Guests

Full Transcript

Episode Teaser –

00:00:03 – Heather
And I think when you think about accessibility and ability to see a little bit more into that scoring methodology, that what’s not there is as important as what is there. Say you’ve got an executive that wants to build your business bank book and that’s our objective for the month of April. Great. Where do you start? Well, let’s get into segmentation, let’s get into scoring, and let’s use that for our first calls as we try to think about building out some of that origination and really cross sell to those customers based on what we know saves a ton of time.

00:00:36 – Heather
You’re getting the best customers coming to you at the right time for the right product. I mean, that’s where the magic happens.

Episode Intro –

00:00:55 – Fred
Hello, and welcome to Banking on Disruption. I’m Fred. You’ve turned into show number two, and we have a great one in store for you today. First up, we’ll be joined by Heather Ryan-Christensen and Elliott Spence to discuss all things number 23 release. Afterward, Dane and I give our perspectives on current Salesforce and banking news and trends in our Quick Takes segment.

00:01:17 – Fred
While you’re listening to this podcast, why not take a moment to follow us on LinkedIn at Banking on Disruption podcast page and on Banking on Disruption. Now sit back and strap in because our show is coming to you right now.

Main Segment – Summer ’23 Panel

00:01:40 – Fred
This week for our main segment, Dane and I are excited to welcome Elliott Spence and Heather Ryan Christensen. Elliott’s a former banker located in Cincinnati, Ohio. Having previously worked at Fifth 3rd bank and First Financial Bank, he’s now a principal consultant with 21 Salesforce certifications, eight nCino certifications, and eight professional accreditations from Salesforce. I’m not sure how he has time for all of that when not working. Elliott’s officiating high school wrestling in Ohio, training for a marathon or training on Trailhead where he holds over 1000 badges.

00:02:11 – Fred
Wow. Elliott, tell me how’d you get all that done. So with the Trailhead side, my goal is always one a day. I try to get on there and do one a day. Now when projects get busy and life gets busy, I can’t do that.

00:02:23 – Elliott
I actually haven’t completed a badge in quite some time now with summer 23, which we’re going to be getting into, that’s going to be caused me to complete quite a few because I want to get caught up on the notes. But then when work winds down, I try to put a goal in front of me of doing something that I don’t like to do. And I hate running. I really do. Always have because it dates back to my wrestling days.

00:02:45 – Elliott
It was a punishment. So I started running a little bit and I’m like, let’s try a marathon. Let’s see what happens. I did a half last year and actually, a week from today, a week from recording the show, I’m going to be doing the Flying Pig Marathon here in Cincinnati.

00:03:00 – Fred
Hats off to you, man.  I always say only if a bear were chasing me and maybe not even then. Thanks for joining. I don’t even think then. Fred you’re probably right. It’s been a good run.

00:03:11 – Fred
And Heather, you’re a former banking executive and chief revenue officer at Zennify. You’re a graduate of Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo School of Business. And in your free time you can be found chasing your one year old son and coaching T ball. Now that sounds a lot more fun than running a marathon. Yeah, a lot less cardio.

00:03:31 – Heather
Although my step count is surprisingly high, so taking that again one step at a time with that little guy being. Alive, I’m sure my son is 18, almost 19, and it’s all I could do to make him walk more than about 15 steps back and forth to the kitchen. So enjoy that step count while you can, but thank you both for joining us. Dane? Yes.

00:03:55 – Fred
I thought we would kick off nice and easy by asking what is the one feature in summer 23 that you are most excited about? Heather? Well, I know we’ll talk a little bit about the density of all Salesforce releases, so this is actually a very difficult question to answer.

Heather
Decision optimization, although it’s in beta, is probably the most interesting to me. I know there’s a lot that we all have to learn and a lot of sandbox play still to be done to really see where the capabilities lie there, but it’s definitely one that’s most relevant.

00:04:33 – Heather
Right. We’re talking about ChatGPT constantly, how AI is going to change the world, although we’ve been thinking about this for many, many years, those that have played in the Einstein space. But it’s really great to see Salesforce dive right in and think about optimizing some of the capabilities we already have within the Einstein suite. When we think about propensity scoring, chat bot blocks, like how to make a lot of this easier and more approachable for institutions we work with. So that’s definitely one of those pieces that from case management to cross sell capabilities, how we think about everything under the sun, even a lot of some of that risk mitigation.

00:05:17 – Heather
Fred, I know you’re all too familiar with these are kind of the building blocks to really make Salesforce an actionable place for AI that I’m really excited about. I will add like a 1.5 to that. Really excited to see more investment within customer segmentation or member segmentation. I think that’s an area where we think about a decade ago I was doing that completely manually and you could spend an entire year trying to segment your customers to actually put together actionable campaigns. Think about touch, think about branch modeling, all sorts of host pieces.

00:05:54 – Heather
So looking at the ability to turn that on and then pull relevant data sets, think about some of those list capabilities, gosh the data set records at 10,000 or something. Along those like really interesting and then layering on propensity modeling to some of that is really exciting to me to think about elevating conversations and elevating some of that customer touch.

Fred
I definitely agree 100%. I think that decision optimization is something that I think has been a feature that’s a long time in coming. I at one point thought I was going to have a career more focused around machine learning and artificial intelligence.

