If your trust company is looking at CRM options, chances are Salesforce has come up. It’s the platform most consultants recommend, and for good reason. It’s powerful, well supported, and trusted across industries.
What a lot of trust companies don’t realize going in is that Salesforce doesn’t function well for trust companies. Even with Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud (FSC), which does have features built for retail wealth management, the platform falls short. It wasn’t built to handle multi-family, multi-generational family relationships. It also can’t handle the complex relationship structures that trusts present, including beneficiary and related party networks. It’s even less equipped for special asset management. And it can’t handle the workflows and processes specific to trust administration—the ones that simply don’t exist in retail wealth management.
Oftentimes, trust teams don’t realize the limitations of the platform until a year (and sometimes millions of dollars) into the build. The good news is you have more than one way to get from here to a working system.
Broadly, there are three paths:
1. Build it yourself on Salesforce
2. Buy a trust-specific system that’s already built
3. Buy a trust-specific foundation on Salesforce and configure it as you go
Each comes with real tradeoffs. We explore those below.
BUILD: You Bought a Ferrari, But All You Got Was a Box of Parts
We hear a version of this from clients often enough that it’s become a running joke internally. One consultant summed up building a CRM on Salesforce this way: “You’re sold a Ferrari, but you don’t realize that you’re actually getting a box of Ferrari parts that you have to put together.” It’s a fair description of what a lot of trust companies experience when they try to build on Salesforce, with or without FSC.
Salesforce really is a Ferrari. Powerful, flexible, and with proven security and scalability. But out of the box, it makes no distinction between a legal entity and an investment account. It doesn’t come with distribution approvals or account onboarding workflows that consider beneficiaries or trust document reviews. It can’t handle special assets like real estate or art or oil/mineral/gas interests or provide a way to do investment or admin reviews. And it certainly is not integrated with your trust accounting system. All of that has to be built, which means taking the time to teach consultants how the trust business works and translating your day-to-day fiduciary work into a system that wasn’t designed with fiduciaries in mind. You have to teach the platform, piece by piece, how a trust company operates.
The upside is real. You do get the benefits that come from being on the best-of-breed CRM—if it’s done right. But the tradeoff is real, too. Full custom builds routinely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and, for larger organizations, can stretch into the millions. Perhaps even more critically, management needs to spend a lot of time with consultants or internal teams to teach them the data requirements and data structures needed for effective trust administration.
Timelines to get to a workable system often stretch two to three years, and even then, many teams land with only a fraction of the functionality they pictured on day one. The risk is real that you end up with a CRM nobody uses. You have the car, but you still can’t drive it.
BUY: Ready to Go, If You Can Find It
In theory, buying an already-built, trust-specific system is the fastest way to skip the education process altogether. A system that already speaks the language of trust administration means nobody has to teach the platform what a trust is or how a distribution gets approved.
In practice, it’s impossible. Search around and the only options you will find are either a CRM built for retail wealth management with a trust feature or two bolted on or trust accounting systems that may have some insufficient and inflexible CRM capabilities added.
What you won’t find much of is a true purpose-built CRM for trust administration, one that handles relationships, onboarding, and distribution approvals the way trust companies operate. That gap is a big part of why so many trust companies end up on the build path by default: not because they want to build from scratch, but because nothing off the shelf was built quite right for them.
BUY-BUILD: The Ferrari’s Already Built, You Just Pick the Options
Good news! You don’t have to spend years assembling your own Ferrari or settle for a box of mismatched parts from the open market. With buy-build, the Ferrari is already built. WealthHub starts with Salesforce already loaded with the data model and workflows trust companies use every day: legal entities, related parties, beneficiaries, distribution approvals, special assets, all of it. No box of parts. No consultant learning curve. You’re driving on day one.
You get to decide which options fit your organization. Working alongside your WealthHub customer success team, you configure the out-of-the-box workflows to match how your trust company operates. Want distributions routed for approval in a certain way? Need an extra review step for a specific account type? Want your onboarding checklist to look different for different types of trusts? That’s the flexibility, built right in. You’re not giving up customization. You’re just skipping the part where you build the engine from scratch.
You get Salesforce’s world-class CRM engine under the hood, an object model already built for trust administration, over 20 of the workflows most commonly used for trust administration, and a customer success team that helps you dial in the configuration, not the construction. Because it’s built on Salesforce rather than a closed system, it still connects with the rest of your tech stack, and you can keep shaping it as your organization grows. And you get it live in three to four months instead of two to three years, guided by a team that has made this exact trip many times before, for a fraction of the cost of a custom build.
How to Choose the Right Option for Your Team
The build-versus-buy question is no longer an either-or choice. You can have the platform strength of Salesforce and the fiduciary-specific workflows your team needs right out of the gate, without giving up the ability to adapt as your organization changes. You can move your organization off spreadsheets and paper files in months, not years. And you can free up your trust officers to spend their time on client relationships instead of clerical work and system babysitting.
The Ferrari was never the problem. What was missing was someone in the passenger seat who already knew where you were going, and enough room to still choose the route.
Ready to see what a purpose-built trust company CRM looks like in action? Learn more about WealthHub.