by Doug Gardner 
Having worked with the Salesforce Financial Service Cloud (FSC) and seen companies grow into it and through it, it is great to see that it is expanding out to help Retail Banking. This is not only because it is another sign that FSC is being taken seriously but also because it is being directed as it should be, to the help customer.
A lot of industries have blanket issues for instance retail often fails to build long term relationships, SEO companies operate in an environment that is always changing and PPI claims companies just annoy us all. In the case of Banks, this issue is a need to provide a better service. The FSC for Retail banking is aimed to do exactly this and to do so in a scalable way. At the moment I actually expect a disjointed nature when I speak with a bank, if I take out a card online, I don’t think of their branches when I need help. If I see an advertisement I wouldn’t expect their phone lines to get me to someone who knows about it within 1 minute. Part of me kind of likes this as if it somehow shows that their security is good but in reality that’s ridiculous, I would leave a mobile phone network for less.
By enabling a link between all the facets of their businesses, Salesforce is offering banks the chance to step into the omni-channel world that exists on our high-streets. This means that they can build relationships, understand what their customers want and ultimately build better focussed products.
This doesn’t mean that it will all be rosy though. The set up for a bank will take time to get right and the task of moving a bank to Salesforce as well as on FSC would require a very large data migration. These are short term items though which can be got round with good project management and clear objectives. The fact is that combining a good structure for holding the customers information with products like Service Cloud, Einstein and Pardot is a very exciting preposition.
For banks, which are under tremendous pressure to provide better service, it’s an opportunity to use an integrated set of tools from a single vendor.