financial Engagement platform, which also hosts the Financial Plans and Goals and MarketingGPT platforms.  

The $1.4 trillion Royal Bank of Canada is using the Financial Plans and Goals platform, so its advisers can utilize data to more effectively plan services around their customers’ financial goals, Greg Beltzer, head of technology at RBC Wealth U.S., told BAN, noting that the platform is a major improvement over Salesforce’s previous financial tools. 

“The graphical UI that they put in front of it is much, much more amped up than what they had [previously] for the goals and liabilities,” Beltzer said. “As they look to integrate with certain partners, that’s going to get even more useful and robust.”  

On the other hand, RBC is not yet sold on implementing Salesforce’s AI-fueled CRM tool MarketingGPT, he said. The bank requires the technology to meet more compliance thresholds. 

Beltzer sees opportunity in generative AI marketing tools, but for now AI-generated content would still require human approval and the bank resources that come with it, he said. 

“Anything that goes to a client either has to be approved before you send it, or it goes into surveillance afterwards,” Beltzer said. “At this point, I’m not willing to use generative AI for the latter.”