Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So if you see, 5 years is a long journey, Pankaj, in a technology space. Market dynamics are changing. Customer tastes are changing. Technologies are changing. So every 2 years, what we do, we do a kind of mystery shopping. We go to the dealership as a customer and we find out how a loan is being processed by our staff there. And we have also tried, even the business had tried, we had tried getting a loan into the -- from the system. So we found out that there are a lot of [ core debt ] -- and a lot of [ lacunas ] have come into the picture in last 2 years. So we tried modifying our LOS-trained underwriting and entire onboarding processes. And with the 3-step LOS process, where -- with the progressive profiling of the customer through our internal bureaus and tightly integrated with SFDC and various third-party data providers, the integration has really helped us to progressive profiling of the customer. And also, to add up to that, for the customer who are -- and see, when the customer goes to the dealership, especially on the festive period, when the load increases manifold, so we have on the -- coupled with the progressive LOS, which is now 3 minutes -- it sometimes gives the -- operate within the seconds. So we have given a QR code, which is kept outside the dealership, which is scanned by the customer. And before entering the dealership, he has the offer in his hand, which comes in a few seconds with the mobile number. And suppose we want to give -- we have also enabled the do-it-yourself journey, powered by Salesforce and connected with the call center, dealership and our CSMs, who can -- a customer can get the offer immediately. That not only saves the time of the CSM who are working on SFDC and front-ending a lot of customers. So here, customer is there, who can go to the staff and say, "Boss, this is my offer. Give me the delivery." So that kind of progressive things, we have done on this. And this has also helped a lot to our customer -- employees when we first launched in 2020, 2021. So people used to -- they used to use monolithic desktop, laptops, and they had to be at one place with WiFi-enabled. Now some of the people running -- going on a state transport versus they have generated the lead and disbursed the loan. We achieve it in half an hour.

Wow. That's amazing.

Those kind of journey. Then they have also benefited because now they can [indiscernible]. They're earning more. And also for the partner, now we have enabled for the partner or the community cloud -- partner community cloud, they have the pulse of the lead. They can onboard the customer. Our staff is not required. They can talk to the customer, and entire journey is only -- is enabled to the partners as well. For the management or for the -- from the organization perspective, now we know, because of the segmentation, what have been done in the Salesforce, we know who are our A-plus customer or A customer. So accordingly, we can tailor our experience and they can -- we can feel them -- highly valued. So all this thing has really helped us, all ecosystem, not only the employee but the customer, the partners and also the organization as a whole.

Yes. Thank you, Rajendra. And one thing I know about you personally is you love running. You try to keep yourself as fit as possible, and that's actually reflecting not just within you but also as a part of the team that you're leading and the business that you're managing. So that brings me to just maybe one last question, in terms of the way you're keeping fit, yourself fit and your team fit, because you have an eye towards the future. What's your vision? What -- how is it that you are -- what's your vision in terms of what are your futuristic aspirations? And how is it that you expect this business to evolve over the coming years?

I think, more or less, it would impact by the latest technologies, which is coming into picture. We have been disrupted a lot in last decades or so, maybe more than that. Social came. Mobile came. Digital came. Paperless came. I think we all evolved, and we migrated towards them. If we don't do that, I think then it is very difficult for us to survive and companies as a whole. So as you talked about the fitness, so my physical fitness, I -- that is taken care by the running, but the mental fitness, taken care by all those evolving technologies because we have to be always on -- to the mind, always have to really scan what is happening in the market, talk to people like you who can guide us. So it's a mind-body integration, which always keep us fit. So I think the latest technology, which is happening, is the AI, gen AI, which is disrupting the market a lot. Fintech enabler are there. We are also trying to evolve on that. I would say that AI will really evolve, and it will impact multiple processes of a lender like us. We can -- using the AI in future. I mean, future is AI, what I feel. We can see the tailor-made loan for the customer as per his financial needs, the automated cater -- underwriting and faster approval for the disbursal. And gen AI, which is -- though it is nascent at this stage, but I feel that can power the virtual assistant, which will guide the customer throughout their journeying from application to the repayment. Other than that, I think AI can also be used to automate the -- to optimize the risk management processes, streamline operations, help in reduction in inbounds, enhance the fraud detection ratios. I think all those thing will really help us to evolve over a period of time. And also, last but not the least, if you know, that we are a -- we are highly regulated entities. So in the compliance, I see a big place where gen AI can help us, which can browse the space and find out what our latest regulatory bodies are saying and whether we are compliant on that or not. So I think there is another use case I can see will really help us, lenders like us, to be compliant all the time [indiscernible].

