Banking In the New Normal

Synopsis: Hear Synovus Bank, EMS, and Salesforce discuss banking in the new normal, and how the banking industry has been able to leverage Salesforce to respond to a rapidly changing world while also maximizing value and deepening existing customer relationships. You’ll hear real stories from industry experts who used to be bogged down with siloed systems and manual processes, and learn how Salesforce has provided the infrastructure to let them become more agile and deepen customer relationships with unified cross-sell and up-sell capabilities.

Speakers: Annie Simms, RVP Financial Services of New York, Salesforce | Katherine Brock, Senior Director of Development Operations, Synovus Bank | Katherine King, Vice President of Delivery, EMS Consulting | Taylor Richardson, Facilitator, EMS Consulting

0:00:06.7 Taylor Richardson: Good morning. Good afternoon, for those of us across the country in different time zones. Thank you so much for joining us today for our round table event: Banking in the New Normal. I’m Taylor Richardson, I’m a Senior Marketing Cloud Consultant here at EMS Consulting, and I will be facilitating our conversation today.

0:00:27.3 TR: I’m so privileged to have three guests joining us today who I’d like to introduce. We are joined today by Annie Simms. She is a Regional Vice President at Salesforce, and was one of the earliest members of the financial services practice at Salesforce, and she’s worked with many of the most strategic Salesforce clients in banking in her 14 years with the company. So thank you so much for being with us today, Annie.

0:00:56.2 TR: Katherine Brock is also joining us. She is a Senior Director for Development Operations for all application development at Synovus Bank. In her more than 15 years in financial services, she has worked in roles across IT, leadership and technology for Synovus, and many other financial institutions previously. And for the past five years, she’s been designing and implementing solutions with Salesforce and nCino across all the various banking lines of business. We’re so happy to have you, Katherine, thanks so much for joining.

0:01:28.3 TR: And we also have Katherine King, Vice President of Delivery at EMS Consulting. She also goes by Kat, so that’s gonna help us differentiate between the two Katherines. Kat has been with EMS Consulting for over four years and comes from a background of financial services as well. She oversees the EMS delivery team in full-cycle FSC implementations. So she has also been able to work with many financial services or financial institutions and different use cases over the years. So thank you all so much for being here, we’re so happy to have you all.

0:02:07.8 TR: Real quick, a little bit of housekeeping. Before we totally kick things off, I want to let all of our attendees know that you may submit a question at any time through the chat feature in the Zoom window. Just click the Q&A button in the little Zoom window, and then enter your question there.

0:02:27.8 TR: At the end of the presentation, we’ll use any remaining time to answer questions that come in. If we don’t have enough time to get to everybody, we will follow up through email after the event. We are also gonna be recording the event. So we will post that on our website within a few days if you would like to share that with anyone else on your team. Alright, so with that, let’s get started.

0:02:55.5 TR: So first, to kick things off, I wanna talk a bit about the state of the banking and lending industries right now and really, what we’re seeing going on, things are changing really fast. Over the past almost year now, our priorities, our ways of life, our ways of work have all changed. All of those changes have really impacted us as people, but all the way, it has trickled all the way, of course, to the consumer and commercial banking arenas.

0:03:28.4 TR: Pandemic-wise, we have some positive news on the horizon. It looks like we’re potentially turning some corners with hopes and expectations of economic recovery, especially. So we really feel like this moment is right for some good disruption, maybe some good news. It promises some rapid change and it’s going to demand fast response to economic recovery efforts, market opportunities, and any other sudden shifts that might occur.

0:03:56.6 TR: So, going into a more optimistic and immediate future, how does having Salesforce and Financial Services Cloud, specifically, ’cause we’re talking about our banks and credit unions. How does Salesforce FSC give consumer banking, and even commercial lending groups, banks and credit unions, an advantage over other institutions who are maybe still relying on manual business processes or maybe a bunch of disparate systems? Katherine, do you wanna kick us off?

“How does Salesforce FSC give financial institutions and organizations advantages over others who still rely on disparate systems?”

0:04:30.0 Katherine Brock: I would love to. And good afternoon, everybody, and thank you so much for having me. I would say this past year, and your question is so relevant, it’s been really eye-opening. COVID, the pandemic, quarantine, closing retail locations; it impacted banks in a way that was very different than they’ve been able to operate for decades.

0:04:50.8 KB: And I say decades because some of those manual processes have been around for decades and yet, in a world when we needed to be able to quickly communicate electronically to customers in a safe fashion, having a portal, being able to have online document exchange, being able to have e-signature.

0:05:07.5 KB: The bank I’m at now, we did not have some of those tools available in March, and we do now, but man, we had to pivot quickly to make that happen. So for me, when I think about the Salesforce FSC, when I think about the online interaction it creates in a safe way for banks, it became an imperative this year, is what I would say.

0:05:30.7 TR: That’s a really great point. I know in my background too in financial services, I would say the same. We did not have online portals. We had some ways of achieving some of those tasks that needed to happen, but it was like a one-off scenario or something cobbled together internally. It definitely wasn’t part of an ecosystem that’s sort of staying together.