00:06:37 – Fred
I actually went to Northwestern and have almost completed a master’s in data science. And one of the things that I always found concerning about the Einstein series of functionality is kind of the black box nature of it, the fact that it is kind of a mystery. You can kind of look at the recommendations and get a sense that they’re directionally correct. But I think with the optimization of feature set and like you said, Heather, a ton of time needs to be spent playing around with in the sandbox and kind of see what those results look like. But I think this is really going to add some of those missing pieces that are going to help a lot more companies feel comfortable in relying on those recommendations.

00:07:19 – Fred
I don’t know. Elliott, what are your thoughts?

Elliott
That’s something I’ve been diving into much, much more. We were mentioning ChatGPT and AI and we see it more and more on projects with we have all this data at hand, we have all of this information available to us. How do we use it better or how do we use better, more efficiently, improve our customer relationships using it mitigate risk, using that automation and it kind of pivots into what I’m more not necessarily more excited about, but it kind of falls into the same vein.

00:07:53 – Elliott
And reading through the release notes is the scoring framework available for financial services cloud. And this is something that we have all this data in Salesforce. And if you’re an organization that has, we have our financial account information in there, we have our customer information in there, we have all of this data, how do we better use it? And this is something that it requires a financial services cloud and b CRMA, but powering those both together to build this scoring framework. And it kind of comes in two phases, is building the scoring framework or building this information into a data set that tells us what are customers more likely to use, what products would they most likely use based on?

00:08:36 – Elliott
What they’re currently using, or the current behaviors that we’re able to decipher within that data? Or are they more likely to churn based on data you have in a system? So you’re able to build that framework. Now with the scoring framework, again, much like Heather said with the last one getting into a sandbox and playing with it, how do we build this model? Salesforce does give you two models that you can use, but obviously you’re going to have to get in there and build your own model to give you that information that you need.

00:09:05 – Elliott
But then based on those models or those data sets that come out of the scoring framework, you can build those actionable lists. So if you have your agents, call center agents or sales team in Salesforce, you can build these actionable lists based on the prediction Salesforce provides to you that looks at, again, financial accounts, their account information, their case information that if you have customer complaints or something like that coming into Salesforce.

00:09:35
I don’t want to say it’s strictly AI, but you have a scoring framework now available to you that’s going to help you better identify opportunities on your customer base or who’s going to potentially churn from the organization.

Fred
Yeah, I think that’s spot on. I’m curious, what do you think are some of the top use cases that you think people are going to be the most excited about when they get their hands on that feature?

Elliott
So it’s cross selling. That’s what jumps first and foremost to me that you have all this data in there.

00:10:03 – Elliott
Maybe they bring over looking at it at financial accounts, maybe it’s their primary wealth management customer or they’re primarily a retail customer or you see that they only have a mortgage with you. Well, based on those behaviors, how they’re paying that mortgage or how they have a mortgage and maybe they have a home equity line with you, but a minimal deposit account. So based on all this information, what are the opportunities for cross sell with them or as it calls out in the release notes, likelihood to churn. So if they have deposits and they’re taking large withdrawals out of that or taking big chunks out of that deposit account or savings, are they potentially going to churn? So it’s identifying opportunities like that within the organization to retain customers or also crossset with them and grow the relationship much quicker than you traditionally would without the model.

00:10:55 – Heather
I love that. Do you mind if I step in, Fred? By all means. I mean such a good call out. Elliott.

00:11:02 – Heather
I think there’s a financial brand article they published probably a couple of weeks ago on that white space quiet on propensity to a trit for a customer. And I think when you think about accessibility and ability to see a little bit more into that scoring methodology, that what’s not there is as important as what is there. And so getting to get your hands dirty and play around with that, to kind of look at the data and the lack of data to your point to think about cross sell capabilities or where you’re going to see customers a trip. I think when I’ve looked at that customer segmentation list calling, say you’ve got an executive that wants to build your business bank book. And that’s our objective for the month of April.

00:11:49 – Heather
Great. Where do you start? Well, let’s get into segmentation, let’s get into scoring and let’s use that for our first calls as we try to think about building out some of that origination and really cross sell to those customers based on what we know saves a ton of time. You’re getting the best customers coming to you at the right time for the right product. That’s where the magic happens.

00:12:12 – Elliott
Yeah, I agree. And it’s something that we’re asked about so much on different projects is can you build me a report that’s going to tell me who I need to contact and when or who’s going to potentially step a trip from our organization? And it’s usually you have to build these highly customized reports that basically it’s built on guesswork that we’re doing or the organizations prepare or providing to us, like customers with large withdrawals. So we can do some of that. But this takes away that mostly guesswork and provides that you’re building this scoring framework and then Salesforce has taken it from there by putting their predictions together based on the data that you provided and then you can have those reports available to you that are going to better help you service your customers.

00:13:01 – Elliott
Again, it’s something that it’s FSC, but it does require CRMA to enable this feature. You’re such a good steward of Salesforce calling out the license types. I love it. Yeah, it definitely takes a lot to keep straight. Yeah, for sure.

00:13:20 – Dane
Explain that. What is CRMA? So CRM analytics. So it’s changed names quite a bit within Salesforce. From Tableau CRM to Einstein Analytics.

00:13:30 – Elliott
And now whenever you hear CRMA, it’s just a different license. It used to be Wave back in the day. Yeah, it’s changed branding quite a bit, but it’s an extra license type, which it’s essentially a different product that enables a ton of different features with the reports. But it’s dashboards that are available with it. So you can bring in data, you can run dashboards basically on data that’s in Salesforce, but also outside of Salesforce.