Yes. I think we should surely talk on that in detail. But thank you so much, Rajendra. As always, I learn from you every single time I meet you and interacting with you. So thank you so much, once again, for your time and really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Yes. Thanks, Pankaj. Likewise, yes. See you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Awesome. Thank you, Rajendra. Thank you, Pankaj, for that amazing conversation. Thank you, Rajendra, for your trust in Salesforce and helping the audience understand how is it that you're leveraging Salesforce and the value that it provides and also giving us a sneak peek into what's there in the future and the potential that you see. Now going on. Before I get into what is it that Digital Lending for India is, just wanted to take some time to give everybody a perspective of how are financial services companies, be it banks and NBFCs, leveraging Salesforce today. Now any [ finance ] organization, be it a bank or an NBFC, can manage the entire customer life cycle on one single platform, which is Salesforce. What is it that I mean by that? Let's do that with an example. Let's say Mithlesh today is a record that is sitting in your transaction system, in your payment system, in your origination system, in a warehouse, in a data lake. Now how do you bring all of that information together to create a unified view of who Mithlesh is: identifying the segment that I belong to, putting me on those targeted marketing journeys for the products that I'm interested in and on the channel of my choice; and when I express an interest, managing that entire lead across different channels, nurturing me; in case I drop off at any point in time, managing those entire drop-off scenarios, personalizing that experience for me; and when I am interested in getting onboarded for that particular product, managing that entire onboarding life cycle, right from [ QBE ] to underwriting, to any verifications that get triggered, to eventually an onboarding or an account opening; and in that process, integrating with as many as 40, 50, 60 different touch points to make it as seamless for me; and when I become a customer, providing me service across different channels. And hopefully, I should not be a customer that you have to spend money -- spend time collecting money from. But even the entire collections life cycle can all be managed on one single platform. And while you're doing that, collecting feedback, understanding how is it that I'm -- how my experience with the bank or an NBFC is and tailoring the processes around it and using all of this data to enrich that customer 360-degree view even further, all of it can be managed on one single platform: a platform that's product agnostic, which means that you can manage any sort of onboarding. It could be a secured asset or an unsecured or a microfinance; a platform that's built for reusability, which means I can build once and reuse that while giving you the extensibility and capability to customize it using the low-code, no-code capability; a platform that's channel agnostic, which means I could reach out to a bank across different channels. It could be a digital channel, a physical channel. All of it can be managed in one single place and bringing all the stakeholders that I interact with. It could be the RM. It could be the DSA. It could be the contact center or the risk and underwriting team, bringing all of them on one single platform. Now all of this is powered by the customer success platform that we have that you love, that you have been using, bringing everything around sales, service, marketing, analytics, collaboration on one single platform. But just how your customers' needs are evolving, our customers' expectations are evolving as well, which means every time we went to a customer, they're like, "You've been doing this for any number of years." We need -- even while Salesforce is amazing, its agility, scalability, we heard Rajendra talk about it as well, but we need even better, faster time to market. We need to onboard customers even more -- faster. We need a much reduced TAT, and for that, we need prebuilt loan origination capabilities. We don't want to do it all over again, build it from scratch. We need prebuilt integrations, which we've done for any number of customers. And lastly, we want to provide a much better RM experience. While Salesforce is amazing, but then we want to take it a next level higher. And that's why, for the very first time -- and I'm very happy to announce and talk about it again. It's for the very first time, Salesforce has built a solution that is purpose-built for India, and that's what Digital Lending for India is. Now what is it? It's a unified origination platform providing banks, NBFCs and financial institutions a single platform to originate customers across different products: providing prebuilt intake experience for relationship managers, thus making RMs much more productive by giving them a very intuitive, seamless, prebuilt intake experience; providing underwriters with an enhanced view of that entire application, giving them an enhanced review experience, giving them everything