0:05:56.8 TR: Annie, you’re at Salesforce. I know… What are you of seeing over there on the Salesforce side? How are the customers that you’re working directly with, what advantages are they having over some of those other institutions who maybe haven’t adopted the Salesforce platform yet?

0:06:20.9 Annie Simms: Yeah, thank you, Taylor, and hi to everyone. I’ve just been amazed to see what our customers have achieved this year under unprecedented pressure, I would say, the pandemic has presented. Some without a platform like Salesforce, many of course, with Salesforce, just incredible examples of speed, resourcefulness, and in a lot of cases, just sheer ingenuity of responding creatively under a lot of pressure and time constraints.

0:06:53.0 AS: At Salesforce, I think this is really reinforced to us, the need to provide our customers real, true agility. So what does that mean? It means helping our customers build a foundation where the foundation is bringing together systems around a view of the customer as opposed to a view of transactions and getting that base in place.

0:07:20.3 AS: But then we can move really quickly from there on needs that we know that the banking industry will have no matter if there’s a pandemic or not, but of course, in times of change, a system that can respond very quickly. So I think at Salesforce, we’re very focused on agility and helping customers get to that for sort of stable foundation that then they can build on through processes, workflows, application intake, restructuring, all of the things that are needed.

0:07:53.4 AS: I think that, of course, as we hear so much, this sort of banks were already going in that direction, we’re seeing a real acceleration. We’re just honored to be a part of the solution that our customers can deploy.

0:08:08.9 TR: That’s wonderful, and I know it sounds like all of us really here today have a pretty good steep background in financial services. I know we’ve heard for a long time that having a platform like Salesforce and FSC now really has a lot of advantages, but I think, to your points, especially during the pandemic, it’s really proven to be more of a necessity and not just a nice-to-have. It really is crucial to being able to respond.

0:08:43.0 TR: Kat, I would love to hear your thoughts. I know you’re a huge proponent of the scalability that FSC and Salesforce platform really offers. Would love to know your thoughts on that as well.

0:08:54.1 Katherine “Kat” King: Yeah, and thank you, Taylor, for having me today. Just like you said, honestly, the biggest advantage would be the Salesforce scalability. It’s that ability to easily and quickly add those new departments, add those new users, adding those new processes and systems without that hard-to-maintain code.

0:09:16.3 KK: Another advantage, I would say, would probably be that data model design of FSC. So your ability to leverage both of B2C and of B2B full view of your customer just like Annie was mentioning. So as an example, as a user, I can see all of my customer financial account data all in one place, and I can see all of their related relationships. I can see my cross-sell, upsell opportunities, I can do all my internal operational requests. So really having that full view of a customer allows me to make those quick decisions and recommendations.

0:09:52.5 TR: That’s awesome. And so once you have that foundation in place, then you have an infrastructure, a technological infrastructure then, that allows you to put new processes in place, like you said, without needing to completely build something from scratch and do a massive integration or something like that. Awesome.

0:10:16.0 TR: Great. So really, like we’ve all touched on, we’ve seen, over the past nine months, that really, some banks and credit unions, we’ve heard press releases and different news stories coming out with everything else going on that some banks and credit unions have been able to really respond to fast things, things that were happening very, very quickly like the CARES Act and PPP.

0:10:41.4 TR: Some were able to respond within days, others across the industry, we were hearing that it took them months, and some maybe weren’t even able to get there before the program ended. So I’m curious to know what each of you saw happening from each of your different views. Who was able to respond quickly? Who was getting left behind? What were the commercial lending and the banks and the credit unions all learning during this time?

“As the COVID pandemic unfolded, which financial institutions were able to respond quickly — and which were left behind?”

0:11:13.0 TR: Annie, I would love for you to kick us off. Would you mind telling us what you have been seeing during that time from the Salesforce perspective?

0:11:24.0 AS: Yeah. As somebody who’s been at the company a long time, when I… Maybe just a little history lesson. When I started at Salesforce, we had one product and it was called “Salesforce”. [chuckle] And what it was, was a lead and pipeline management tool over the Internet. And when I started, that was still very innovative and people didn’t quite trust it.

0:11:50.9 AS: But the real brilliant move right around the time I started in 2007 was Salesforce realized that, “Hey, the platform that we built to deliver that first app,” which was now what we call “Sales Cloud”, “Hey, we can unlock that platform and actually give that to our customers as well and allow them to build apps and extensions, and that have maybe nothing even to do with CRM.”

0:12:19.7 AS: And once we uncovered that sort of power of the platform and unlocked that early in the company’s history, it just, it opened up a ton of capabilities for our customers. So a lot of the things that we all three just talked about in the last question; agility, scale, that’s because underneath the award-winning apps like Financial Services Cloud, which is essentially a kind of a version of our flagship app built for banks.

0:12:45.9 AS: Underneath that, you get all the power of a platform that can be used for various purposes. And I think that is really where sort of that agility and that scale comes from. It’s funny, a lot of our customers come to us at first and say, I always ask customers a couple of years in, or a new customer, “How did you build that business case for when you first signed up for Salesforce?”