00:13:55 – Elliott
So if you have data that’s in five different platforms or databases, you can bring those into Salesforce, build the dashboards based on that data without that data. Actually living in Salesforce, I was getting. A little far afield from this release, but I have definitely seen a lot of trend towards banks in particular, wanting to run their customer acquisition more and more out of CRMA, basically leveraging that as the desktop that drives their daily activity. And the rest of Salesforce is primarily kind of a logging and kind of pipeline management. But CRMA is coming more and more to the front and center and I think it’s a very robust tool set.

00:14:35 – Fred
Yeah, extremely robust and it’s something that you hear more and more about all the time. A lot of organizations are using it. Absolutely. I’ll share my favorite feature and I’m going to go the other direction and get a little dorky a little technical. I’m super excited every release with more and more flow features.

00:14:55 – Fred
And one of the ones that I’m super excited about is the fact that the Http call out action to go out and fetch data is now ga and they’ve gone beta to do Http posts and so now declaratively inside of Flow, you can go very easily go fetch data and post data and I think that’s immensely powerful. I’m super excited to get my hands on that. I can think of a ton of use cases for bringing in that kind of data and making it actual on the platform without having to go and write your an Apex. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. I’m a Flow nerd myself and I use it all the time.

00:15:38 – Elliott
Even before Salesforce started retiring workflow and now process Builders Summer 23, you can no longer build process builders, you can edit your existing ones, but with ever release, Salesforce comes out with so much inflow. So it’s almost getting to the point where you don’t actually have to know a lot of code to get do things that are super powerful within Salesforce. And there’s a ton of Flow features that came out with this one. And there was a lot in this summer release, but I actually think it was less than you’ve seen in the past two or three releases with Flow, but there still was a ton of ton in it. And what you just mentioned are two that are extremely powerful and like you said, it really eliminates you having to build your own Apex classes.

00:16:20 – Elliott
You don’t have to be a developer to get extremely powerful and doing those Http the posts and everything. So yeah, it’s an extremely powerful feature they released. It’s funny because part of my thoughts there friend, I’ve just been I want to hear more on Omni and I want to hear more on how we can take advantage of that from a flow segmentation perspective. So really good deep technical pieces. I’ll take your word on some of that.

00:16:49 – Heather
Again, going back to this changes and regulations that are coming for our industry, having the ability to kind of reconfigure, change up how we’re thinking about some of those process builds is so critical. We think about doing more with less right now. Those are exactly the features that we have to be looking at for how can we do more with less and how can we react quickly to this changing regulatory environment so that we are not caught on our heels? Yeah, no, that’s absolutely spot on. I’m curious to shift gears a little bit.

00:17:23 – Fred
There’s a lot in here and Salesforce has been around for, I guess about 20 years, a little bit over 20 years now. Reading through the notes, what was the most duh feature like, what is the feature that you’re like? I can’t believe Salesforce has been around for 20 years and they didn’t have this. What do you think, Haley? Any thoughts there’s quite a bit that I wrote down in this vein around duh features.

00:17:48 – Elliott
I would say the two that jump out of me and actually there’s probably three that jump out of me. But number one, they’ve been around 20 years. With this release, you can now have the when you’re building your page layouts, a button that you can click and says you want to align the fields horizontally. And that’s one like when you think about if you read through the release notes, you’ll see what this is exactly. But when you’re building your page layout, some fields on the page layout take up more space than the others.

00:18:15 – Elliott
Think address fields or long text area fields. Because there’s address, you got city, state, zip code, country, and then next to it you have a phone field, which is only one line of data. Well, on the page layout, it’s going to look super weird because one field takes up a lot more space than the other. So now you can click a button when you’re building your page layouts and it says align these horizontally so the page layout doesn’t get all out of whack. With those fields next to each other, the address field will take up the same amount of lines as your phone field.

00:18:47 – Fred
I love that you mentioned it. That is the exact feature that made me think to write this question, because. I read it and I was like, you know what? I can’t believe Salesforce. I mean, obviously it hasn’t had it, but I just couldn’t believe that this is the new feature 20 years in.

00:19:00 – Elliott
Yeah, I didn’t even like and I’ve seen it on page layouts, building them on projects and stuff. You look at it and it’s like, it looks terrible, but I can’t do anything about it. And you never even thought to even put that in as an idea because it’s just an annoyance, but not something that jumps out at you. But it came with this. So now when you’re building them, you can click a button, align them horizontally and it fixes that for you.

00:19:21 – Elliott
Number two is building dashboards. You can have filters at the top of the Salesforce out of the box, like standard dashboards. You used to be able to have three filters, which seemed kind of like limited, like, why can’t we have more? So with this release, you can now have five. So this is the two I’ll mention right off the bat.

00:19:39 – Heather
We can get into some others. Elliott taking the words right out of my mouth there, it’s like, oh, guys, guess what? Five filters. Now let’s bang the gong, have a character run out and cheer. Yeah, it’s always good to have more layers to pull through, but it is kind of funny how something so simple can be revered.

00:20:01 – Heather
I think I’ll add, and this isn’t with a look back 20 years, but the basics as we think about some of the product acquisition on the Salesforce side. That’s the post to Slack button calling out on Dash. It’s like, again, should be a basics as we think about a lot of the framework, although I’m glad to have that. It’s kind of funny to see you’re. Surprised it took that long to get in.

00:20:29 – Heather
When was the Slack acquisition finalized? Think it was three years ago. Yeah, I believe. Yeah, if not longer. At least there was talks of it.

00:20:39 – Heather
But here somewhere, it flies. Time flies. What do you guys apparently with this release, greater integration with Slack? What does that mean? Any predictions on that?

