PegaWorld iNspire 2024: How RBC Spearheaded PegaForce: A Groundbreaking Implementation Integrating Pega with Salesforce

RBC had the objective to provide a 360-degree customer view on a unified platform. They were able to use DX API services to retrieve data and display it within Salesforce using the Pega Process Extender for Salesforce Lightning.

Join this session to see how RBC established guidelines to develop future Pega applications across geographies – all to optimize reuse and ensure rule compatibility for performing DX API operations. This strategic integration marries Pega Case Management finesse with Salesforce's record-handling precision.

Transcript:

- All right. Is this coming through okay? They didn't have handheld, so I gotta use the podium. All right, good, because all I hear is echo. I can't tell how it's coming through. My name is Scott Andrick. I'm a senior director at Pega. I'm an industry principal. I work with our clients to help prepare them for these presentations. It's actually one of the cooler parts of my job is actually getting people ready to be amazing teachers of what they do, to tell you about how they've been able to use the Pega technology to solve their problems. And so my friends from Minnesota, because I'm from Wisconsin, for those of you who are from the Upper Midwest. Woop, woop, cheeseheads, cheeseheads rule. I also won't tell you I grew up in Ohio. I'm an Ohio State fan, so sorry. Woop, woop, go Bucks. But I digress. The reason we're here today is to talk about, we all know Pega's great technology and you should be using it for everything that you do in your operation, right? Everything. But the reality is every technology investment you have is on a different cycle. We don't come in and replace every single piece of tech that you have. We have to work with what you've got. Salesforce, obviously, large in the space. Decisions have been made and it's great. We've talked about how we play well with other technologies and we've got RBC Wealth Management here to talk about that today. But I wanna do one thing real quick, 'cause we had a bet on this. How many people are not from financial services? I want you to raise your hand if you're not from banking. I said more than half of the audience would be non-bankers. It's about a 50/50.

- [Becky] Yeah.

- Yeah, we said it'd be a good draw across industries, not just a banking session. So we got a good mix. We're gonna have time for Q&A at the end. So if you would please welcome Rohit and Becky to the stage.

- Great. Thanks Scott. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Rohit Gupta. I'm the director for WealthX, which is a program at RBC Wealth Management. I lead the strategy and vision of our unified advisor desktop, which is on Salesforce and our business process management capability, which is using Pega. Join with me today is my colleague on the IT side, Becky, if you wanna introduce yourself.

- Sure, I'm Becky Meisenheimer, director for business process management covering Canada and the US.

- Great. Alright, let's get started. So who we are, right? If you are from Canada, you're definitely familiar with RBC. You probably have a, you know, checking account or credit card with RBC. But if you're not, RBC stands for Royal Bank of Canada and we are the US Wealth Division based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are one of the top 10 full service brokerage firms in the US based on assets under administration. We have over 2100 financial advisors in 190 locations spread across 42 states. And currently our total client assets under administration is over $570 billion. So that's really who we are and what we are doing today here between Salesforce and Pega to be integrated. Alright, so a little background of why the strategic integration was really important for us, right? So prior to this year, our advisors used to use Salesforce for kind of managing their client and household relationships, and they used to swivel chair to Pega to fetch statuses on service requests that they've initiated. When I say service requests, that can be wires, checks, any money movement, right? So if a client is calling them, they're now swivel sharing across two different platforms. It's taking them longer to service their client. So that was one of our very important things that we wanted to resolve, that pain point, reduced navigation, reduced clicks, right? So that is why this was very important for us to solve the strategic integration. Also, it was really important for us to create a seamless and collaborative front, or allow for collaboration between our front office, middle office, and back office. So we are on a single Salesforce org strategy. So the entire US wealth management, about 5,000-plus employees all are on a single Salesforce platform. So we wanted to make sure that when they, you know, when a client reaches out, they're able to service from that same data set that any of these folks are looking at. Also with Pega, we wanted a platform that can allow kind of easy changes and faster time to market when there are regulatory needs, right? So that was really important for us. And finally, I'll call out like having an integrated technical stack, you know, gives us the competitive edge from an advisor recruiting standpoint. It also helps us, you know, reduce attrition of our financial advisors. So this is really the background of why, you know, we invested in the strategic integration between Salesforce and Pega. Alright? So our automated vision with this integration was really to support that unified desktop experience for advisors to enable them to view Pega service requests straight within Salesforce and to not swivel chair or log into different platforms. Alright, so that's where we really branded or created a feature called PegaForce, right? It's really Pega and Salesforce combined. PegaForce is our branded feature for this. The objective was again, to provide that 360 degree view of clients and households in a single unified experience. Becky, do you wanna share, you know, the approach that we took to really establish this vision?