0:13:17.0 AS: And a lot of times, customers will say, “Well, we built it around increased revenue through cross-sell. It was all a revenue play for our sales team, and that’s how we justified it.” And I said, “Well, now, three years in, kinda how did you do against that?” And they said, “We did well against sort of those initial justification, but we didn’t realize it the core processing power of sales.”

0:13:40.9 AS: Not core processing in the sense of a banking processing, but sort of the workflow engine, the sort of platform capabilities and the middle and back office benefits that our customers achieved in terms of streamlining, increasing efficiency, reducing time to complete tasks. And that was another benefit that hadn’t even been quantified in the original business case.

0:14:06.7 AS: So again, some people are surprised to hear that we are a platform company, and not just an app like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Financial Services Cloud.

0:14:19.5 TR: And that makes a ton of sense and that’s, to really bring it home, the financial institutions that don’t have a platform like Salesforce to connect all of those different departments, we’re talking about totally different lines of business that can’t seamlessly connect. That have to manually figure out how to communicate with each other and get business done.

0:14:41.6 TR: And like you said, having this underlying platform that allows that speed and that agility to be able to really get the job done. If somebody in the contact center needs to send a task over to card services, having a platform that knows exactly how to do that out of the box is so crucial and allows you that agility to completely pivot in times like these.

0:15:12.2 TR: Kat, I know on the implementation partner side of things, we’ve worked with several partners here at EMS Consulting, and we’ve seen what they’ve been able to do, especially over the past nine months, and respond lightning-fast to the changes going on. Would you mind talking about some of what you’ve seen on that side?

0:15:32.0 KK: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, it was banks and credit unions that responded quickly and were on a platform that allowed them to that quick development. They were really the winners. Companies that were still on legacy old systems that relied on really cumbersome integrations to their external systems, outdated workflows, general red tape, they were at such a disadvantage.

0:15:58.7 KK: When we saw companies that had invested in digital transformation prior to COVID, they were really, I would say really able to leverage all of the out-of-the-box features of Salesforce for quick processing improvements.

0:16:15.8 TR: That’s awesome, yup. And Katherine, too, over on the Synovus side, you’ve had to weather the storm over there. I would love to know what it’s been like for you as a customer, as an end Salesforce user, having Salesforce during this time?

0:16:33.1 KB: It has been quite a year with Salesforce, and we are so grateful for that platform. I remember March 31st sitting on a call with our executive leadership team at 10:30 at night, and normally, we aren’t on conference calls that late at night, though that was the beginning of about a good month-and-a-half of having really late conference calls.

0:16:53.4 KB: But we were sitting there that Tuesday night, we knew that Friday morning, we were allowed to go ahead and take applications, but we didn’t have a process to do it. And so that Tuesday night, you’re talking Wednesday, Thursday, Friday morning, we sat there going, “Okay, what do we do? Do we wait for our vendors to provide us a solution? Do we create one ourselves?” And that’s not the Synovus way, by any means. And so they trusted our Salesforce team, my team, to deliver it.

0:17:18.2 KB: And so that Wednesday, we literally were working with our online team for the online form. We had to build out the workflow, the automations. We had to build out a DocuSign integration. We had not used DocuSign internally within our company prior to April 1st. They were on the phone with us at 2:00 AM to help us with that. But we got that done Wednesday. By Friday, we were training end users. By Saturday, we were processing 19…

0:17:40.4 KB: Or well, we started the beginning of processing 19,000 applications over the next 30 days, and it was incredible. And then on a daily basis, we were having to make modifications because new changes would come out, or we would realize something had to be easier or quicker or sped up differently, and Salesforce let us do that on a day-by-day basis, an hour-by-hour basis in some cases.

0:18:01.8 KB: So not only were we able to quickly train 500 users in a 25-hour period, not only were we able to create this entire workflow in literally 48 hours, we had to rely on that to process what wound up being $3 billion of loan applications in 30 days, and Salesforce was a huge partner to us.

0:18:18.2 KB: We had not, like I said, had DocuSign before, so all of sudden, we were hitting API limits and issues on that end. They were on the phone with us on our bridge lines, helping us work through it, increasing limits, and helping resolve those as quickly as they could, and that was incredible. So for us, had we not had Salesforce in that moment literally ready for us to design and use it, we wouldn’t have the success we had. And we had a ton of great press as a result because it worked so well and so efficiently.

0:18:45.9 KB: And then we did the same thing again, we didn’t have online account opening prior to April 1st. We do now because of Salesforce, and that got delivered in a week. Several processes like loan payment deferral and handling all the communication, that got built in a week and had to be built that fast.

0:19:00.1 KB: So thank God for Salesforce, because had that platform not been available for us to use, and mind you, we have 450 other applications available to us. None of them could have done what Salesforce delivered for us in that quick moment where we needed a quick win. And it’s delivered substantially.

0:19:19.1 KB: We’ve gained, I wanna think it’s 4000 new commercial customers as a result because people were telling their friends about their experience, and I think it’s close to 10 million new deposits. It’s been a wonderful success story for us, and we’re so grateful for Salesforce as a result.

0:19:33.8 TR: Oh, that’s fantastic. And just to bring it on home for everybody who’s listening, these are three different perspectives. We’ve got Annie at Salesforce saying this is the intent of the platform, this is the philosophy and the spirit in which it’s built. And Kat and Katherine are, first-hand, able to testify and say, “That’s exactly how it has played out over the last nine months.” That’s the proof right there that… And I wanna point out too, the flexibility and the scale.