00:20:52 – Heather
I haven’t done a lot with Salesforce and Slack myself. I use Slack all the time. But when I envision, it’s thinking like if you’re an organization that’s using Salesforce and Slack and think of a financial services shop, obviously a big part of your business is referrals. And if I send you a referral or something in Salesforce, the biggest thing that usually happens is we set up like email alerts or notification or maybe you don’t see it until you get into Salesforce, but if you have Slack and Salesforce, usually you’re not using your email for a lot of internal communication. You usually slack each other.

00:21:31 – Heather
So if I send you a referral, maybe it just bam, it pops up in Slack. That’s like one of the biggest things that I think of and I would automate if we had a bank that’s using Slack and Salesforce. It’s a lot of those things that you generally see email notifications or even custom notifications in Salesforce for. I would just deliver them right? To have it popped to them on Slack.

00:21:55 – Heather
Or if they have a shared Slack channel with like mortgage, something like that, all that notification would be delivered right there in Slack. Yeah, I think we hope to see more capture from Slack, right? I think that would be great rather than more double entry. So I think there’s a lot more that can be done there. But to Elliott’s point, right, I think those working groups or rooms when you’re talking about talking to your underwriters through a loan origination, having them in one spot, having that communication, your appraisal, you’re all working kind of real time to get that done.

00:22:26 – Fred
But then that data capture being within Salesforce, as you think about tracking some of that origination and then giving that transparency to customers, I think that flow will continue to get tighter when we think about Slack integration. I think both of those make a lot of sense. When I think about Slack, I continue to think about the real power, is that it’s a completely different user experience form factor than Salesforce. And so I tried to think back to the first time I looked at MuleSoft. I saw the different layers of abstraction and then there’s the endpoints.

00:23:03 – Fred
There’s always Salesforce and that it have here’s your portal or your digital banking platform. And to me, Slack belongs right there alongside it. And that there’s definitely situations where bankers and other people especially spent a lot of time out of the branch and out in the field, can use Slack as that interaction layer to Salesforce and other back end systems. So if you’re really building kind of an abstracted API based user experience layers, you can use Slack to go and reach into your load origination system and get the status of a loan in Slack and not have to go to Salesforce and not have to pick up the phone and call somebody back at the branch and ask them what’s the status of this particular loan? There’s a number of use cases that I can think of where Slack is able to fill that gap.

00:23:54 – Fred
And then the bonus is when you find something that is out of sort, you can then use Slack to bring other people into the conversation in context and say, hey, this loan has been in loan committee for a week. What’s going on? Why hasn’t this been approved? And you can get a lot of eyeballs on it and start moving things down the road. And I’d love to see a lot more use cases for Slack that go that direction.

00:24:21 – Heather
I think that is a tremendous amount of power. That is the moment pretty much untapped. Yeah. So Fred, basically you’re saying we don’t need to talk about the Salesforce mobile app release note piece because Slack will circumvent. I think it’s a both end.

00:24:39 – Fred
I love the enhancements that are coming to the mobile app. I love that you can finally do some things with the mobile app that have ultimately be done in the browser experience before. But again, I think that if you’re really going to get banks and other institutions to want to adapt Slack over other communications platforms, you have to stop thinking about Slack as a communications platform. Right. You’ve got Microsoft out there basically giving teams away for free.

00:25:09 – Fred
And there’s a lot of things that you could do with Slack. And APIs is one where they are 100 times more powerful than Teams. And I think we would all, in the ecosystem, do ourselves a favor. We spend more time talking about those and less about the straightforward collaboration communication use cases. You’re spot on.

00:25:32 – Dane
Yeah, that’s a keen observation. Coming back to Summer 23 release, is there anything that comes to mind that you find surprising? Anything unexpected? One of the things that has been asked about, and it’s been an idea out there for a long time for like a feature. Not even a feature, just an update.

00:25:56 – Elliott
On the FSC side, Salesforce still doesn’t support three digits in interest rates, so it’s still two, although it’s very common when you have like a 3.75 or something like that. Interest rate. Well, in Salesforce, those fields are still only two digits. You can only have like an 8.5 or 8.95. So it doesn’t support those three digits, which is a huge annoyance when you get into working with mortgage shops or just interest rates on CDs or savings account.

00:26:26 – Elliott
So that’s something that’s not there yet, still not. And that’s kind of like a surprise. Like, how is this kind of like we were talking about with the line fields horizontally? How has this not been fixed? So that’s one of them.

00:26:36 – Heather
That’s kind of like a shock that it’s still not here. And who knows when it will be? Hopefully next release, it becomes one of those duh features. That’s what it is. It’s like, how’s this not there?

00:26:47 – Dane
So that’s one that shocks me, that it still hasn’t been delivered in this release. Elliott, are you just custom building right, to fix that? No, not really. I mean, it’s just something that you either have the round up or round down. If it was.

00:27:01 – Elliott
This is the core within Salesforce. Yes. You would custom build to try to resolve for that or have a resolve for it that way, but it’s the out of the box fields don’t offer that. Painful. Yeah.

00:27:14 – Dane
What’s your take on that, Heather, with your background making? Like, I’m thinking .5 rounding up at that point of like, wait a second, my wife and I, we manage finance. It’s a game of inches. Oh, yeah. Thinking .5 gets rounded up.

