Are you ready to peek into the future of wealth tech innovation? Buckle up, because our latest Beacon Flash podcast episode features none other than Michelle Feinstein, the esteemed Vice President and General Manager of Financial Services Group at Salesforce. She takes us on a thrilling journey, revealing the groundbreaking advancements at the recent Dreamforce event, including the cutting-edge Einstein Co-Pilot, an expanded data cloud strategy, and the integration of personal financial management in their industry-leading financial services cloud.
Looking for answers on how technology is morphing the wealth management industry? Feast your mind on our enlightening conversation about the vital role of data, the swift pace of industry evolution, and the challenges of catering to diverse client demographics, from the uber-rich to the mass affluent. Michelle decodes the complex role that AI plays in financial services and uncovers Salesforce’s bold strategy in this space. We also tackle the technology hurdles wealth firms grapple with, emphasizing the importance of data unification, effective analytics, and the retirement of outdated systems to accelerate innovation. Don’t miss out on this action-packed discussion!
Speaker 1:0:09
Hi, my name is Chip Kispert and I’m the host of the Beacon Flash podcast. Today, my guest is Michelle Feinstein, a true wealth tech industry leader who plays a pivotal role at Salesforce as they help the wealth management industry. Michelle’s expertise and insights on Salesforce, along with her wealth management technology thought leadership, are going to make for an engaging and informative podcast episode. As a little backdrop on Michelle Michelle has an abundance of experience within the wealth tech space. Currently, she is the vice president, general manager of the financial services group at Salesforce. She is also tasked with product innovation and driving customer success. Michelle has the pulse on many of the dynamics of an ever-changing wealth tech industry. Previously, michelle spent time at Pershing, a bank of New York Mellon company, where she effectively helped customers intersect, clearing custody with their technology needs.
Speaker 1:1:09
I am excited to have Michelle as a guest on the Beacon Flash podcast and I am sure that you, our audience, will walk away with valuable insights, along with a fresh perspective on the wealth tech industry and its future. Let’s get to the podcast, michelle. Thank you so much for being on the Beacon Flash podcast. Now, we’ve been friends for years, right, and even. Furthermore, I look at you as one of those people in the industry that, I believe, has a terrific handle on where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going. The work that you’re doing is thoughtful and I’m so excited to talk about it, so I’m excited to get into the conversation and again, welcome.
Speaker 2:1:55
Michelle. Thank you so much, chip, and yes, we have been friends for years, so it’s my pleasure to join you on this podcast. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:2:03
Chip. So our background is we work together when you’re at Pershing. We also are working together now that you’re at Salesforce. Right, You’re just off a dream force. What are a couple of the things that you took away from the event that should be of huge importance to investment advisors and the enterprise wealth community at large, Michelle.
Speaker 2:2:26
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the biggest really theme of focus at Dreamforce this year was data, AI and CRM and the powerful combination All of that brings to the wealth management community and to advisors. So if you look at all the announcements that went out at Dreamforce, if you go to Salesforce live, you can see a lot of the sessions. I would touch on a couple of things. First and foremost is data cloud, the LLMs and Salesforce strategy around Einstein co-pilot. This is really really important, right?
Speaker 2:2:59
You know, in our roundtables, the topic of AI has come up all year, but I think in wealth, a lot of firms are sitting back and kind of trying to determine what to do with it. Are they ready to use it? And so there was a lot of excitement around the fact that Salesforce has made such an investment and so much progress in this area. So, to give you a little bit of color, like Einstein co-pilot is basically generative AI conversational. It’s like a digital assistant that Salesforce is embedding into not just one cloud but all the clouds at Salesforce, and this is really important because now, well, firms don’t have to try and think up something. They can.
Speaker 2:3:36
Actually, if they’re Salesforce users, they’re gonna be able to start using Einstein Co-Pilot and what it does is it basically is like a productivity enabler, right for financial advisors, for sales, for service, for marketing, where I’ll give you the example of financial advisors, Co-Pilot’s gonna be used to help them find cases, to act on cases, summarize meeting notes, set up automated schedules of meetings and so much more. And that’s just in that one area, right, If you apply that in the sales scenario or service scenario, super, super impactful. So that would be number one.
