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Salesforce Industries rolls out banking AI compliance tools

Salesforce now claims cloud customizations for 12 different vertical industries. Can this help them win new users from competitors who have released their own industry clouds?

Don Fluckinger
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Published: 09 Jun 2021

Salesforce, which now offers 12 vertical-specific industry clouds, added customer features to several of them this week, including AI tools to enable financial services compliance and healthcare appointment management.

Salesforce Industries, the company's business unit charged with vertical clouds, released Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud. This specialized set of features for money managers includes Einstein Relationship Insights, which connects the various stakeholders in complex account relationships. The AI helps tag sensitive data and manages how and with whom it is shared, for both competitive and compliance purposes.

Also included in the release is investment-banking specific Tableau dashboards showing pipeline, deals, tasks and interactive summaries for salespeople.

Part of the financial feature set is an AI tool to detect client information protected by regulations or data that needs to remain nonpublic as deals are negotiated, said Jujhar Singh, Salesforce Industry Clouds executive vice president and general manager.

Also new to Salesforce Industries is Provider Network Management for Health Cloud, which enables insurers to credential and onboard clinicians. Intelligent Appointment Management centralizes scheduling for healthcare providers with AI to reduce booking bottlenecks and no-shows, and also gives contact center agents a set of booking tools.

Vertical clouds proliferate

Salesforce isn't alone in pursuing customers in particular verticals. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe and, last week, SAP, introduced customizations for specific industries. Constellation Research analyst Nicole France said that such clouds can make the difference when enterprise users make their buying decisions for business applications, such as CRM.

When large vendors offer tools for a particular industry, such as manufacturing or telecommunications, she added, it can demonstrate competency and knowledge of that industry's users -- and their needs -- compared to vendors that don't have vertical offerings.

"It is a little bit of an arms race," France said. "It's a competitive market, and these are all players who are competing head-to-head. Even if they're not, they're competing for thought leadership in areas important to major elements of their customer base."

Current Salesforce Industries clouds

  • Financial Services Cloud
  • Health Cloud
  • Communications Cloud
  • Media Cloud
  • Energy and Utilities Cloud
  • Government Cloud
  • Nonprofit Cloud
  • Sustainability Cloud
  • Manufacturing Cloud
  • Consumer Goods Cloud
  • Philanthropy Cloud
  • Education Cloud

Some of the tools Salesforce offers to particular vertical industries, such as Einstein Relationship Insights that map CRM relationships among large organizational customers for financial services, can be deployed in different verticals, Singh said, but for now the data models would need to be tuned by individual users as they plug it into their own data sources.

"It can be used across other industries, but we have launched it in the context of financial industries first," Singh said.

Other Salesforce Industries features released include a pandemic-inspired, social-distancing-friendly B2B tool for retailers to upload pictures of goods on shelves. Typically, a supplier's sales crew must be deployed in-person to confirm a store has met its end of product-placement agreements; retailer-uploaded photos confirm it remotely.

The Salesforce Industries releases coincide with the Salesforce Industries Summit virtual conference.

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