that they need about a particular application in one single place, the data related to it, the documents, the integrations, all of it in one single place, where they can take a decision on an application in a much more faster way. Having prebuilt integration templates, along with the ability to orchestrate these integrations to run manually, automatically, significantly reducing the time to market by making configuration of these integrations purely simple. And very happy to announce that we partnered with Perfios to have a lot of these prebuilt integrations already done for you in the product. And lastly, it's enriched with automated processes, thus reducing the turnaround times that it takes from intake to disbursement, giving borrowers an amazing and exceptional experience. Now while digital lending offers a lot of these things, we understand that every business is unique. You have your own nuances, something that make you unique. That's why everything that we're shipping can all be customized, configured using the low-code, no-code capabilities that are available in the platform. And these are the same low-code, no-code capabilities that you all love, like, for example, capabilities like flows, Omnistudio, business rule engine, document generation, along with some newly launched platform capabilities like stage management and integration orchestration, which we'll talk about in a short while, allowing you to quickly configure this entire origination process and integrate with your KYC vendor to get onboarded and for the time to market to be significantly reduced. But it's not a new platform. All of this are of the same Einstein 1 platform that you hear all -- well, all about and that you're using [indiscernible] AI, plus data, plus CRM and now digital lending on that [indiscernible] single platform. [indiscernible] talk about it [indiscernible] next is walk you through a quick demo so that you see a lot of this in [ action ]. [Audio Gap] Awesome. So -- and now these different personas in action. And we'll see how their life gets better, how Salesforce [indiscernible] with their experience. Now to begin with, let's talk about Shilpa. Shilpa is an existing customer of a fictitious Cumulus Bank. She has a savings account with the bank. She's an IT professional. She's recently moved to Bangalore. She goes ahead and updates her correspondence address to the one in Bangalore. Now about Shilpa, it's disconnected, locked in different systems, leading to a lack of a single, consolidated view of Shilpa. With Data Cloud, Cumulus Bank is able to unify and harmonize this data to create a single view of Shilpa, right? It can be capitalized and acted upon. For example, in this case, because she changed her address, her customer 360-degree view is updated. And based on her historical behavior with the bank, she is automatically added to a segment or a campaign [indiscernible] makes buying home simple. She's targeted on the channel of her choice, which [indiscernible], and gets a WhatsApp message asking her to check her eligibility and apply for a loan. I'm Shilpa. I go ahead and click on this. I think it takes me to the Cumulus Bank website, where in a few clicks, simply applying for a particular loan. Now filling in the application is a breeze because I have a prebuilt guided experience on [indiscernible] -- I can fill in minimum required details in a very [indiscernible] manner. So in this case, I authenticate via an OTP. And most of my information, including the demographic details, are all prefilled, making it like truly seamless for me. Now let's say, at this moment, I get a call. I drop off. I'm distracted, and I leave this page right here. Now this interaction is again captured and processed in real time [indiscernible] view and automatically adding her to a drop-off journey segment, a dialer to initiate a call to her and have an outbound call center rep assist her in this journey. Now next, let's look at how Ram, who is an outbound call center rep, has everything that he needs to convert this otherwise drop-off into an amazing experience for Shilpa and more business for the bank. Now let me take the role of Ram. As Ram, when I start my day, one, I'm assigned Shilpa's call. And as soon as I pick up her call, her 360-degree view pops up right in front me, allowing me to have a much more meaningful contextual conversation with her because I understand who she is [indiscernible]. I'm also seeing a time line view on the left, giving me a very [indiscernible] [ how is that ] we've reached out to her. Like, for example, she was a part of the home loan offer. We went on [indiscernible]. She was doing her journey, but then she dropped [indiscernible]. I also have the business, giving me [indiscernible] what are the business [indiscernible] go ahead [indiscernible]. I quickly ask her if she needs a help [indiscernible] to come to her for this application [indiscernible]. She says yes [indiscernible] based on her time and date preference. I [indiscernible] appointment for her [indiscernible] and now [indiscernible] call center rep, have a better conversation with Shilpa but also to convert this drop-off into like a [ seamless ] experience for her as well. Now let's see how I, as Uday ,who is a Relationship Manager at bank, in this process provide her with a great experience. Now since I'm a Relationship Manager, I'm always on the go, which means everything on my mobile. Now when I start my day, I have a dashboard right here which helps me quickly assess how is it that I am performing, how am I doing with respect to me which is -- now I go ahead and meet Shilpa. And I simply continue her onboarding journey right where she had left off, all thanks to the guided, prebuilt onboarding journey that's provided for me. Now authenticated via Aadhaar. A lot of her information is prefilled, making data entry flawless simple for me. I don't have to spend hours putting in all of those details. I -- all of this gets automatically done for me. I go ahead and capture her employment details, her income and asset details, which is quickly verified with the prebuilt integrations, making application processing much more simple. Business rule engine and document checklist walk hand-in-hand for -- to give me a view of what are the different documents that need to be uploaded in this particular [indiscernible], review her eligibility and choose a preapproved loan offer that I'm presented with that matches the term and amount that she's looking for. I can also go ahead and look to any more offers than I want, but in this particular case, she is happy with the offer that is presented by Cumulus, and I go ahead and complete this particular application. Now that's it. Now as RM, my job here is done. And I could do all of this truly seamlessly, effortlessly. And I could do this across different channels. I could do it on my mobile. I could do it on my tablet, making me much more productive and helping me translate that into a great experience for Shilpa, in this particular case, and all thanks to the prebuilt journeys and integrations that sort of helped me do all these. Now her application is all put in. Her application now moves to an underwriter. So let's see how Anjali, who's an underwriter at Cumulus Bank, she's empowered with all that she needs to become much more productive. She has a comprehensive 360-degree view of the application and all the tools that are required for her to make an accurate decision and a faster decision, thus reducing the overall TAT for the bank. Now as Anjali, when I start my day, I start my day by looking at my state of business. How is it that I am performing? How is it that my function is performing? I also have a view of the application that got assigned to me right here. Now while I can look at the entire application, with Einstein, I can use generative AI and Agentforce to get a summarized view of the application, in this particular case. Like here, with her credit report from CIBIL going in the data cloud, I can have a summarized view so I don't have to go through all of it here. Now while Einstein gives me a great summary of her CIBIL report, I also have a comprehensive view of the entire application in one single place, with the key ratios, her credit details, result of the different verifications that have been triggered and fired. I have everything that I need in one single place to assess this. I can review the integrations that have been fired, both automatically while I can fire some of these integrations manually as well. For example, I see that Aadhaar, PAN and name-matching APIs, AML screening, employer verifications have all been triggered automatically and all thanks to the prebuilt integration templates that we're shipping as a part of the product. While I can look at all of these integrations, I can look at all the documents that have been captured based on her loan product and the document checklist, in this particular case. I can validate individual documents with the document on the right and the details on -- with the document on the left and the details on the right in one single screen. And if any document is in unclear or if, let's say, any information is not there, I can go ahead and create an action for both an RM and the customer to provide all of these necessary clarifications. Now let's assume in this particular case the document's unclear. I can go ahead and raise a request for Shilpa to reupload those documents. Now with digital curing, Shilpa gets notified and is taken to this particular page where she can go ahead and upload the documents so that the application does not stop and it moves forward, again converting this from an otherwise drop-off journey to a successful application. Now let's come back to the underwriter. As an underwriter, I can also look at all the deviations that have been captured. Like, for example, in this particular case, the loan-to-value is higher than the permissible limit. I can initiate a conversation with Shilpa right from here, thanks to the prebuilt video PD integration, so I go ahead and initiate that conversation. And once I am satisfied, I can go ahead and approve her application right from here. Now you saw how as an underwriter, as Anjali, I was enabled not just with a great quality application because of the experience that we're giving to an RM, but also a single