Speaker 1:4:12
Okay, excellent. What’s number two?
Speaker 2:4:15
So number two would be the expanded data cloud strategy. So there were many sessions and demonstrations of data cloud and what Salesforce is doing to be a trusted data layer and offer out an LLM and ability to act on that LLM and a lot of conversation and strategy meetings I sat in. Customers were saying well, what if I don’t wanna put all my data in Salesforce? The beauty of this is you don’t have to. What they’re trying to do here at Salesforce is be the unification layer but be very open while we do it. So it’s really a bring your own data model right.
Speaker 2:4:49
Clients can go ahead and if they’re using Snowflake or Amazon products or something else, and they just wanna connect that data with Salesforce. That’s the whole point and we’ll just mirror the data, but the goal is unifying it so all that rich data can be acted upon. So that was a big focus and what was really cool is they had a demonstration and a booth on this Einstein report formula generation, where creating reports can be really complicated for advisors or somebody in operations. Very soon, I think at the end of the year, you’re gonna actually be able to have a prompt that says I wanna create the certain type of report with these attributes and the system’s gonna just go do it. So it’s basically you’re able to like voice how you wanna code right into the system.
Speaker 1:5:33
You’re gonna make it easy.
Speaker 2:5:35
We’re trying to make it easy. The last thing I’ll touch on is FSC, so financial services cloud, or those folks that are not familiar, but there were a lot of announcements around new innovations coming around around financial services cloud and the one I’ll touch upon is personal financial management and the ability to embed financial insights into financial services cloud and what it’s gonna come from is the day layer of data cloud. The other is an expanded goal of implants experience in FSC, so this has been a long time coming. A lot of well firms use FSC as their advisor experience and they’ve taken on the burden of building out integrations with leading planning providers. What we have done on the product team has said we wanna take that integration burden away, and so we’ve built in the integration hooks. I can’t say the names of who those providers are just yet, but I will be able to soon. But now the advisor doesn’t have to leave the platform when they wanna see or take action on their financial planning capabilities.
Speaker 1:6:36
And I certainly am curious about that, cause we get a lot of feedback. I wanna go back to your first and second points. I was down in in South Carolina this earlier this week and I was giving a talk on AI, which is something that a lot of our community is super interested in, and we actually had some advisors in the room and it was amazing because one of the two of the biggest things that the advisors were concerned about and couldn’t get their arms around was those meeting notes you talked about. Right, they’re like, oh my gosh, I’ve gone out and I bought remarkably, I bought or remarkable the note pads. I bought an iPad for notes, yet they couldn’t get it hooked in to their infrastructure. The whole part as simple things like that is what I’m hearing that Einstein is gonna take over.
Speaker 2:7:41
That’s right. Yeah, I mean, when people ask what are the use cases you’re focused on, they’re really actually pretty simple, right? So in the areas of service efficiency, service automation, advisor productivity, these are some of the main areas we’re looking at and we’re saying we know advisors spend too much of their time on non-core activities, right, they’re doing compliance training and they’re trying to learn new products and services and they’re doing all kinds of administrative work. That’s very manual, right, and so the goal with these co-pilot agents is to say what is manual that regulators wouldn’t be overly concerned about.
Speaker 2:8:16
Where, if we can have the AI take over some of that, but still put in a layer for review so that we can make sure a human is still comfortable with how AI has summarized. That’s the key. As an example, even, we put AI into action for one of my dream force sessions. After the panel was delivered, within I think it was 10 minutes our marketing team sent me a summary of my entire panel and it was summarized by AI and I had a chance to approve it, and then it was attached on the website to go with the session as a recap. So we’re using it in real life here at Salesforce.
Speaker 1:8:51
So you have some voice activation in there as well and those pieces of the post. That’s awesome. The other one and I’m chuckling is data right. So these advisors who are very particular about their data, especially as 1099 advisors, how do they? Oh, what am I giving, what am I bringing in? I think that’s a huge item. How is our friend Greg Belzer, mr RBC Wealth Management?
