Key Takeaways:
- Legacy tech slows innovation and creates silos across BFSI.
- Salesforce enables BFSI firms with a 360° customer view to make better decisions.
- Financial Services Cloud unifies fragmented data into a single, real-time customer profile.
- Ciklum’s Integration is not just technical, it's strategic, secure, and scalable.
Salesforce: The Operating Core of Financial Services
The banking and financial services sector is gaining momentum in a new era of rising expectations, tightening regulations, and growing competitive pressure. Yet despite years of investment in cloud and automation, 80% of banking leaders say legacy systems are still holding back their ability to innovate.
The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector is, no doubt, complex. It’s compliance-heavy, data-sensitive, and built on trust. But fragmented systems and disjointed processes make it harder to deliver the real-time, personalized experiences customers are expecting.
Salesforce is helping BFSI institutions shift from patchwork processes to connected operations, unifying service, sales, marketing, and compliance around a single view of the customer.
This blog explores the challenges BFSI leaders face today, the role Salesforce plays in resolving them, and the platform strategies defining the next generation of financial services.
Core Challenges Slowing BFSI Momentum in 2025
Despite digital progress, structural limitations continue to block BFSI institutions from innovating at full speed. Below are four of the most pressing barriers:
Legacy Systems and Technology Fragmentation
While AI and cloud adoption have accelerated, 43% of financial institutions still rely on core systems built over two decades ago. Some still run on COBOL, a programming language from the era of Blockbuster and dial-up internet. These systems are brittle. They slow down product rollouts and stall innovations. Silos are created across payments, lending, compliance, and underwriting areas. Without interoperability, real-time insights and seamless customer engagement remain out of reach.
Escalating Cybersecurity and Data Risk
Cyberattacks target financial services 300 times more than any other industry. As APIs expand under Open Banking and PSD2, the attack surface grows wider. Confidential data can be leaked, which poses serious consequences for BSFI firms. Many of them still rely on patchwork security systems with limited visibility. Managing cybersecurity today is like tracking freight across borders using sticky notes, it only works until it doesn’t.
Regulatory Complexity and Compliance Overhead
From Basel IV and IFRS 17 to AML and GDPR, compliance is now a continuous burden for financial and banking firms, not an annual checklist. Manual audits consume time and resources, while global operations face overlapping regulatory frameworks. Compliance thus becomes error-prone and expensive without a unified system.
Rising Expectations and Omnichannel Disconnect
Customers now expect their banks and insurers to know exactly who they are, what they need, and where they left off, regardless of the channel. According to Zendesk, 77% of business leaders believe deeper personalization drives higher customer retention. But broken systems and data stuck in silos prevent most BFSI firms from delivering on that promise.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud: A Foundation for Resilient BFSI Operations
The complexity of modern financial services makes speed, accuracy, and personalization hard to scale. More so when customer data is fragmented and compliance rules are constantly shifting. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is designed to solve that problem. It gives institutions a secure, connected platform to simplify operations and improve services, while keeping up with regulatory demands.
Pre-configured for banking, insurance, and wealth management, FSC reduces time-to-value and helps teams shift from reactive service to proactive engagement.
A Unified 360° View of the Customer
In most financial institutions, client data is spread across multiple systems. Core platforms, CRMs, service tools, compliance databases, you name it. That disconnect slows resolution times and makes personalization inconsistent. FSC brings all that data together in a single, real-time customer profile. Advisors and support teams can instantly access history, products, interactions, and next best actions. When Ponce Bank implemented Salesforce, it unified dozens of internal systems. That visibility helped reduce handoffs, improve cross-team coordination, and deliver more targeted support.
Customized for BFSI Workflows and Compliance
FSC is built with the structure and constraints of financial services in mind. It supports key processes like commercial lending, underwriting, and policy servicing, and integrates easily with legacy platforms through APIs and MuleSoft. Compliance is managed through built-in encryption, audit trails, and role-based access, all aligned to standards like GDPR and SOC 2. Institutions don’t need to choose between modernization and oversight, they can have both.