0:20:04.7 TR: So what Katherine has just talked about is a fairly large-scale solution complete with a DocuSign integration and a lot of new internal processes and workflows and automations in order to meet the needs of what Synovus was trying to do. But we’ve also heard of credit unions who have much smaller footprint, and they were able to still use the platform to quickly pivot and also respond to these needs too, so not necessarily with new integrations and things like that.

0:20:37.0 TR: So really, it is this wonderful platform that offers that flexibility so that whatever the business need is and whatever the thing is you need to respond to, you have the means with which to do that however it suits your business best.

0:20:56.2 TR: So to carry on with this theme of being able to quickly respond to threats as we go through the new normal, I wanna actually start to narrow this conversation down to some of the actual Salesforce solutions, so that we can actually start talking about what are the pieces of Salesforce that we’re talking about that fit into this picture that we’re painting. We know the power of Salesforce and that Salesforce ecosystem as a whole.

0:21:28.9 TR: So let’s get more specific about what should be included in a commercial lending FSC implementation, but really, any Financial Services Cloud implementation for banks, credit unions. Kat, you lead the EMS Consulting team’s Salesforce implementation efforts as well, so I’m interested to know, since you do this all the time, since you do this all the time, what are the core parts of every Financial Services Cloud implementation?

“What are the core components of every Financial Services Cloud implementation?”

0:22:07.4 KK: Regardless of the department or the specific vertical, there’s really three main base solutions. They’re really the must-haves when implementing a Financial Service Cloud product. I would say Shield, it’s your number one for compliance, it’s a tool that adds that security to Salesforce. It allows for encryption of data at rest and gives insight into your user transactions. It allows for compliance audits.

0:22:37.4 KK: I would say the number two one would be analytics from the Einstein product. And that’s really a tool that creates really beautiful industry-specific dashboards, really user-friendly, really intuitive to visualize and predict your customer data. Some examples of just out-of-the-box Einstein would be your client acquisition, cross-sell opportunities, and then predicting attrition.

0:23:05.8 KK: I would say the third must-have is ARC, it’s new, it’s the actual relationship center with an FSC. So that’s building on existing relationship models. It allows users to visually see a graphical component of all customer relationships and related relationships. So I would say in any implementation that EMS does, those three are really what we push to get the full value of all of that 360-degree view of your customer.

0:23:36.8 TR: Okay, awesome. And what about other integrations like document managements and maybe LOS integrations? Where do those sit in that conversation?

0:23:51.1 KK: Yeah, so it depends on the department. We often use nCino for commercial loan processing. We do a lot of LOS integrations, we do a lot of POS integrations. So it really depends on: How do you wanna use the platform? What are your use cases? Is it bank-wide? Will everybody have a license? And really, determining the best use case for that, but definitely, nCino’s a big one, Blend’s a big one. We’re starting to see Solidifi come up. Definitely Cloud and DocuSign, that’s your bread and butter, yeah.

0:24:24.0 TR: Awesome. Okay, great. So really, yeah, obviously, everybody’s gonna have a different spray of systems that they’re working with. And obviously, during that, “We’ll figure out how FSC is going to work with all of those,” and… But that’s fantastic, thank you. Katherine, you’re currently leading Synovus Bank’s commercial lending org, but you’ve also helped other financial institutions implement Salesforce and future-proof their tech stack, too. What are the must-haves in your FSC implementations?

0:24:58.3 KB: So I love that Kat talked about Shield first because I think security’s important, but what I, in my mind, thought of, and what I always think of first is the ROI. How do I gain profitability? How do I justify this expense? And so for me, she talked about analytics. That customer householding is critical. You need that for marketing data and using Marketing Cloud if you aren’t.

0:25:20.9 KB: That’s such a great, wonderful tool because you can talk to your customers on all these different channels that we just don’t get to now because banks don’t operate they did 15 years ago. I remember being a regional manager and having branches that had 25,000 customers, and you could use that live touchpoint to generate more referrals or to expand their wallet share with you, and you don’t have that anymore, it’s just a different world.

0:25:42.8 KB: And so Salesforce, to my mind, it is one of those great solutions that can give you the information you need to know, which customers to target for what products. What’s gonna help them be more successful and yet, still expand their share. So I think about profitability and adding in that component.

0:25:57.5 KB: But then I would also say, and I know this is built into the platform, and this is part of what I definitely recommend. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes operation request maintenance updates that there’s, in a lot of banks, people sitting in these rooms with paper still processing information into core systems still to this day. And FSC solves for so much of that, it replaces the need for that human touch.

0:26:23.4 KB: Those humans keep looking at paperwork to copy data from one system to another, Salesforce simplifies and starts to remove that. So it speeds it up, it’s more accurate, it saves money on resource cost. So for me, as much as I absolutely agree with the Shield encryption ’cause that’s a powerful tool, profitability, which is still gotta pay for all that, is so critically important. Without Einstein or analytics solution, you just aren’t going to get there and be able to move forward the way you need to.