Speaker 2:9:18
Greg is always amazing. He did not have a dedicated poster that I came across at Dreamforce, but he was still one of our experts, that one of our expert clients that we called upon and he spoke in many sessions and he’s just awesome.
Speaker 1:9:32
He always needs to have the 30 foot poster. I mean, that’s a big deal.
Speaker 2:9:35
He’ll never be out of a job. I’ll tell you that One day you’re gonna see him working here at Salesforce.
Speaker 1:9:41
All right, hey, number two, and you and I have both been doing this for long enough, right? How do you see the wealth business changing? And I ask this, given both your currency at Salesforce, your past seed at Pershing, you know, and, and I really believe you’re kind of that intersection of technology and advisor experience, and you know I’m curious about your thoughts.
Speaker 2:10:14
So it’s how is it not changing right? I think our wealth management firms are seeing more change in the past two years in particular, than they have in the past 20, and They’ve always been trying to evolve and modernize. But what I see is, on meeting with all different kinds of clients, is they’re accelerating their ability to make decisions. They’re accelerating their ability to try and reduce complexity, because they’re seeing that they’re just not going to scale if they don’t. So you know there are about six key areas that are the ones that most often come up these days when wealth clients are putting their priorities. The first is definitely connecting ecosystems, and it’s not just a focus for advisors, it’s also for operational efficiency for the middle office. So see a lot of wealth firms there kind of looking at their tech stacks, seeing how complicated they are. They have too many systems in there and so they’re really being very strategic about Recognizing which of those systems really maybe they don’t need anymore. I also see a big shift away from them having to build all their own tech. You and I both know in the world of wealth for a Lot of our firms they did that for a long time. They’re finally starting to become much more open and the challenge there is some of these firms have not been in a position, with talent, to be very API driven, but they’re recognizing to connect ecosystems. They really they need to get there.
Speaker 2:11:39
The second theme and it came up a lot of dream force when I was meeting with clients was clients are now trying to figure out, if they want to have Accelerated growth, that they can only focus on the ultra high net worth segment and that they also have to find a way to Serve the massive fluent. You know, no longer is it just give them a robo model and so what their challenge is? Okay, how do we maintain supporting the needs of the ultra high net worth but also start to put in a service model, an operating model, a pricing model for this massive flu Acceptment, because they don’t want just digital, they want digital plus human support, human advice. And For these firms that I’ve been speaking to, a big problem is advisor scalability. In order to support that, the advisors are going to have to have some conversations with the mass affluent and also Personalize advice and portfolios for that segment.
Speaker 1:12:30
So I’ll let you react to that one.
Speaker 1:12:32
Yeah, so it’s interesting, I was talking to a chief marketing officer last night and we were talking about the same subject. You know, if you look at a lot of these firms kind of that ultra high net worth they’re only so many customers, right, that’s right. And and then you know, we look at, you know, the other space, right, the 401k. We look at 403 B’s, another. We have some customers that play in the 403 B space. I Don’t know when. The last time you went in and dug in that technology Maras was. But it’s not easy for these firms to be able to support that business, right, but they want to be able to support it. So they’re looking for for the technology side. So I think that’s super important. We had a round table last week and and it was investment round table, and one of the things that I took away was this you can have the technology, which I think is hugely. You know, hey, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Tech has been our focus. You have to change the behavior too.
Speaker 2:13:38
Absolutely, absolutely. And you know I was having a conversation this morning with one of our market research analysts. I’m about to head over and do a wealth event over in France, and so they’re trying to learn from us here in the States, and one of the big things was education. So it’s not just about the technology, but it’s also about education for advisors, financial literacy for investors, and how are you going to deliver that education? It can’t all be in person, so that starts to turn into more technology, investment and projects. Right, are you going to use a digital assistant? Are you going to use recorded sessions? Are you going to use video? Are you going to leverage chat box, like? How are you going to, you know, meet this need and in order to really engage, especially the Mass Affluent, for instance, you can’t not have that.
Speaker 1:14:23
Right, hey, hey. Anytime you go to France, let me know Happy to come.
Speaker 2:14:28
Going soon, so I’ll pack you in my suitcase.