00:27:31 – Heather
I don’t like that. Yeah, you get the double. I mean, we’ve built out and I’ve seen many customers customize some of that where it’s a must have for specific permission sets and it doesn’t have to be all encompassing, but where that’s kind of a requirement when you’re having the right customer conversation. For those folks that are really investing in Salesforce as the place everyone is operating in, you kind of have to lose the customer trust on what they’re looking at from a printout versus what you’re speaking to them live about. So I think there’s a lot of those pieces that we continue to see improvement on the Salesforce side to work for financial services firms.

00:28:15 – Fred
But, yeah, the number is going to be right. Yeah. That’s something you absolutely have to get right. That’s what I always called go to prison numbers. You’ve got to represent customer assets and liabilities accurately.

00:28:30 – Fred
That’s what always gets people in trouble. I know we’ve talked about quite a bit. I want to make sure we don’t leave anything major on the table. Heather Elliottt, anything else that you think is a showstopper or a feature that we would be remiss if we didn’t call out? Well, I mean, one of the things that is at the top of mind that I use on just about every project now is dynamic forms.

00:28:52 – Elliott
Ever since that came out, when dynamic forms came out, it only represented your desktop page layouts. Then with Winter 23, there’s a lot more that came into dynamic forms, but it was still only available to represent your desktop layout. Obviously, you have dynamic forms. You have dynamic actions now all available. Well, with this release, you have dynamic forms for mobile, and what that means is and what dynamic forms are for anybody that doesn’t use them.

00:29:20 – Elliott
You really don’t have to use your classic page layouts anymore. You can build your Lightning layout that represents your record layout, but then you can dynamically choose to show sections or certain fields based on criteria what’s on that page layout. So if you have multiple record types, you really, if you want to, only have to have one page layout. And now it supports mobile as well. So it makes things a lot easier if you have a shop that’s big on the mobile app as well, and you want certain things to show, if they’re looking at mobile versus the desktop, you can align it that way.

00:29:53 – Heather
So I think that’s a big win. It’s a good call. Elliott, I think I talked a little bit about just the Omni Studio and capabilities there. I think probably less even not to a two off topic, but outside of the release notes. Right.

00:30:10 – Heather
It’s just something I think we’re not talking about the capabilities enough. I find in many conversations with executives, they’re confused that it’s even a part of FSC and definitely want it to be used a lot more and show a lot of value even in what’s been rolling out in the past six months. So I think it’s one to double down on or look at both from a Salesforce admin perspective on how to improve a lot of that flow writing and taking that a look at Omni Studio. I’m curious, I’m a big fan of Omni Studio. I’ve loved the tool set since before Salesforce bought Velocity and when Velocity was restricted from selling it into any financial services companies other than insurance companies.

00:30:55 – Fred
And I kind of wished for a lot of years that banks and wealth firms had access to it. I know what the line is, what the official line is. But I’m curious for both of you, as you’re talking with customers that are looking at flow and they’re looking at Omni Studio, and they’re curious about when do I use one, when do I use the other? How are you navigating those conversations? What kind of guidance are you giving people?

00:31:20 – Heather
I mean, for me, if it ain’t broke, spend your time on kind of net new and where you can think about some of those pivots. If your flows are working as they are, I think that’s fantastic. But really looking at those where you’ve got processes that are continually changing, as we talked about earlier, I think that’s a huge one for customers. I know we’re seeing that across treasury management, deposit acquisition, so many new capabilities when it comes to turning those on extremely quickly. And that’s where I would tell my customers.

00:31:58 – Elliott
And in working with Salesforce directly on how to talk about that is really focusing on what do you have to execute on with some degree of efficiency right now. Let’s get that done. Yeah, I typically look at is it staying internal versus going external? Because with Omni Studio, you’re going to be able to a bring in and utilize a lot more data from a lot more systems, going out and grabbing data, pulling it back in, using that for like decisioning and things like that. And you’re also really going to be able to brand it however you want with Omni Studio.

00:32:31 – Elliott
I mean, Omni Studio, I mean, it’s super powerful to be able to do certain processes. The data doesn’t necessarily have to be in Salesforce, so you can go out and grab it from external systems, deliver data to external systems, brand it how you want it, and do a lot more complex automation. So if you’re a shop and yeah, it’s something that a lot of people don’t even realize it’s included with financial services cloud now. So if you’re looking at building out things like a loan origination system, you want to be able to originate deposits and allow your customer to go on your website and apply for a deposit account. And then based on that deposit, you want them to also be presented with certain loans that may be available to them or different offers.

00:33:18 – Elliott
It’s all possible within Omni Studio that’s not something that necessarily can be done with flow. So if it’s like an internal thing, like, I want it available just to my user base within Salesforce, I’m probably going to go with a Salesforce flow no matter what it is they need, even if it’s just a complex screen flow. But with Omni Studio, you have a lot more available to you. Great summary, Elliott. With this release, over 600 pages, with all this hulk lately of digital assistance, I wonder, is there a place for an app, a digital assistant to help make sense?

00:33:55 – Dane
What techniques are you guys using now to ingest all of this information that make sense of it or think about your customers and making recommendations about putting them in a place to leverage some of these new offerings, et cetera. How do you keep up with that? It’s a lot and it’s overwhelming for a lot of folks, but I think that’s, gosh, this is where the Salesforce ecosystem comes into play, right? You’ve got the wonderful three legged stool, right?

00:34:28 – Heather
You’ve got Salesforce to help you with that. You have an SI if you’re sitting in the customer side. You’ve got the financial service cloud groups that are also ingesting it, giving ideas on what they’re using and playing around in the sandbox and getting up to speed on a lot of these tools and whether or not you want to turn them on really fast. I think that’s really the power of both this technology and at our fingertips, folks that are using it real time, showing us how it’s working within their tech stack and I think that’s a really good way to do it. I mean, Elliott has spoken very well, so I can go on to the license types too, right?