0:26:48.8 TR: That makes perfect sense. And I can speak to the power of the Analytics Studio, Einstein as well, being able to see and prove the return on investment on everything that you’ve just stood up is so critical. But I think what I’m also hearing, too, speaking from experience, is that there’s so many out-of-the-box features, too, with FSC that if you really take the time to make the most out of your investment, that means bringing all of your departments up on to Salesforce and streamlining all of their processes.

0:27:20.6 TR: So making sure that all of… Even though they might not be a big ROI driver in the institution, making sure that you’re taking care of them and getting them up on Salesforce, is another way of also maximizing that investment, and I totally agree with that. Awesome. Great, so I know we…

0:27:44.1 TR: So to start off with your Salesforce investment, there’s so much out-of-the-box. There’s the Shield encryption as an add-on, there’s the Einstein, of course, as an add-on. And there’s some other solutions too, that we know work together with FSC in the Salesforce ecosystem. We’ve heard nCino mentioned, we’ve heard other LOSs mentioned. So I would love to talk a little bit about that, too.

0:28:11.7 TR: What are… Let’s talk about the relationship, really, between FSC and other tools like Encompass, nCino. I’ve heard other folks try to have discussions about, “Oh, we wanna do one before the other.” I’ve heard other people say, “No, they don’t, one doesn’t replace the other.” So I’d love to clear that up.

0:28:33.0 TR: My understanding, just to start us off on the right foot, is that you absolutely need both of these things. So FSC is not going to replace a loan origination system like Encompass or nCino. So we know that both are important. But first, I would love to hear from Kat. Would you mind expounding on what you know about the relationship between FSC and these other tools like nCino or Encompass? Why are they both important?

“Do financial institutions need a CRM in addition to loan origination systems? Does one replace the other?”

0:29:01.4 KK: Yeah, and it’s a really nebulous world of information out there for those two products. I feel like a lot of people believe that if they’re standalone, they don’t play nice together. But in reality, what we’ve seen at EMS is that FSC is really that engagement layer. It’s the framework that can scale to meet almost every one of the financial verticals.

0:29:26.5 KK: So it excels at capturing and tracking your leads, tracking your referrals, all your relationship management, your case management for support, and all of your backend request routing. Other managed packages such as nCino, Encompass, those really come into the middle as an add-on and fulfill the need of that department.

0:29:49.4 KK: If it’s nCino for underwriting, if it’s an LOS like Encompass… I’m sorry, nCino for commercial loaning and nCino for underwriting, it really is that add-on to do all of the processes you’d wanna do for that specific department. FSC then comes in at the end for when the servicing of whatever the loan is or the customer’s account happens.

0:30:12.0 KK: So what I’ve seen is that both are needed for that successful implementation deployment, but they do have their roles. FSC tends to be the beginning, whereas, nCino or an Encompass is more processed-based, workflow-based. FSC and nCino, I would tell people that you would implement FSC’s frame first.

0:30:37.2 KK: Get that frame, get the customizations in there, get all the security, the users, your routing, your queues, your referral management, your case management set up, and then you would add on that other product that helps your processes.

0:30:52.7 TR: That makes sense. So just to reiterate too that FSC, being the glue that… Or Salesforce really being the glue that ties the customer relationship, especially in the banking use case, to the rest of the institution. ‘Cause if it is, let’s say a commercial lending relationship, that person could have their consumer relationships. So Salesforce being the backbone that connects it to the rest of the org is important.

0:31:20.6 TR: But then when of course they need a commercial loan, that’s where nCino kicks in and is able to help process the loan. So I love how you describe it, thank you so much, Katherine or Kat. That actually, really I think clears it up, too. Katherine, do you, or Annie, do you, either of you have anything to add onto that topic of Salesforce and these other tools in the ecosystem?

“What is the relationship between Salesforce CRM and loan origination systems like Encompass and nCino?

0:31:46.0 KB: I’ll jump in real quick because I, years ago, had that misconception that FSC and nCino were duplicative and unneeded in both organizations. And as I’ve done several nCino implementations and even worked with our bank on it, Kat’s right, it’s origination, and it’s phenomenal in origination. That whole process is its own ecosystem of problems and challenges and workflows that has to be resolved.

0:32:10.8 KB: But then you hit closing and post-closing and nCino stops there. And so when you wanna take on managing titles, floods, exceptions, payoffs, and all of that post-closing ecosystem with that loan that will exist for years after the fact, you have to figure out a solution for that.

0:32:25.4 KB: And then in addition, because I always go back to profitability and ROI, when you’re doing a commercial loan, inevitably, from all the guarantors and owners, you’re going to receive so much data about them, not only their business, but also about them individually. And if you don’t have a system like FSC to help you examine, manage and assess how that data can be useful, that’s just a great information sitting in a document and it’s not actionable for you, growing that customer’s relationship outside of that loan, plus the guarantors, plus their business, plus everything else that’s a possibility just from that one loan.

0:33:01.6 KB: So FSC opens the door to all of that, whereas nCino really just supports just the loan. And while it’s great at that, we aren’t just a transaction. Banks, usually, we are relationship banks, and so we want that relationship and that profitability and that wallet share.