Speaker 1:14:31
All right, the obligatory AI question, and you know we talked a little bit about it earlier with co-pilot, right, but how does Salesforce see AI fitting into really the that broader financial service fabric? You know let who the big winners in this one?
Speaker 2:14:56
Yeah. So, as I talked about earlier, right, we’re making heavy investment. You can see in the news us making acquisitions of AI companies and then also just enhancing the AI capabilities we already have. Right, salesforce isn’t new to the world of AI. I mean, we have really been playing in that space since 2016 with Einstein, and so now it’s just how do we take that to the next level?
Speaker 2:15:18
One of the new things that I think will benefit wealth firms is the prompt builder technology and templates that are starting to roll out as part of that co-pilot experience I was mentioning.
Speaker 2:15:28
So we know gen AI is only as good as the data that it’s, you know, taking from, and it’s also trial and error, and you have to teach that AI with the right way to ask questions in order to get back the best responses.
Speaker 2:15:40
And so one of the differentiators here at Salesforce with prompt builder is we’re going to enable users to have a better way to be more prescriptive with describing in the prompt builder exactly what they want AI to do, but in simple, plain English. So we’re going to come out with some templates that have been customer informed as a starting point, but then that prompt builder is also going to be highly configurable and simple to use and they demonstrated it at Salesforce, at Dreamforce rather, and if you want to see it, you can see it on that Salesforce plus. So that would be one example. The other is with financial services cloud. We also are thinking about how do we bring AI into the financial services cloud experience, and so for us it’s going to go back to that personalized finance, but also things like transaction disputes. That’s probably going to be one of the first use cases that shows up in February. Yeah, we’re going to use AI there to kind of fine tune the responses, give suggested responses or review kind of a cue for that to try to make that easier.
Speaker 1:16:40
That is incredible. I always love to ask this question. Salesforce, we can see, is all in on the wealth management business. We see that with FSC. We see it with how they’re utilizing AI, how they’re looking at data. It’s really incredible. We can all see that. How is Salesforce partnering with those next-gen technology companies that weave into the advisor tech step, because currently we see a lot of those next-gen being disparate from the ecosystems of these wealth management firms. They become a compliance problem where they become challenging in terms of administration, and how do they weave into process? How are you guys thinking about that?
Speaker 2:17:26
Yeah, I’m so glad you asked me. At Dreamforce this year, we probably announced the most new partnerships and core integrations and we ever have for any Dreamforce that I’ve been a part of. I’ll name a bunch of them that just recently came to light. The first is the integration that’s launching with Pershing X. Now, Pershing itself is a custodian that’s been in place for over two decades, but Pershing X is the new fintech of Pershing. The data integration is just that it’s to connect the platform of Wob with financial services cloud and sales and service cloud and make sure that data is syncing in the moments that matter most for advisors and their productivity. We’re really excited about that one.
Speaker 2:18:07
The second one is Broadridge. Broadridge has really rich data, especially around books and records, and it would be super valuable to get that data and unify it with CRM data. We launched an integration at Dreamforce that does just that. In addition to that, Broadridge is launching two new ISV app exchange apps around security, space lending and a digitized marketing experience called Advisor Stream, which, when an advisor is trying to personalize an experience, Broadridge has already purchased content from news outlets and providers that’s safe for the advisor to use, and so they can just access that information directly from Salesforce. The other one I’ll touch on is Accenture. We know here at Salesforce we can’t always build everything on our own, and we have a rich partner community. What Accenture is doing is they’re extending the financial services cloud data model. They’re putting on a pack of integrations that are most in demand by wealth firms and they’re rolling out a user experience that actually builds new account opening, unified new account opening on top of FSC, so our firms don’t have to build it themselves. Those are just a couple of examples.
Speaker 1:19:19
So it’s a small world, right. So in the last couple of weeks I’ve seen the Pershing X piece pretty impressive. Yesterday, actually, our old friend Nick Facker got to go through advisor stream with Nick and his Broadridge team and what they’re doing truly is impressive, and weaving that into Salesforce can pay big dividends. My last question for you here, and this is one I’d like to ask right, when you think about the wealth business and, to a greater extent, our technology hub, what do you think keeps advisors and large wealth firms up at night when they think about, hey, we have this tech stack, we have advisors.