00:35:03 – Heather
You can whittle things down based on what you have today versus where you’re thinking about going and at least from a customer perspective, or those that are sitting in a house using the tools now, use the folks that have helped you build it and use Salesforce to help you think through, put them on the spot. What should I be using now? What are you seeing other customers using to do that? So make sure you’re not sitting alone reading through those 600 pages in the dark at midnight, stressing about it, use the entire ohana at your fingertips. Yeah, absolutely.

00:35:40 – Elliott
That’s great, that’s great. Yeah. As soon as they’re released, I’m going to jump into release notes. And as everybody’s mentioned, they’re extremely long. I dwittle down to Financial Services, Cloud, Sales, cloud Service Cloud, and other potential industries or products that I utilize a lot.

00:36:03 – Elliott
And then I start to just Google it because there’s so many blogs out there that are immediately going to come out with top ten features for Admins, top ten features for developers, top ten features for FSC. So you can just go through and really read all those. And they do a good job of even adding screenshots or even quick videos based on how they’ve been using it in the pre release, which takes me to step three. And four pre release orgs are available, so you can get those which have those features built in, and you can start playing around with them. And the final thing is Trailhead, which hopefully a lot of the listeners are already getting into.

00:36:37 – Elliott
But Salesforce released their Summer 23 badge and it’s never any kind of like difficult hands on scenarios, but it takes you through a lot of those features, the core features that are mentioned in the release notes. That’s number 1001 for you, right, Elliott. Next one on the backlog, 1031. I’ll get it one day. It’s been a while.

00:37:00 – Fred
I think all of those tips make a lot of sense. In full disclosure, I jumped into the release notes much more quickly this week because of our episode than I normally would have, but I also don’t try to digest it. Certainly didn’t digest all 600 pages ahead of our conversation today. I did go and read through where I thought there would be some interesting items and some interesting gold. I also tried, back Dane, to your question, I tried a couple of AI solutions.

00:37:30 – Fred
The first thing I did is I had been reading about this app called Sharly, which is a document analyzer that sits on top of ChatGPT, and you can take a PDF or a text file or what have you and upload it. And then it basically gives you a ChatGPT like interface to ask questions of the doc. And so I tried that all 611 pages or 617 pages, however many pages that is. And I asked it, can you give me a summary of the five most interesting and innovative new features? And it came back with five all from the first 57 pages.

00:38:10 – Fred
So I don’t know that it read the whole doc either. I think it just found got tired. Things that were they got tired like like we all would, right? So then I decided to to try another Tact, and I said, well, give me the notable new features for Financial Services Cloud. And it gave me six, and they were pretty good, except if you’ve read the release notes right after.

00:38:35 – Fred
Financial Services Cloud is a section on grant making for nonprofit cloud, and it included the grant making functionality in the answer. So I think for anybody that’s worried that ChatGPT or some of these large language models are coming for all of our jobs tomorrow, I think your concerns are overblown. I also tried getting it into OpenAI directly using Auto GPT, and I kept running into a limitation that it would only take 8000 tokens, about 6500 words or so at a time. And so it just kept breaking. So more to come.

00:39:17 – Fred
I’m sure that’s going to continue to evolve, but I think that I’m going to keep with my preexisting techniques of filtering judiciously and looking around for resources like blogs and podcasts like this one. So I really appreciate both of your time. Thank you both very much. Let me ask you, as we wrap up, Heather, if our listeners are interested in connecting, reaching out to you, where can our listeners find you if they. Want to connect the old, boring answer.

00:39:44 – Fred
LinkedIn is a great spot. I like old, boring, LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time on old, boring LinkedIn. I actually reorganized my iPhone a little bit today. I had a lot of buttons on there and I pulled the trigger and I deleted Facebook.

00:39:59 – Fred
So I don’t even have Facebook on there anymore. But LinkedIn is a great go to. How about you, Elliott? If our listeners want to connect, where’s the best place to find you? The best place probably same LinkedIn.

00:40:11 – Elliott
Elliott Spence on LinkedIn. I am on Twitter at Elliott s one five seven. So I’m pretty active on Twitter as well, but that’s about it for me. What does the one five seven mean? That was my first weight class when I wrestled in college.

00:40:26 – Dane
Yeah, I was going to guess that. Got to do the tie. Then I went down to 149, but that was it. I was 157 at first. So that’s what that dates back to.

00:40:36 – Fred
It all comes full circle. Well, thank you both very much. We appreciate it and have a great rest of your day. Thanks. All thank you.

Quick Takes

00:40:52 – Fred
All right. And now it’s time for this week’s Quick Takes. So Dane opening up with an article I read. I think I was late to the party. I guess it was about a week old article.

00:41:03 – Fred
But I read this week that OpenAI spends $700,000 a day just to operate the ChatGPT part of their offering. So that’s not model training, that’s not Dali, that’s not the epis, that’s just ChatGPT. And the reaction that I saw to that article a few different places was, wow, that’s a lot of money. But my reaction was the opposite. The first thing I thought about was last October, Elon Musk announced an initiative to cut spending on Twitter’s infrastructure by one point five to three million dollars per day.

00:41:45 – Fred
Per day. That is two to four times the spend of ChatGPT in cuts. I did a little bit of quick math in my head. ChatGPT has over 100 million monthly active users and $700,000 a day. That’s $21 million a month, or about twenty cents per user per month.