0:33:17.0 TR: Absolutely, absolutely, that’s a wonderful add-on, thank you so much. Alright, so before we end our event today, I would actually like to dive into some specific examples of how we’ve been able to overcome some of these roadblocks and challenges in the banking space with Salesforce FSC, in particular.

0:33:46.4 TR: So, Katherine at Synovus, and I know you’ve had a pretty big commercial lending focus recently, so I know that that might be some of your examples here, but it can be general banking as well. But can you give us some examples when you and the Synovus team were implementing FSC and were going down that path, can you give us some examples of some of those known gaps and problems that you knew you were solving for going into it?

“What customer experience gaps were you looking to solve with Salesforce FSC?”

0:34:15.5 KB: I would say what FSC does well, besides, again, that Customer 360, and if you’re a bank that does not have platforms that offer that. So I’ve worked with and worked for large organizations that provided that beautiful 360 view. And then I’ve worked now for quite a few smaller community banks where to collect and consolidate all of those different assets and knowledge across all the different core systems we are working with, usually, and I haven’t seen it in any other solutions, Salesforce and FSC is the best solution to do that with.

0:34:49.7 KB: It’s hard to see it, you might have a data warehouse, but that’s not actionable for your banker who’s sitting in front of a customer. And so FSC, that’s what that solves for in a way that was desperately needed. And then back to that comment I made around documentation and manually managing processes, some of what has happened has been documentation that we’ve faxed or emailed somewhere for someone to do something, and that’s now sped us up and allowed less resources to have to be focused on supporting those antiquated manual processes. So for us, that was a big part of the decisioning.

0:35:27.9 TR: That makes sense. And of course, yeah, insight, right? We wanna turn the lights on, we wanna be able to see what’s going on. Annie, I know you definitely have some thoughts on this as well. Whenever you talk to folks who are thinking about going down the Salesforce FSC path, what are those known gaps that they’re looking to solve for going into it?

0:35:57.7 AS: Yeah, I think Katherine and Kat have said a lot of it… I think putting the customer at the center of the culture of the company is huge. Obviously, cross-sell, upsell are things that are sort of table stakes, decreasing call time in call centers. I think the known gaps have been identified, I think, a lot by some of the other speakers. It’s the unknown ones that are interesting, so maybe I’ll comment there once you get there.

0:36:35.3 TR: Kat, before we do move on to the unknown gaps and the surprises that Salesforce solves for, do you have any others that you can think of that when banks and credit unions are evaluating FSC, what are the number one things that they are saying they have to solve for?

0:36:54.0 KK: Yeah, and it’s so similar to Katherine’s, and we see it all the time in the financial vertical, especially in credit unions, but really, in almost any vertical that’s looking at the Salesforce platform, is those manual processes. It’s the fact that Salesforce allows for automation of those common and repetitive processes, where you can write your request, shortening your operational costs from your drawn-out procedures, it really makes the simplest task really that simple.

0:37:30.0 KK: Whereas, it might have been two hours before for something to queue through two different people from two different emails. And then the follow-up that would have to happen from that, now is such an easy workflow in Salesforce, it just seems so simple, but it’s such a time-saver and it’s such a cost-saver.

0:37:45.9 TR: Right. And it almost seems, I remember back in those days, it seems almost impossible to quantify exactly how much time you’re gonna save every single time that process has… That previously manual process has to be done. I remember needing a list for something in Marketing and needing to go to IT, and waiting for IT to get to it, and writing the query, producing the list, and then something was wrong with it or something was missing, and then having to go back.

0:38:11.2 TR: Like you said, that’s one of the most burned in my memory examples that I can remember, of something that just should have been so simple, taking a very, very, very long time. And then once the organization is up on a platform like Salesforce, that becomes such a simpler, and in some cases, drag and drop sort of a task to reproduce.

0:38:35.2 TR: I can’t expound on that enough. That’s such an important [chuckle] and truly endless time saver once those issues go away. So yeah, let’s jump over and talk about… So I know there’s this concept of, we know what we’re trying to solve for when we wanna get FSC, and we get it, and then there’s all the surprises that happen after the fact, right?

0:39:00.3 TR: There’s all of these like, “Oh, I didn’t know we could also do this with it,” or, “Oh, this was an unexpected time saver.” Or, “Oh my goodness. We didn’t know that this department could also use FSC.” I would love to hear some of those stories. Annie, do you wanna kick us off on some of those unknowns?

“What surprise solutions has Salesforce provided for your financial institution?”

0:39:16.1 AS: Yeah, I’ll start with some that I’ve heard that are really interesting from more of sort of an enterprise-wide level, and I think Katherine and Kat can probably get into more, some very specific commercial lending examples. But again, we see this all the time, and this is the best part for us at Salesforce, ’cause the customer without spending another dollar can increase the value that they get on their CRM license in a lot of cases.

0:39:44.9 AS: We’ve seen a lot of complaints management, collections management, people didn’t think they were gonna be doing that in the platform when they started. And then it gets sort of outside of some these classic use cases. Recruiting, we do see customers build somewhat simple recruiting processes in Salesforce.

