As your bank grows, you need a team and technology that grows with you.

Crossing the $10 billion threshold is a huge transition for a company — requiring investments in technology, skilled people, and new processes to accommodate changes in compliance, audit, and workflows.

Salesforce is a key tool that can consolidate these workflows, give your team better visibility and access to information, and help you be more diligent and focused around compliance and risk management requirements. If there’s one thing Salesforce does particularly well, it’s scalability and speed-to-market.

Here’s what you need to know about your technology needs as you look at crossing $10 billion in revenue:

1. Changing compliance and risk

The most important aspect of crossing the $10 billion threshold is that there are new compliance programs you need to implement. While the specific legal requirements often change based on the current administration, it’s still vitally important that you upskill your staff or upgrade your capacity to handle specialized compliance requirements.

Financial Services Cloud can implement and handle new processes and protocols to ensure your bank stays compliant and up-to-date on any new regulations that apply to your business. 

For example, banks over $10 billion in assets go through a much more stringent review process for annual auditing. When you have a tool like Salesforce with built-in Shield security, you can easily see your audit history, build out a true change process and governance model, and add de-risking processes into your sales, marketing, and complaint management services. When it’s time to conduct an audit, you have a 360-degree view of everything that’s taken place during that year so auditors can pull the reports they need quickly. This makes the entire process smoother and easier to manage.

2. Balancing your efficiency ratio

Another revenue impact for banks to think about is efficiency ratio. 

What trips up a lot of organizations is that they don’t start thinking about what happens after $10 billion until they’re already at $8 billion or $9 billion — but investing in workflow efficiency well ahead of scale is what’s going to help you grow faster. (But don’t worry, it’s never too late to start!)

The larger you grow, the more likely you’ll be able to eliminate some physical locations, consolidate systems, and harness economies of scale, building more capital and flexibility to invest in technology with automation capabilities that can drive the efficiency you need.

When you do think about your technology investments, your current team capacity, and skill sets, you want to make sure you’re choosing a platform with built-in automation, AI, and predictive insights so you can continue to move smoothly. With Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, you can get built-in forecasts, churn models, and more so you can see what’s impacting your efficiency ratio and take action.

3. Optimizing your workflow for more everything

The bigger you grow, the more likely those annoying gaps or workflow processes will become glaring issues, especially if you throw mergers and acquisitions into the mix. You can use Salesforce’s expansive functionality to drive scale and efficiency, moving from legacy technology to optimized workflows.

With Salesforce, you get a single pane of glass when it comes to complaint management service cases, marketing campaign visibility, segmentation, and change control on the platforms, among other things. If you haven’t yet thought through some of your processes and how bulletproof they are, Salesforce can help smooth over transitions, get everything out of clunky spreadsheets and into streamlined user-friendly interfaces, and make it possible for teams to collaborate easily.

4. Collaboration all in one place

The biggest complaint I see from the larger banks we work with is that there are too many systems to get things done efficiently. There’s one platform for loan origination, another for customer service, and still another for CRM. Salesforce can do it all.

Once you cross the $10 billion mark, you need to manage multiple scenarios. How does the bank plan on meeting increased FTE and technical skill sets as they keep evolving? What type of platform investments and business optimization initiatives need to be considered? What silos currently exist? You need a strategic long-term vision to get from here to there.

That requires working together as a team, breaking down silos between organizations, and working together on a single platform. Salesforce enables these workflows to really come to life, thinking through what truly drives long-term value for your business, whether it’s designing new processes or acquiring a smaller firm.

I recently spoke to a client who was about to go through a major acquisition, and not sure how their technology would hold up. Of the six potential initiatives they proposed, four of them could be directly handled in Salesforce — it was just a matter of connecting the dots between existing systems, business processes, and engineering to give them the scalability they needed for the acquisition to go through seamlessly.

5. A data infrastructure that makes sense

All of this is powered by data.

With Salesforce, you can centralize your data to create a single customer record, whether a customer has student loans, a mortgage, or is running their own small business. This is especially relevant if you plan to cross $10 billion through an acquisition, since you don’t want to disrupt progress on any initiatives or customer experiences, but still want advanced analytics that will create a bigger picture. Having visibility into managing business lines in more detail gives you a look into an optimized future. Instead of constantly looking at past performance to understand how you’re doing, you can start forecasting future performance with confidence.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud gives you the power of scale

The more you grow, the more you need to invest to continue that growth.

Moving into the $10 billion range is a big deal for banks — but luckily, Salesforce is more than a CRM. It can be the single operational platform, workflow platform, engagement platform, and data platform you need to keep your bank growing and operating smoothly.

Consider partnering with someone like Silverline around an initiative like Salesforce to see all the different ways it can fit into optimizing your growth. With more than ten years experience in the financial services sector, we can help you identify key optimization opportunities, assist with transitioning from legacy systems or multiple platforms into one single operational flow, and more. See what Financial Services Cloud can do for you.