- So we knew for this project to meet that objective, we needed to change how we historically are doing these types of integrations. So typically we would do a custom API, we do a custom UI, and then you have a lot of dual maintenance, dual work when you do a release. And we really didn't wanna do that again. So we really wanted to take a step back and look at how should we approach this technology. And that's where we saw the Pega Extender for Salesforce. And in order to leverage that, like we saw the potential of that. But in order to leverage that, we really had to modernize our platform. We had to look at how we were operating. We needed to go low code, we needed to go out of the box and we really had to look at how we're reusing Pega, like across, 'cause we support, I support applications in Canada and US, and then there's a larger enterprise. So we really had to look at how we could reuse this across the different geographies. And so that's how we approached it, and we knew it was critical to save time, to get market quickly, to reduce that duplication overhead that we went this route.

- Great, and really the outcome of that was, you know, it allows us to marry basically Pega's case management features with Salesforce record handling position using Pega DX APIs and rendering those Pega cases right in Salesforce. Alright, so how did we go from concept to production, right? So I wanna kind of, I think a lot of you probably are in this digital era of transformation, right, and we wanted to share kind of what was our timeline, right, for going from concept to production. So Pega Process Extender was actually, you know, first came out in I think fall of 2022, right? And from then we knew that one of the prerequisites for that was we needed to be on Pega Infinity, right? That was where DX APIs really shine and we are able to leverage that and extract data out of that, right? So in March of last year, we enabled or rolled out Pega Infinity at US Wealth Management. From then we also did a POC to basically integrate Pega Infinity and our Pega Process Extender with our US wealth management Salesforce org. Like we wanted to prove to make sure that these two platforms can talk to each other, right? So that POC was completed in June of last year. Took us about a couple of weeks to really, you know, how those two platforms can talk to each other. You know, when two SaaS platforms are talking to each other, there is always architecture and InfoSec reviews that are happening. And you know, it varies from organization to organization. In ours, it probably took about four to five months to really vet that architecture, authorization patterns, authentication patterns. So I would say about November of last year is when we completed all those architecture and InfoSec reviews, we got the thumbs up, and we all know December, no one really works, right? So we kind of, you know, left that month out. But from then, also what what we knew was, you know, we anticipated maybe we would have delays with architecture and InfoSec review. So what we did in parallel is actually we built our own Lightning web component in Salesforce and it directly with Pega DX API. So that was the one thing we did in parallel. We knew there might be some throwaway work with that because Pega Process Extender is that Lightning web component that comes as a package that you can install in Salesforce. So just to help that time again, faster time to market for our advisors, and they were really, really behind us in terms of, hey, can you get us to avoid the swivel chair experience, right? So we did that in parallel, but in April of this year, we actually enabled Pega Process Extender within our Salesforce production org to allow viewing of Pega cases within Salesforce. Now, some of the custom functionality that we actually built in our own LWC, we were able to layer that or move them easily into this Pega Process Extender package because it's an unmanaged package. So you have full control over any customizations that you want to add on top top of that. So for us, it was mainly around, say, we wanted to launch Infinity contextually from our Salesforce LWC, which is not yet available in Pega Process Extender. So we are able to pull that code out and embed it into the Pega Process Extender LWC. Now, one thing that we also saw is in the last, I would say, 12 to 18 months, our Salesforce mobile adoption had significantly increased. We were trending at somewhere around 10% to 15% of our advisors actually going into our Salesforce mobile app and using it. In the last 12 to 15 months, it went up to 70%. So right now we are sitting about 70%, 75% of our advisors that are also actively using their Salesforce mobile app to access their client's data at any point, and you know, anywhere. So it was really important for us to also enable this integration within our mobile app. And we are working actively with the Pega Process Extender team to also integrate or enable that feature to be available on mobile. There's some authentication and authorization aspects that we are working with them. Also, what else is coming, right? So right now we have it as a read-only or view-only of Pega requests in Salesforce. Very soon, I think later this year or early next year, we will be looking to also allow for approving and taking actions on those Pega requests from within Salesforce. Followed by that would be, that I'm personally very excited about, would be to allow creating of Pega requests from within Salesforce. So kind of, I've given you a sense of what it took us from concept to production, you know, but definitely, you know, the architecture and InfoSec review is really the most time-consuming component of this integration. I think Pega, you know, has all those features available. We had our pretty mature Salesforce org, so it was all about just making sure we have the necessary checks and, you know, patterns approved before we integrated those two.