0:40:06.4 AS: If you’d asked me if I’d ever be doing, be kind of a health expert, contract tracing. Obviously, we have packaged solutions for that, but some lightweight employee apps, has been really interesting this year. Mapping is really neat, we’ve seen a little bit more pre-COVID and I think it’ll pick up again after COVID, but how to help salespeople who are out in the field, how to make maximize their efficiency maps and getting in front of their customers.

0:40:38.4 AS: We see a lot of interesting things around sales enablement, so how can the Salesforce technology enable sales people, not just to use CRMS, but all forms of sales enablement. I think that’s been real interesting. And lastly, it’s been really neat to see our solution help kind of customer-facing, financial well-being journeys. I find that to be really interesting.

0:41:01.2 AS: We are able to help customers launch programs to serve their customers and take them on journeys through some of these financial well-being initiatives, and many customers don’t have any clue that that’s a Salesforce… An area that we can play. So those are a few that I’ve just jotted down as we were talking.

0:41:20.6 TR: That’s really cool. So on some of the earlier examples, to kinda drive home this idea that it really is this open platform that allows you, as the need arises, you can pivot quickly and add on through the app exchange, these other apps that expand the functionality of Salesforce.

0:41:41.9 TR: Maybe for some of those folks who are listening, who are maybe wondering where those large integrations to add on the sales enablement pieces, and in a lot of cases, they’re not necessarily giant add-ons. So I love that about Salesforce. And then I love too, for specifically the banking use case, the financial wellness journey, that banks are taking more of a personal and life event driven approach to building out that banking relationship.

0:42:11.3 TR: I’m on the Marketing Cloud side over here at EMS Consulting, and seeing a ton of praises about how Marketing Cloud also really helps bring that to life, and automate those amazing customer touch points and experiences too. So driven by that awesome data model in FSC, as the data is sort of collected there, and as the financial advisor is maybe building that relationship there, Marketing Cloud can do a lot to digitize that further outreach in a scalable way too. So I love those examples. Thank you so much for sharing.

0:42:47.9 TR: Kat, I would love to know, with some of our EMS consulting customers who maybe aren’t with us today on the call, what unknown or surprise advantages has FSC given them, that you’ve heard of?

0:43:03.0 KK: Yeah, definitely. Probably something we’re really proud about right when COVID hit was, we had a current client that needed the PPP application portal up and running within 30 days, which was a very difficult task when we heard that. We had to design and build the solution using Salesforce, and it needed to accommodate really large loan application volumes, and it really allowed good interface for the loan officers to manage the process easily.

0:43:35.6 KK: I think it was within 12 days, EMS resources were able to create that application process on a Salesforce community portal. It included an application form, digital signature for the applicants, and then a whole bunch of reporting metrics. What we’re really proud of is the result, which was we were able to have the client approve 104 million in loans to date, and they have currently 403 applications in process.

0:44:02.7 KK: I would say the best part of this was they were able to do this without any additional investment in new software, utilizing all of their current Salesforce features.

0:44:12.0 TR: That’s incredible. Katherine, have you had any unexpected surprises over on the Synovus side?

0:44:21.3 KB: Gosh, in the past year, if I think through from an FSC and even just Salesforce standpoint, one of the things that makes Salesforce and FSC so great is how quickly you can adjust it to what you need it to be for you, or how quickly you can add something new, a new functionality into it.

0:44:37.9 KB: So where we’ve had to manage complaints, because every bank has to manage complaints for a variety of regulation reasons, I’ve deployed that three times with three different companies, because it was a workflow that didn’t require code, but just a workflow that had to be built out and can be done quickly.

0:44:52.9 KB: Same with managing exceptions, same with low payment deferral. They’re so incredibly easy to build, and not have to have a ton of integrations or bring in these expensive specialists, but can build them out and make them usable and scalable. But what doesn’t get talked about as much, and I… There’s no project that I work on that doesn’t have this component to it, is the reporting and dashboards and how amazing those tools are.

0:45:16.2 AS: I talked a minute ago about PPP and what that looked like for us. We had a dashboard monitoring every stage and phase of that process, up and running within an hour, to the point where I had to train our president on how to access Salesforce, because he wanted to be able to track it hour by hour as we were seeing this huge volume come in, and it was so quick and easy to give him that visibility. At that point, I think we had another 100 users who also needed to have that visibility, because it was so quick and easy to build.

0:45:43.2 KB: And so to be able to not only put in a workflow, but then to have the tracking and the accountability, and the reporting and the visibility of what’s happening in your world, and how… And they quickly identify where there’s a gap or a problem, that’s just, it’s an incredible solution it solves for so quickly.

0:45:57.6 TR: Wow, that’s incredible. Well, I’m sure your CEO is absolutely hooked now. [chuckle]

0:46:03.4 KB: Well, actually, our poor commercial bankers, once he realized how to start looking at their loans and their processes and their leads, it became very apparent that he was in there and able to inspect what he expected, which is how he viewed that. So yes, you’re absolutely right.

0:46:18.2 TR: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, I love the analogy too. It is the equivalent of being able to turn on the lights, you can finally see what you’re doing, [chuckle] what your whole organization is doing and how it’s going. And I know credit unions especially, who are still dealing with the disparate systems, a lot of them are still used to seeing yesterday’s data. But to be able to see it hour-by-hour, like you said, it was just a total game changer. To be able to pivot that quickly, it’s incredible.

