8 Salesforce FSC Project Later... My Verdict: Don't
8 Salesforce Financial Services Cloud projects. Declarative and coding enhancements. Mostly greenfield implementations. And I caution against it.
Spoiler, and no surprise to anyone familiar with Salesforce, cost comes into play. I’ll go into more detail on each of these, but here’s the high-level sum up:
💸 “Features” – Light value, heavy price tag. Salesforce’s quirks are baked in, turning customization into a nightmare. Account Contact Relationships require incantations to deal with programmatically. Making Action Plans behave the way users assume it should took more effort than building it from scratch. And you'll likely only leverage a few of these bells & whistles.
📊 Built-in data model – Similar diminishing returns. If you’re buying FSC, you already know what fields you need on a Financial Account. Hire an intern for a week, get the same outcome without the recurring invoice.
🔫 Triggers – Black box. Impossible to control. My team ended up abandoning FSC objects and rebuilding them custom just to escape them.
Considering FSC? Trying to escape FSC? Trying to force FSC to obey your business requirements? Codality knows the traps, we’ve solved them, and we’ll build you what FSC promises... without the recurring Salesforce tax if you haven't signed the contract yet 😉
Jessie Grenfell
Tech leader with 20+ years designing, delivering, and overseeing complex software systems in financial services, insurance, nonprofit, and education. Currently CEO of Codality, a consultancy delivering enterprise Salesforce solutions, Fractional Architecting and packages that super-charge Salesforce development teams. Former founder and CEO Platy IT of a consulting firm developing custom platforms for complex, unique operational workflows.
Experienced guiding teams, leading empathic discovery, designing scalable & configurable architecture, and UI/UX for software platforms used in complex, regulated and high-risk environments. Strong background securely integrating disparate systems and coordinating work across engineering, operations, and leadership.