- And I would just add that, you know, the architecture that we had got approved was also leverageable by our other wealth management business lines. That was something that we wanted to take, be very careful about to make sure that we could take this architecture and it wasn't just specific to US. We could leverage it in Wealth Management Canada, maybe we could leverage it in the commercial banking. So that was something important, and we actually have the line of business in Canada rolling this out later in 2025 too.

- Great, thanks Becky for that. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about so far, what have been some of the high level benefits, right? I'm gonna talk more from a, you know, front office experience standpoint and then Becky will chime in from a technical and operational standpoint, right? So our main focus was again that productivity and transparency, right? We wanted to allow for that client advisor experience was paramount for us and to allow them to quickly answer those questions. So that is what we were able to benefit. And it was, I would say like a game changer to have that Pega integrated from within Salesforce for our advisors, right? It positively impacted our front, middle office, and back office. So as I said, like all those three groups are on Salesforce. So previously they had to go, you know, if the client is calling them and telling them about, Hey, my wire hasn't gone through, what's happening, right? So they are opening a support case in a different platform, which then the advisor doesn't really have visibility into that from within Salesforce. Now because all of that information is available in Salesforce, they can quickly open a support case within Salesforce, so the advisor has full traceability into whether it's a client support service person that got a call from the client, whether it's the advisor that got a call from the client or it was the client associate that got a call, they all are in that single platform, can easily and view those requests. So that was a huge benefit from a traceability standpoint, right? The mobile aspect that I mentioned, so that was really something that, you know, they are meeting with their clients in person, they were able to pull up that, hey, you just, you know, sent in a wire or a check and it's already being processed. They were able to quickly pull that on their Salesforce mobile app and respond to their client. And finally is, you know, probably five years ago, right, our advisors were really focused at a financial account level, right? They used to service, very financial account driven. Last five years with Salesforce and Pega, that's actually changed to look at it more a relationship at a client level. And I think it's really gone to the next level of householding. Like they no longer, from what I've heard from most of our advisors and their big teams, they don't manage relationships at a financial account or a client level anymore. They really start to look at it at a household level. So those are some of the main front office enhanced experiences that we were able to provide them. Becky, if you wanna chime in.

- Oh, sure. So from a technical standpoint, the big benefit for us is we're building the rules, we're building the case, we're building the process once. We're not building it in like a UI and Salesforce and building additional rules in Salesforce. We build it once in Pega and that process leverages the out of the box DX API. So the maintenance is low, it's flexible, we can get speed to market and that's really the dynamic part of this, is it's saving us lots of time so we can build the other stuff Rohit wants us to build. And then these DX APIs, because we're doing out of the box and minimizing customization, we can actually leverage those, while we're using it, in this case, for the Pega Extender, we can actually leverage those for other channels. So our client web channel for example, we do do client self-service transactions. So these DX APIs can be leveraged for that. So again, we're building once and reusing, which is kind of that center-out that you keep hearing about at this conference. Yeah.

- Alright, Becky, I don't think anyone here in the audience believes us, right? I think we've talked enough. Let's show them in action, right? Let's show you what we actually have live in production right now. So this is not conceptual anymore. This is live in production. So let's take a look at that.

- [Presenter] Welcome to the demo for Pega and Salesforce integration. Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management advisors manage client relationships at a household level. Utilizing the Pega Extender component in Salesforce allows financial advisors to have a single view into Pega requests, providing them with a consolidated experience. Existing Pega money movement requests created in Pega are displayed in Salesforce at a household, account, and client level. RBC refers to the Pega application as Infinity, the name which you will see being referred in the demo. Let's jump right in. We have logged in into Salesforce and have searched for the desired account of the client. Now from the household summary, access the servicing tab and scroll to the related Infinity cases section, which display the list of requests as they exist in Pega. This data has been pulled using the Pega Extender component. The data attributes displayed for each case are coming from both Pega API and Salesforce data. The requests list appears in the order of date created with the most recent listed at the top. The columns within Salesforce can be sorted by clicking the arrow next to the column header. Clicking the I to the left of the request provides a custom view of request details. The data displayed is retrieved from Pega. Clicking the Open Case in Infinity button within the request details routes the user to the request within Pega itself, where a user can action it. Data within the table may be exported to Excel by clicking the export button in the right hand corner of the related Infinity cases section. This integration has been an integral component of our automation vision and we look forward to add additional functionality using Pega Extender within Salesforce in the coming year. Thank you for watching.

- Okay, so as you saw, like, you know, we have layered some of those custom features. The view, I can download to spreadsheet. I know like many advisors just love having their view in like a spreadsheet. I think that that's really their client book, right? So we were able to use Pega Extender, LWC, and then layer in some of those custom features on top of that. Alright, so let's talk a little more technical aspects of how this this really came to life.

