Salesforce Ventures takes on a minority stake in Hearsay

Hearsay’s compliant, regulation-ready social media, voice, text, and website solutions extend the power of Salesforce to wealth management, banking, insurance, and home lending customers

Hearsay Systems, a trusted leader in compliant digital communications for the financial services industry, today announced a deeper partnership with Salesforce to provide compliance at scale for heavily regulated financial services firms to deliver a human client experience across digital channels. With Salesforce, Hearsay will continue to reinvent the advisor-client experience in wealth management, home lending, property and casualty, and life insurance by allowing advisors and agents to authentically and intelligently grow business relationships by proactively guiding and capturing the last mile of digital communications. Salesforce Ventures also took on a minority stake in Hearsay.

“Salesforce’s 360-degree view of the customer, workflow, and analytics plus Hearsay’s compliant last-mile engagement together deliver the human client experience at scale which advisors and customers need now more than ever,” said Hearsay CEO Clara Shih.

“Customers are increasingly navigating their lives through seamless digital experiences, and the interactions with their financial services partner should be no different,” said David Dintenfass, Chief Marketing Officer at Fidelity Investments. “Fidelity is glad to leverage Hearsay’s platform to enhance our customer focus by simplifying communications through text messaging, which will integrate with our Salesforce CRM. Digitally-driven capabilities like these give our advisors more time to spend on what’s most important, serving their clients.”

Naveen Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, Prudential, explained the importance of seamless integration from first interaction to last mile:

“Our advisors think deeply about the needs of our clients and help them make complex financial decisions. They act as approachable authorities and are a trusted partner. To do this well they need connectivity and consistent communication with our clients. Enabling our advisors with the right communication tools, from first interaction to the last mile, with seamless CRM integration is essential for success. A technology-enabled advisor is the future, and key to realizing Prudential’s purpose to help clients do better in an ever changing world.”

“Hearsay’s last-mile customer engagement platform is a natural addition to our Salesforce applications,” said Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager, Salesforce CRM Applications. “With a growing set of regulations introduced across industries, organizations need to ensure that their sales, service, and marketing teams follow compliant communications with customers. With Hearsay, we are excited to deliver these enhanced capabilities to Salesforce customers.”

Hearsay serves more than 170,000 advisors and agents at the world’s largest financial services firms including Allstate, Ameriprise, Farmers Insurance, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential. The partnership will encompass stronger product integrations, allowing insights from advisor activities to be captured in Salesforce, thereby providing visibility into omnichannel advisor-client conversations that are happening in the field across compliant text messaging, mobile calls, social media, and advisor websites.

“The first phase of digital for banks and insurers was automated engagement – mobile apps and push notifications, email automation, ad targeting. Now, especially in the pandemic, financial services customers are demanding authentic engagement with their financial advisors, bankers, and insurance agents,” says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Systems. “Customers want the speed and convenience of digital combined with the empathy and trust of their relationship manager. Salesforce’s 360-degree view of the customer, workflow, and analytics plus Hearsay’s compliant last-mile engagement together deliver the human client experience at scale which advisors and customers want and need now more than ever.”

Built on the Salesforce Platform, Hearsay for Salesforce is currently available on Salesforce AppExchange, the World’s Leading Enterprise Cloud Marketplace.

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About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce is the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), bringing companies closer to their customers in the digital age. Salesforce Ventures, the global investment arm of Salesforce, invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Ventures is building the world’s largest ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies and extending that technology to customers. Portfolio companies receive funding, strategic advisory, and operating support, and can easily join Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 400 companies, including DocuSign, GoCardless, Guild Education, nCino, Twilio, Zoom, and others across 22 countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.