view of the entire application with AI capabilities, enabling me to take a decision much more faster and helping me to reduce the overall TAT. Now Anjali has gone ahead and approved this application. Shilpa immediately gets notified, again on the channel of her choice, which is WhatsApp. A sanction letter gets generated and is sent out to her. She is very happy because she's got an amazing omnichannel experience, where she started on the web then went into physical and then all of the other things happening digital, in a much more faster way, giving her this entire experience in a record time within days, if not minutes. Now while we saw all of these personas, there is another very important persona that is within the bank, which is Rahul, who's an administrator at Cumulus Bank, because he's the one who's responsible for providing an amazing employee experience to all of these different people that we saw till now so [indiscernible] into an exceptional customer experience. Now while as an admin, Rahul absolutely loves Salesforce, the configurability, the low-code, no-code capabilities, the flexibility and the scalability that Salesforce provides, he really likes it. But he also has a customer, which is his business, and they are behind him because he needs to onboard newer loan products really faster. Now for Rahul, as an admin, he has one single place where he can configure that entire loan application process in one single screen with the stages that an application has to go through, the transitions that it is allowed from one stage to another. And what should happen on that particular transition? Should there be a flow that is launched, an integration that is called, an OmniScript that launched? He can configure all of this in one single screen. So we sort of saw how we're able to elevate not just the borrower experience with a faster approval and an omnichannel experience. We also saw how we're able to delight every stakeholder, be it the relationship manager, the underwriter, the ops, and giving all of them a prebuilt, seamless and simplified experience. All of this that you saw is powered by Digital Lending for India, built on the same Einstein 1 platform that you love, thus bringing AI [ plus CRM ] and now digital lending on one single platform. So that was the quick demo with this. Let's go back to our presentation. And for this, now I'll invite Keerthy to come and talk about the road map and some of the newer, exciting things that we're launching in Salesforce. Over to you, Keerthy.

Thank you, Mithlesh. Thank you all so much for your time. I'm Keerthy Jaganath, a product marketer for Financial Services Cloud here at Salesforce. Mithlesh was talking about a lot of things, which is currently available. You just witnessed the power of the unified platform. And I'm here to talk about the futuristic view on the road map. Mr. Rajendra, we thank him for coming and joining us, and he mentioned a lot about increasing customer expectations across channel of choice. Definitely, all of this is what we've been listening and also the product team is listening, and that's why here's a road map. We work with 78 of top 100 banks, use our industry solutions. We actively listen to all of their pain points and address them in our road maps. Today, bankers are being asked to do more with less. So how is that possible? Unifying data saves time. Automation increases productivity. AI reduces costs. So we have factored all 3. Customers are deploying our solutions with 70% out-of-the-box configuration, decreasing the need for custom code. So it's clicks, not code. It takes weeks, not months, to start showing value delivery. We understand your processes, and we are putting together prebuilt flows for collateral management, auto lending, collections and more. Also, we have India-specific prebuilt integrations, some of which are account aggregation, credit reporting, bank statement analytics and more. How can we not talk about AI? AI is front and center of all our innovations. We are embedding AI right into the workflow, right inside our integrated Salesforce platform without the need for exiting the application or toggling between apps or browsers to find loan information and take actions. Some of them that we're coming up with is: an upsell and cross-sell recommendation; application and CAM report summaries; AI-assisted risk scoring and underwriting, a need that Mr. Rajendra was talking about; product-based financial calculator. Okay. So from AI to agents. We are -- we have witnessed predictive analytics. We have seen copilots. Now we are in the third wave of agents, and we are already delivering value. Customers need instant gratification, a self-serve experience that solves their query or problem instantly. Bank employees are spending hours doing mundane, repetitive tasks of handling queries, simple requests regarding loan information, address updates and doing form fills. Agents bridge this gap. Introducing Agentforce for financial services. We -- some of our customers have already heard about it, and you've heard Mr. Rajendra mention it. And for some of you, if you haven't heard this, then we are going to talk about this through