0:46:50.4 TR: Well, we are a little bit here close to time. So I want to give us a few minutes to check and see if we got any questions while we were talking. And actually it looks like some of these questions have been answered live, some of them Annie was in there answering some of those questions. So Annie, thank you so much for that as well. [chuckle]

0:47:21.1 TR: Great. If any of those, if there’s any more questions, please feel free to submit those in the Q&A box right now. We do have a couple of questions that came in through another channel here. And let’s see, I might start with Kat at EMS for this one. The question is, “For banks or CUs who are just getting started, how long is the average… ” Or how long, I’ll say not average, but, “how long is an expected… What is a reasonable expected timeline for an FSC implementation?”

Attendee Question: “What is a reasonable expected timeline for an FSC implementation?”

0:47:57.6 KK: So it obviously depends on a tonne of factors, different use cases, and we have to take all that into consideration. Most people would like to hear it would take four weeks, but realistically, for EMS we’ve seen it in the past really range between six to nine months. You add on multiple integrations, depending on what the middleware is that they’re using, it can really either shorten or lengthen the lifecycle of the project, depending on that. All of the different focus areas, I would say.

0:48:33.9 TR: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so depending on the number of systems, the integrations, the tech stack, and obviously the different business lines of the organization, so that makes sense. Well, if anyone listening today is wondering, or I know with everything that we’ve been through over the last year, we might be thinking, “Oh my gosh, it’s too late to get started,” and that is just absolutely not the case. I wanna let everyone know that now is as good a time as any to get started with FSC, and to start working towards that future-proof tech stack.

0:49:10.1 TR: We at EMS Consulting, we’re available to talk through that with you and start scoping that out, if you’re curious and wanted to start getting some costs and scoping around that. So definitely reach out to us if you are interested in learning more about that. Our website is www.consultems.com. You can shoot us an email at [email protected] as well.

0:49:35.6 TR: And of course, if you have any additional questions please submit them through the Q&A. Oh, I do see we have one more question that came through that has not actually been answered, and Kat, I would love for you to help me out with this one as well. This one is from Pat Shaw and says, “What differentiates EMS from other implementation partners?” We did talk about how fast, so let’s talk about some of the differentiators for EMS versus other implementation partners?

Attendee Question: “What differentiates EMS from other Salesforce implementation partners?”

0:50:10.7 KK: Yeah, great question. And from an implementation and delivery perspective, I would say our tried and true proven methodology. We call it our “reach methodology”, it’s almost a Waterfall-Agile hybrid. We’re very waterfall in the front end, we have an extremely robust business requirements document, we will lead multiple discoveries with multiple departments, we have a template of discovery of everything we know we’re gonna ask and all of the questions we’re gonna really go over to get what we need to create that BRD.

0:50:51.2 KK: And then from there we go into our sprinting, and that’s more of an Agile framework. We do utilize accelerators that we’ve built in the past to help build out best-practice data models using metadata that we’ve configured separately in our own environment hub, which really decreases the life cycle from other partners in the past.

0:51:11.9 KK: And then we also do a very robust user acceptance testing, so we run through all of the testing scripts, all of the different use cases you would see for each of the departments that are in there, and we really make sure that there’s no bugs, there’s no defects. And then finally, I would say it’s definitely the training we give. We are extremely detailed. We have our Director of Customer Management, who just focuses on that.

0:51:37.9 KK: He preps the client right at the beginning, halfway through the project, how are we getting the communication of that training out there, who’s getting trained, what does that training document look like? And he’s really helping prepare, as well as give that training sessions. And then J.P, if you have anything else to add, who is our sales rep on the phone as well.

0:52:00.6 J.P.: Thanks Kat. I actually just responded on the Q&A itself, but I think you hit it. And just to reiterate for folks, in terms of differentiation outside of the technical and project methodology that ensures success for most customers at the onset of every project, we certainly pride ourselves on white glove service. When our organization was founded that was sort of the initial scope.

0:52:25.8 J.P.: Over 22 years of experience in the industry, we’ve got an above average industry score for our customer satisfaction. Which again, reflective of those 22 years of best practices, bringing those to every project. So I’d say some of those are certainly the differentiation outside of just our project methodology, and we of course look forward to any, in additional engagements, where we can prove that out in further detail.

0:52:52.4 TR: Awesome. Thanks J.P and Kat, really appreciate it. Great, well, we are at time. I just wanna thank each and every one of our guests. Annie, thank you so much for being here from Salesforce. Really, really appreciated your perspective there, and I hope you can tell that we’re huge, huge fans of the platform, and really, really believe that it’s going to carry us into the future and help us future-proof, whatever may come our way.

0:53:18.0 TR: Katherine at Synovus, thank you so much for being with us and sharing your battle stories. It sounds like they’re so lucky to have you leading the way and being able to kind of innovate as things sort of happen. And Kat, thank you so much also for taking time out of your day to be with us too, from the EMS side. To all of our attendees, thanks for joining, and we hope to see you soon for one of our next events. Have a great day, everyone.