AI-Driven Decisions Embedded Throughout
FSC includes built-in AI tools such as Einstein Discovery, Next Best Action, and predictive analytics that enhance decision-making across the customer lifecycle. For banks, that might mean faster credit risk assessments. For insurers, it could be smarter claims triage. For wealth managers, it helps surface timely investment advice. Automating routine decisions and surfacing insights in real time through FSC helps reduce costs and ensure consistent, scalable service delivery.
Agentforce: Putting Power in the Hands of Frontline Advisors
While Financial Services Cloud centralizes internal systems and data, Agentforce brings that same intelligence and oversight to the frontline. It gives relationship managers, brokers, and agents real-time access to customer profiles, policy data, and approved sales content – directly within a secure, mobile-first workspace.
- Faster onboarding and productivity across distributed sales teams\
- Stronger adherence to regulatory and brand standards
- Better visibility into advisor performance and customer engagement
- Reduced friction between front office and core systems
What makes Agentforce more powerful today is its integration of agentic AI capabilities that take the initiative itself. Think of it as the cockpit for your customer-facing teams, now enhanced with intelligence that proactively surfaces insights, logs interactions automatically, and retrieves pre-approved materials—all while staying aligned to internal governance and audit requirements.
What’s Next: Three Salesforce Trends Reshaping BFSI Strategy
Salesforce is already well-embedded into BFSI. The focus now is on where to go deeper. These three trends are shaping how firms respond to rising demands and evolving expectations.
AI-Powered Agents Are Moving Into the Frontline
Tasks like onboarding, claims processing, and compliance reviews are increasingly handled by intelligent agents. These AI-powered systems reduce manual overhead, flag risks early, and deliver decisions at machine speed. What used to take days now happens in real time, so teams can focus more on relationship-building and exception handling.
Personalization Is Becoming the Standard
With tools like Salesforce Data Cloud, institutions can use real-time data to deliver timely advice, tailored product offers, and proactive service. The goal isn’t just better marketing, it’s embedding retention into the customer’s mind. They stay longer when they feel understood across every touchpoint.
Connected Journeys Are Now the Expectation
Clients no longer differentiate between digital and in-person channels. They expect consistent, informed service whether they’re using a mobile app, visiting a branch, or interacting through a partner platform. Salesforce makes that possible through embedded AI, APIs, and unified design logic that turns fragmented channels into a seamless customer experience.
Ciklum’s Approach to Salesforce Integration
Integrating Salesforce involves building a secure, scalable infrastructure that supports smarter decisions and real-time compliance across the BFSI enterprise.
Start with the Right Outcomes
Every engagement begins with clear goals. We set clear business outcomes, whether it’s improving lead-to-cash velocity, increasing data visibility, or tightening compliance reporting.
Build for BFSI Complexity
We use the right methods for the task – REST and SOAP APIs for real-time sync, Bulk API for high-volume data, and Platform Events for event-driven architecture. With expertise in MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, and Informatica, we connect Salesforce with ERP, billing systems, and core banking platforms, without pausing operations.
Embed Security and Compliance at the Core
Data integrity is preserved through accurate mapping and transformation. OAuth 2.0, encryption, GDPR alignment, and role-based access controls ensure each integration meets the security and regulatory demands of financial services.
Support Extending Beyond Launch
After go-live, we stay close. From monitoring and optimization to documentation and Salesforce release readiness, we help your teams scale confidently and be ready for any adversity.
Rethink Your BFSI Workflows with Ciklum
The challenges facing financial institutions today run deeper than ever. Legacy systems, compliance pressure, and rising customer expectations can’t be solved by scratching the surface with isolated tools. What’s needed is platform thinking, strategic alignment, and execution you can trust.
Ciklum brings deep BFSI experience, robust integration capabilities, and the ability to turn complexity into practical outcomes through engineering solutions built for scale and resilience.
Have a conversation with the Ciklum team to explore what a more resilient, connected BFSI operation could look like for you.
