Understanding Relationships in Financial Service Cloud
Picture a wealthy client with a big family, a trust, and multiple advisors. How do you keep track of it all? Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) makes it easy. This article helps financial advisors understand and visualize complex relationships using FSC’s Relationship Map, different account types, and special links that connect people and accounts, making wealth management simpler and smarter.
Why we need Relationship Map?
Imagine that you are an advisor and need comprehensive view of the client’s financial and relational landscape. This includes their personal finances, non-financial relationships (e.g., legal advisors, accountants), household-level financial data (e.g., aggregated assets or liabilities), and other ties like trusts or business partnerships. In short, you need a holistic view of the client’s relationships.
FSC’s Relationship Map creates an easy visual chart of these connections.
Types of Accounts:
In FSC, accounts are central to managing client relationships and financial data. The platform extends Salesforce’s standard Account object with specific features tailored for financial services. Here are different type of accounts.
1.Business Account — represent organisations or entities, such as businesses, trusts, or partnerships.
2. Household Account — represent groups related individuals or entities whose financials are aggregated at group level.
3. Person Account — represent individual clients. It’s special type of account which groups Account and Contact fields together.
4. Institution Account — represents a large, complex financial institution or organisation, such as a bank, hedge fund, pension fund, or investment firm
Junction Objects: The Glue of Relationships:
When we associate two parties- be it two individuals, business or entities, under the hood below junction objects are used.
Account-Account Relationship- connects accounts (e.g. Business and household)
Account-Contact Relationship- connects individual entity with business
Contact-Contact Relationship- connects people, like Sam Jackson to his lawyer
Reciprocal Role- shows how entities are connected, like “Trustee” or “Advisor.”
Relationship Map:
Relationship Map is OOTB component from Salesforce, you can add it your page layout. Using this you can visualise how accounts are inter connected.
Use Cases:
We’ll incorporate different account types — such as Person, Business, Household, and Institutional Accounts — and examine how they are visualised in the Relationship Map.
Get Sucharita Mondal’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We’ll also demonstrate how associations are defined for one-to-one relationships (e.g., a client and their trust) and multi-party relationships (e.g., a household with multiple members and external advisors), highlighting the role of junction objects in linking these entities.
Use Case: Relationship Map for an Individual Client (One-to-One Relationship)
Scenario : A high net individual client, Sam Jackson. Who owns family business.
Accounts Involved:
a) Person Account- Sam Jackson (Individual entity)
b) Business Account- Family Business (Jackson Hotels)
Observation:
Even though Sam is a Person Account, he appears as a person/contact because the Map uses a special link (the Account-Contact Relationship) to connect him to his business, making it clear and easy to understand.
Use Case: Relationship Map for a Household (Multi-Party Relationship)
Scenario: High net worth family of Sam Jackson, his spouse and two dependents. This family has legal advisor, financial advisor and owns two businesses.
Accounts Involved:
a) Household Account- Jackson Household
b) Person Account- Sam Jackson, Reena Jackson (Spouse), their children (dependents)
c) Business Account- Jackson Industries, J&R Goods & Services
d) Contact- Legal Advisor, Financial Advisor
Observation:
A person can be linked to many households but he/she can be Primary Member of only one Household.
Here both Jackson Industries and J&R Goods & Services are Business Accounts. Which forms Account-Account Relationship with Jackson Household.
Here both Legal Advisor and Financial Advisor are Contact and will show Contact-Contact Relationship with Sam Jackson. Observe the other two screenshots for relationship with Sam Jackson.
Conclusion:
FSC’s Relationship Map simplifies complex client relationships. It helps advisors understand and manage clients — from individuals like Sam Jackson to large organizations — with confidence.