the year. So this is our latest innovation here. We leverage the power of platform. So far, what we saw was gen AI, embedded AI can manage smaller tasks, but Agentforce financial service agents can take on more substantial roles, such as interacting with customers, identifying their banking needs, form fills and even resolving issues like changing an address or ordering a new checkbook. For more complex tasks that require human oversight, the agent can seamlessly transition the -- it to the -- the conversation to the human agent, augmenting the human agent abilities and enhancing their day-to-day work. With Agentforce you can build and customize autonomous AI agents to scale and support your workforce. You don't have to be a senior prompt engineer to do that. You don't have to be a data scientist to do that. It would be right on our platform with simple do-it-yourself techniques. This allows agents to focus more on complex cases and focus on personalization and strengthen customer relationships, all while maintaining top-notch security, privacy, compliance and data accuracy. So here, we have financial services agents coming your way. Our team is rapidly building intelligent agents specialized in financial services. Here's a sneak peek of what's coming up. We are building a banking agent where an autonomous agent goes in front of a customer, takes care of time-sensitive, time-intensive routine tasks, service processes and, like, address updates, refunds, fee reversals. So that's banking agent. And then you have lending agents for -- you have scoring and loan terms. And we have collection agent, which is a voice bot that proactively calls the customer to understand the status of their payments or to remind them of their overdue payments, get collection information and update records. And you have something called collection assist agent. That is a chat assistant for employees of the bank. That is collection team members to get assistance on talking points that you could use to talk to customers, but it's human in the loop all the way. With that, I hand it over to Mithlesh to handle a few questions. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks, Keerthy. If there are any questions that you have, we'll be happy to address.

I see some of the questions around how are we integrating solutions for green financing. So from a Salesforce perspective, it's an API-first platform. And from a green financing perspective, a lot of those go into your underwriting and decisioning models, right? So we're doing it with -- I mean, this is a conversation that we're having with some of the customers, but [indiscernible] in greater detail. I see some questions around whether the product is GA from a Digital Lending for India perspective. Yes, it's GA and it's available. We launched it in the World Tour Essentials this year. So if you're interested, do reach out to your account reps, and we could have a much more tailored demo for you. I see some questions around who are we partnering with. So like I mentioned, we're launching a lot of these prebuilt integrations, and we've partnered with Perfios to have some -- have a lot of these integrations prebuilt. For -- I see a question. "For WhatsApp journey, do we require SFDC credentials?" So while from a Salesforce perspective, we provide WhatsApp capabilities. Like, for example, you can use a unified WhatsApp and use it -- use Salesforce for it. But let's say if you have an existing vendor, we could integrate with that particular vendor and use -- and do that integration via APIs, right, while we also provide for -- the prebuilt native WhatsApp integration. I see the question around how do you -- how the message at WhatsApp from Cumulus Bank is hack proof. Fraudsters are using the same techniques. I mean, it goes to the way that you're currently managing it. And anyways, all of these templates and so on have to be WhatsApp-proof and so on. But if there's any specific questions around that, we can discuss this in a greater detail. From -- I see there are some questions around Agentforce. That's something that we've recently launched at Dreamforce, and it takes the whole game a lot more -- higher. But we're telling customers that -- don't DIY your AI. Salesforce has all of these things prebuilt. I mean, the capability is available for you to simply configure it. We launched it in Dreamforce, and it's something that will be GA by the middle, end of the next month. But we can have a lot more tailored conversations around it as well. So I see these questions coming in -- and apologies for the slight breaking voice that you saw during my presentation. But any more questions? Happy to address them.

All right.

Okay. With no more questions, thank you so much once again for your time. Thank you for taking out an hour early morning to spend with us. I hope this was really helpful. Happy to engage. Reach out to your account reps, if you have any more questions and [indiscernible]. But once again, thank you so much, Rajendra and Pankaj as well, for taking us through those -- through that conversation. And thank you once again, everybody, for joining in and spending this hour with us. Awesome.