Bluewolf and salesforce.com recently hosted an exclusive financial services breakfast briefing at the London Stock Exchange. Here are my 3 key takeaways from the event.

1. A key concern and potential barrier for financial services firms wanting to enter the cloud space remains data security. Although salesforce.com is one of the most secure systems on the market, things such as the Patriot Act and Swiss banking laws continue to make it difficult for European-based financial services firms to get compliance officers and legal departments to agree to store data ‘outside’ of corporate networks in the cloud.

When it comes to storing sensitive data in the cloud, there are options available to help:

• Encrypted custom fields allow you to store sensitive pieces of data in the cloud such as credit card numbers.
• Mashups allow you to store key transactional data on in-house servers while displaying the information on screen. From an end user perspective, they then have a one stop shop for all key customer and prospect information.
• Cloud encryption gateways provide on-the-fly encryption, or data tokenisation, giving more control to the customer.

2. Cross-selling is a driving force within many financial services firms today. They are operating in silos with little to no knowledge of what the other business units are doing. In this difficult economy, we are all trying to do more with less and it is important that no opportunity goes unnoticed!

A good cross selling initiative must have some key tenants in order to make it successful:

• Flexible technology that provides ease of use, visibility, security, and strong analytic capabilities.
• A program driven from the top down with strong and visible executive support.
• A well-thought-out change management and adoption program.

3. Collaboration is a hot topic in today’s business world, but it’s not just a passing trend. Bluewolf helps organizations increase internal collaboration through the deployment and adoption of tools such as Chatter and externally facing customer and partner portals.

Collaboration has real tangible benefits for your business:

• More opportunities to engage your customers 
• Make the sales process faster and easier
• Improve your relationships with your customers
• Realized revenue benefits

Download Bluewolf’s latest Whitepaper: Financial Services Industry — Delivering Customer Engagement In The Cloud to learn how leading financial services companies are boosting their success strategies with the cloud.