What Financial Services Cloud actually gets you for double the price

Not including Salesforce Shield in Financial Services Cloud is offensive. Shield would make that premium price tag make sense. Consider building FSC's limited features yourself for a one-time fee and save the recurring annual cost. Existing customers may be required to migrate to a new instance, but even that painful cost would be recouped over the years...

Why trust these declarations from me? My FSC highlights:

🔄 A multi-custodially integrated wealth management instance with fully populated household onboarding document generation

💼 White-glove Financed Life Insurance: Custom UIs and automation via Apex and declarative, including Action Plans, in Financial Services Cloud for premium financing and life insurance policy sales

🏢 Captive Insurance Platform: Designed a captive-insurance management system that automated claim allocation logic and return of principal calculations

🔹 And others...

A big part of what you get from FSC is the data model, and it either works for you or doesn't. It's a Frankenstein of data models with enough specificity to hint at the business models of the companies in insurance and banking who first piloted FSC as a managed package. But even when the data model seems appropriate, you may run into black box, undocumented automation in objects that can complicate or even block business logic you want to add.

My attempts to add what seemed like a simple automation to Action Plans ("What percentage of Tasks in an Action Plan have been completed?") turned into a battle against inexplicably complex asynchronous chained logic. It would absolutely have been easier to rewrite the meager bit of functionality Action Plans provided than deal with that poorly engineered mess. Transactions, Account-Account/Contact Relationships, Insurance Policies and Claims all had similar headaches.

So for twice the cost of Enterprise Sales Editions, you get:

🛠️ A data model you could just put the elbow grease in to build yourself (That's a core Salesforce selling point, right?)

👶🏻 Cute little interfaces for Life Events and Business Milestones

📊 A visual relationship diagram which could be implemented more elegantly with any number of JavaScript libraries

⚙️ The added expense of surprise black box automation to throw a wrench into your Salesforce team's plans

But NO encryption-at-rest or security audit features that many FSC customers are required to have by law. Nope, they'll hit you up for another 30% increase for that. Offensive.

Have I mentioned that Codality has years of experience extending and rebuilding FSC features? Message me if you're feeling ready to skip/drop a SKU and reinvest those licensing costs into your own company.