00:42:06 – Fred
In contrast, Twitter has 450,000,000 active users a month, or at least they did in 2022, at $3 million a day, which we know is at least the amount that they’re spending. That’s $90 million a month, or about twenty cents per user per month. So my question to you is, for the same $0.20, where are you getting the most value? I canceled my Twitter account. Yeah, I think it’s interesting way you do the math, because $700,000 a day does sound like an awful lot of money until you actually break it down.

00:42:52 – Dane
So I think that was keen on your part to do them and then just kind of obviously spent your career in the tech space. And so you’re looking at these articles and people are like, oh my God, that’s a ton of cash. And then you’re thinking, let’s break this down. ChatGPT is that kind of generative AI. It’s bringing a ton of value to a lot of people.

00:43:18 – Dane
I’m a big fan and I feel like I’m learning each day how to get more and more out of that platform. Love it. No, totally. I’m the same way. I still have a Twitter account.

00:43:33 – Fred
I don’t actively use it, but I use ChatGPT all the time. No secret for the listening audience. We use ChatGPT to do research for the podcast. I’ve used it to write code snippets for some side projects that I work on. I even used it a week or so ago to write something funny and sentimental on a birthday card that I was sending to a friend.

00:44:00 – Fred
So there’s a ton of value out of ChatGPT, and I know there’s a lot of expenses at OpenAI beyond just this. There’s a lot of expenses at Twitter, but beyond the infrastructure to deliver and keep the tweets going. But side by side, I think hands down, the value is on the ChatGPT side. Yeah, I’ve also used it for some creative kind of use case. You were talking about the birthday card and I was having a conversation with a friend, actually a Salesforce industry colleague and a friend recently.

00:44:38 – Dane
We were kind of talking about that aspect, chat. His take was, okay, so every time someone sends a really interesting or thought provoking message, whether it’s in a card or a text or an email, my question is, is that this person or is that ChatGPT? And then he was like, what’s your take on that? His feeling is that we’re going to sort of lose our authenticity in favor of just sounding more interesting by way of Chat. And he asked my take on that.

00:45:16 – Dane
I was like, Well, I said, I see your point, but will we all become maybe more interesting and thought provoking as a result of ChatGPT? Like, are we sort of in school again? So, I don’t know. Like I said, ton of value, right? There is a ton of value.

00:45:36 – Fred
I think that from my perspective, I’m a big fan of the large language model technique that is behind Chad GPT, but it is inarguable that it is all derivative. It can take inputs and combine them in new and interesting ways, but it’s not actually creating anything new. There’s not net new creativity. It is a lot of repackaging and restating what’s out there. And so while I have used it for blog research, I’ve used it for podcast research, I have yet to have anything come out of ChatGPT that I would feel as opposed to BuzzFeed feels they can just go slap out on the website as ready content, right?

00:46:25 – Fred
It’s good for summarizing, it’s good for getting me prepared and read in on a subject very quickly. It’s not great, in my opinion, for truly creating something in an author’s own voice. I still think I have a little bit of secret sauce to add on the top of that. And I don’t know that large language model is the technology that gets us there. I’m not saying that there’s not some form of AI that gets you to true creativity.

00:46:59 – Fred
I don’t think large language models get us there. That doesn’t discount what it does, but it does have limitations. Yeah. Well, it’ll be interesting to see the story continue to unfold. Switching gears.

00:47:13 – Dane
So I subscribe to HBR. And there was an article recently that I was reading entitled How Banks Finally Get Risk Management. Right? And of course it it centers on Silicon Valley Bank. I was thinking about you reading through it while they were talking about how the bank’s failure destroyed over $40 billion in shareholder value, which is huge number.

00:47:42 – Dane
It’s a lot bigger than $700,000 a day to run. It’S a lot of days. That gets you to 40 billion. Yes, lot of days. And anyway, the article highlights the inadequacy of risk management and governance measures.

00:48:01 – Dane
And the bank’s failure as the article was talking about, raises questions about the role of the Chief Risk Officer, the Board Risk Committee analytical models for assessing risk. I’d love to pick your brain on that and then other things like public risk disclosures and then regulatory oversight. What comes to mind as I share some of those points with you? It sounds like a very interesting article. I definitely would love to check it out.

00:48:34 – Fred
It sounds like the bread and butter of a sound risk management, specifically around balance sheet management. One of the things that came out very early about Silicon Valley Bank in particular was the fact that they did not have a chief risk officer for eight months. So you certainly can’t have an empowered and independent chief risk officer if you don’t even have a chief risk officer. I think that the questions will continue to be asked. The Fed announced significant amount of recommendations coming out of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

00:49:11 –
So we don’t see this kind of thing again, right? So there’ll be questions asked about where was the board at Silicon Valley Bank on some of these key risk issues? And then looking at the balance sheet, looking at and relationships. This goes back even to some of the things that we talked about in our last episode around bringing the data together. We focused around relationship data from the aspect of getting your message out in front of key depositors, key borrowers, key influencers of the bank.

00:49:47 – Fred
There’s also obviously a concentration risk that goes alongside that. When those key influencers got scared and reacted by not just pulling their own money out, but raising the alarm bells in their network, analyzing those types of network effects, not just from a communication standpoint, but certainly from where you’re going to see that risk in your deposits and in your loans. It’s an evolution of thinking about in deposit concentration risk. So I think it’s spot on that I think that’s actually a perfect segue to an article that I wanted to tell you about that I found. I came across an article on Krebs on security this week that was announcing that it found that a lot of public Salesforce, experienced cloud sites are exposing private data unintentionally.