Speaker 2:20:14
Is that the question? That’s the question.
Speaker 1:20:16
Okay.
Speaker 2:20:18
You know, I think, first and foremost, what keeps advisors up at night is are they going to continue to remain relevant, valuable and be able to really grow their business at scale?
Speaker 2:20:28
Right, so they’re facing off now to more and more individuals within the household. Maybe in the beginning it used to be just Michelle and her husband, but now they really are reaching it to Michelle, the husband, all the kids, anybody that could potentially inherit the wealth and so I think it’s putting a lot of pressure on them to learn new technologies, to make sure those technologies talk to each other and to be time efficient. Time management, again, is their biggest challenge, right, so they spend too much time doing manual administrative things. So I think what keeps them up at night really is not having a unified platform experience. Right, and still having too much friction, too much swivel chair, and it can be overwhelming, right, as their wealth firms are piling on more products to learn, more solutions to sell and oh, by the way, expand your book faster than you ever have before and show growth. I think the second, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:21:20
Go ahead.
Speaker 2:21:21
No, I was just going to say, and the other one is really getting these technologies to work seamlessly together and for the advisors, they’re still learning how to use analytics. Like a lot of these wealth firms are going to start turning on predictive insights and predictive analytics, but the advisors, I think, are still not really used to using all that analytic power and so, again, I think it goes back to a little bit of fear factor of what do I do with this data. So wealth firms have to be very targeted and supportive in terms of what they roll out and how they teach those advisors how to maximize the value out of those reports.
Speaker 1:21:55
Yeah, you know it’s interesting. You talked about the analytics. We did a demo for a firm recently and they’re like, oh, we have this great analytics page and I look at it and, great, I’m like, all right, what do I do with it? What are the activities I need to do from this analytics page?
Speaker 2:22:16
That’s right, and so, instead of making it overly complicated with every little data point like a million different analytic reports you could use, I’m seeing wealth firms scale back. Here are five new reports with a very simple user interface so that these advisors will get comfortable enough to start customizing those reports and using it on your own. Going back to the Greg Belzer example, that’s exactly what they did and that’s what he started to see that his advisor and their support staff are not calling the home office to get reports customized. They’re actually using it now, but he brought them to the table to inform their design.
Speaker 1:22:52
That’s great. Yeah, all right. The final word. This is where I give you 60 seconds to share your thinking on an aspect of our business that could be trends, concerns or outliers.
Speaker 2:23:05
Michelle, attention so okay, so I’ll say my final words are if you’re thinking about where to prioritize your strategy, I would start with solving the data unification problem. This is the number one area where firms that are making the most progress have started. So it’s really going back to take an inventory of your tech stack. Be open to retiring systems with low adoption. Think about those systems that need to connect, and start with business outcomes. Why are you trying to connect them? What do you want to achieve? What is the data that’s needed?
Speaker 2:23:37
The second is, if you’re someone in the seat of choosing where to send your budget next, take a look at how open is your architecture. How open are you to outsourcing to an outside platform? To be that unification layer, you don’t have to hold on to the customizations and maybe to some of the homegrown systems you’ve had. Think about retiring that kind of philosophy, because you’ll accelerate your innovation by leveraging a unified platform experience. In the end, once that data unification problem is solved which is really data consolidation, normalization, reconciliation and making it operational then you can light up onboarding, asset movement planning, portfolio management and a much more efficient and scalable deliverable offering.
Speaker 1:24:23
Michelle, thank you for being on the Beacon Flash podcast.
Speaker 2:24:27
Thank you, chip, I’ll see you soon.
Speaker 1:24:31
What a podcast. I want to thank my wonderful guest, michelle Feinstein, for joining me today. Also, I want to thank you, our audience, for taking the time to listen to this interview. For those of you that are curious about what we do at Beacon, please go to the bio and click on the link to our site. There we have an overview of what we do. We really would enjoy talking with you and learning about how you look at the enterprise. Well, space In closing. Be well Until next time.