Over the course of our research into a number of WealthTech companies, we looked into their functionalities, technologies, software development methodologies, and product management approaches.
When it comes to integrations, almost a quarter of the companies are already integrated with Salesforce, are in the process of doing so, or plan to do so in the future. This is understood in terms of versatility, flexibility, and many other useful facilities.
Financial planners, investment advisors, money managers, and other wealth management professionals use Salesforce to store data, track customer lifecycles, and gain a deeper understanding of each customer. B2B financial software providers integrate with Salesforce and other popular CRMs to make their own platforms more attractive for existing and potential users.
However, the integration process contains pitfalls that can spoil the experience for developers, platform owners, and even clients. This is why thorough business analysis is a must before moving to integration. You can download our whitepaper, “Integration of a WealthTech Platform with Salesforce,” which includes a detailed overview of steps you can take to mitigate the need for rework and the danger of losing data.
So what are the risks?
Rework
Your wealth management platform likely has entities that don’t match the standard objects provided by Salesforce. Data mapping is step one of the preliminary business analysis process. If this isn’t done thoroughly beforehand, you might discover new connections and dependencies too late, after the integration process has started. Then, your developers might need to do significant rework.
Our whitepaper shows an example of data mapping for the following simplified data model:
Data loss
Before integrating your platform with Salesforce, carefully think about the rules of updating data. You should answer the following questions:
- If data in Salesforce and your core platform differ, which data are relevant?
- Will you promote updates from Salesforce to the core platform or vice versa?
- What should be done if the source platform contains deleted or null values?
- When dataflows conflict, what should be done in each case?
Without clearly formulated and agreed-upon rules, your clients might lose their data.
In the whitepaper, you’ll also find examples of data-update rules. The following is an example of object-level data-update rules when data flow from Salesforce to a core platform only:
Blocked integration
Salesforce is a very popular CRM. To ensure that a process doesn’t monopolize shared resources, Salesforce imposes limitations on runaway Apex code and processes, API requests, and loads. Find detailed information about these limitations in our whitepaper, “Integration of a WealthTech Platform with Salesforce.”
Once the limit is reached, the integration will be blocked until the end of a 24-hour period. This can be a headache for both platform owners and users.
To avoid blocking, you should consider a number of details. Among them are the following:
- Salesforce edition license
- The frequency of synchronization
- Updating large amounts of records, etc.
How can our whitepaper help?
Our whitepaper covers all aspects of business analysis you should perform before starting the integration process. There, you can find a comprehensive description of standard and custom objects and fields in Salesforce and its Financial Services Cloud, which was specially designed for wealth management professionals.
The document also explains what aspects to consider when you discuss CRUD operations rules; provides a list of main limitations that Salesforce imposes on callouts, requests, and loads; and offers examples of UIs of the Mapping Setup page and the Update Rule page.
To make the document even more informative, we included an overview of Apex, a language created by Salesforce, and a lot of useful links to Salesforce’s documentation and community forum.
Download your free copy of our whitepaper, “Integration of a WealthTech Platform with Salesforce.”