00:50:40 – Fred
Now the good news is that the data exposures are not a Salesforce vulnerability. It is a misconfiguration in these experience cloud sites that are giving unauthenticated users access to records that should only be available to authenticated users. And so that’s important to note. But tell me, what are your thoughts? Dane, have you come across something like this?

00:51:10 – Dane
It’s really interesting. So we’re getting close to officially launching our brand, the Work Stream brand. They’re putting together the content for privacy policy. We kind of challenged ourselves to just say, okay, let’s not just kind of copy and paste GDPR like policy information here. Let’s really dig into this and make sure that we understand it and that we get it and that we’re abiding by it.

00:51:40 – Dane
And so we looked at GDPR, CCPA and NYPA which is kind of like New York’s version of GDPR. They’ve got California’s version and CCPA New York’s version and NYPA. And what we did is our content and again it’ll go live, but our content comes from the perspective of a little less technical incur. It clearly stating exactly how we’re using people’s data, and then number two, with how we’re protecting it, and then number three, reminding them what their rights are and then making sure that we can deliver on it’s. Interesting when you really dig into it.

00:52:27 – Fred
So I guess I’d summarize it in answering your question. I think that more and more organizations might see the rise of a chief data officer with really making sure that person is keeping the organization in shell compliance, that sort of thing, around these privacy policies, because it could get sticky, this could become messy and it could become an issue. That’s my feeling on it anyway. I definitely think that is spot on. I think for me, it really underscores the importance of having good policies defined around data access.

00:53:11 – Fred
Really getting your data classification correct on what is sensitive information, what is PII, making sure that you’re partnering very closely with your CISO or someone in the CISO office to identify classify that data, and then really taking a good look at how you configured Salesforce and your other systems to make sure that that data is being stored. As well as that, you’re only exposing it to the people that need access to it, whether it’s inside your organization or outside your organization. I definitely want to make sure I underscore very clearly that this is not a Salesforce vulnerability. It is an issue in configuring proper access to data. Right.

00:53:58 – Fred
And Salesforce is a very complicated system. Sometimes there’s a lot of nuances to get right. There’s a ton of use cases where a company might want to take data in Salesforce objects and make it available on their experience cloud site to unauthenticated users. Right? That’s a good functionality.

00:54:19 – Fred
We just need to make sure that when we do that, we’re only exposing the data that we want to expose and we’re not inadvertently exposing data that should be kept private. Yeah. Switching gears. Fred we were talking about Twitter earlier and I was never big Twitter user. I’m probably more LinkedIn than anything else when it comes to social networks, but I read a surge not on chat JPT and was looking at an alternative to Twitter and I noticed that in several lists there’s a social network called Mastodell.

00:55:00 – Dane
I’m still getting started, but as I understand kind of like the position they’re taking as a social network is decentralized, open source, besizing privacy, customization, ad free experience. Where does the money come from? How is it supported? Not sure about that. Will there be limitations as a result?

00:55:25 – Dane
But like a federated kind of structure also want to promote diversity and collaboration.

00:55:36 – Dane
Have you heard of Mastadon? I have not. In fact, as you’re mentioning it, I just pulled up the website. It reminds me a lot of Twitter. I see a stream of posts.

00:55:48 – Fred
It looks like some interesting content. I love the idea of having spaces that are a little bit more curated, spaces that are a little bit more walled gardens. To go back to the term from the AOL and Copy serve kind of days. Part of the reason I stopped using Twitter is there was way too much noise to the signal. There’s still good information there, but the site made it so hard due to lack of controlling bots, due to lack good content moderation to find the good information.

00:56:30 – Fred
And I think they’re incentive by getting as many eyeballs to sell either placement or click through Ads. Because as we all learned, it’s expensive, right? Twitter is cutting $3 million a day from infrastructure cost as it’s just on infrastructure. So these platforms are expensive to run. And as they scale up, I’m just curious about the business model that’s going to support that.

00:56:58 – Fred
If it’s not going to be ads and it’s not going to be subscription, how are they going to grow in scale? Yeah, and I think they definitely are promoting diversity and collaboration. And the collaboration pace is interesting. What their vision for that? Right?

00:57:18 – Dane
Are we talking about just collaborating on anything that’s kind of open source? Does this become the slack of open source collaboration? Or is that aspect of mastodon something that maybe businesses can leverage on like a collaboration social networking platform? Does it take on that kind of element as well? Not sure.

00:57:47 – Dane
Be interesting to see. Awesome quick takes as usual. It’s going to be great to see some of these stories unfold. And we’ve got some things going at the house this weekend. I’m going to be looking for a great Barbacoa recipe and thought we go about the jump back into ChatGPT.

00:58:08 – Fred
You are making me hungry and jealous. I love Barbacoa, but it was Great Dane to talk again this week and look forward to chatting soon for sure. Take care, Fred. Later.

Outro

00:58:28 – Fred
Well everyone, we hope you enjoyed episode two of Banking on Disruption. I can’t thank our guests, Heather Ryan Christensen and Elliott Spence enough for kicking off our first panel discussion on the Summer 23 release. We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for upcoming episodes, but most importantly, we want to hear from you. Cadena and I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and ideas for new episodes. Why not drop us a line?

00:58:50 – Fred
New episodes drop every other Thursday, but in the meantime, you can visit our website@bankingonderruption.com for show notes, including a full transcript of today’s show. Also, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. And finally, we’d love it if you followed us on LinkedIn and Banking on Disruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena wishing you success in your digital pursuits.