- The really fun part, right? So how we do the authentication or how we get the data from Salesforce to Pega. So we are using, like we said, the Process Extender for Salesforce. We're using the managed package that's available on the marketplace. And really what happens is the user logs onto Salesforce. Salesforce authenticates that user, and then Salesforce is calling a DX API, so a Pega DX API to authorize that client. And there's exchange of tokens and then they're given a special access token so they can call additional DX APIs to pull back the Pega case data that's specific to that client. So it's doing all the validations and checks to make sure they're not seeing accounts they shouldn't see. And so then they're able to see all of that in Salesforce. And then this is just listing out, you know, the different features. So DX API is, you know, there's a lot of them. They allow a lot of different, different functionality. Right now we're using it for the view case, and you know, we're moving towards doing the take action. We're moving towards the case creation. So these are all available, DX APIs, outta the box in Pega. And so for lessons learned, before I kind of jump into these, I just wanna first point out like one of the big things we did that provided us success is we worked, we partnered very closely with Pega. I see a person in the room over there that worked with us very closely, Sharif. So we worked with them like, as we started this POC, we said we were doing it, they partnered with us, they did add on the fly changes to the product to make it better and to make us get to market quickly. We also partnered with Cognizant who does our development and they provided some critical subject matter expertise to help us get over some of the technical challenges. So that was a big component to our success. For the lessons learned, I would, you know, the two I'll just call out here is on the data. So we had to modernize our platform to get this to work. We had to change our data model. We had to go out of the box. We had to change the way we were doing things with Pega and stay within those guardrails 'cause they're important. And so that allowed us to use the DX API. And then the other is the security, which Rohit referred to. It takes a while depending on your organization to make sure that you are not giving people access to data that you don't want them to have. We have an on-prem Pega application and that's speaking to a public cloud Salesforce application. So we had to make sure that that security was in place. So give yourself a little extra time for that. And the benefits, as you know, Rohit talked about the swivel chair. Advisors don't like to do the swivel chair. So, you know, just enabling that case view where they don't have to go to Pega to view the case, they can actually just do everything from Salesforce, saves them time, even a few seconds of time, multiplied by the 4 million, over 4 million cases that we have in Pega is a big savings, and they can do other more important things and service their clients. The architectural reuse, so as I mentioned, we are reusing the architecture in Canada for Canadian Wealth. We're having discussions with other enterprise teams about, you know, how they can use this. So that's a real savings and jumpstart for those programs. And then just the dual maintenance, like I'm not having to, you know, every time I wanna do a code deployment, we do multiple deployments a month. I'm not having to go to Rohit's team and the Salesforce team and have them make changes 'cause I made changes in my app. So it's really saving a lot of time and money for so that I can, again, build those things Rohit wants me to build.

- I just want to add, you know, or reemphasize the importance of this cost avoidance with duplicating efforts, right? I think many times, it's really ignored, like it's very siloed across IT teams and business teams that, you know, you have some team working on Pega, you have other team working on Salesforce and they don't really talk to each other, right? So with this and Pega Process Extender, the beauty of that architecture was really to allow that, right? We had new case types in Pega. We don't have to make any changes whatsoever in Salesforce. So that's the power of Pega Process Extender in Salesforce, right? So really wanted to reemphasize that cost saving. Like it might seem small for maybe some of your organization's IT budget, but it's a huge savings and less overhead so that our devs can focus on, you know, again, improving efficiency, reducing clicks, and many other features that that come with these integrations. Alright, so again, we have about, I would say, over 14,000 users right now in Salesforce, right? So I have about 5,000 US Wealth Management employees on the org. I also have another clearing and custody business line that also uses Salesforce Experience Cloud, which is about 10,000-plus users. So we have had them, about 15,000 users live with these features since April, and I just want to share some positive testimonials that we've already started to receive from our investment associates, financial advisors, and complex management on how this has really transformed them to faster serve their clients. So just wanted to highlight some of these. Alright, with that...

- That's it. If we could thank Rohit and Becky for their time today. Alright, the good news is we have lots of time for questions. Actually, I wanna give them two call outs. So number one, they used center-out in their presentation, so we gotta give them props for that. Woop woop.

- Do I get a free drink.

- Yeah, get a free drink later. That's right. Emilio and Teal are buying her drinks because she said center-out during her presentation. Yeah, there you go.

- [Speaker] Double.

- Doubles, right, there you heard it.

- All right.

- And then the other element is they showed their live demo. I don't, and Rohit and I were talking ahead of time. It's like I've been in sessions, nobody's showing a live demo. We're gonna absolutely shock the audience with the fact that we're gonna show 'em what we're actually doing. So was that awesome or what? Alright, good stuff. Now here's the great news. We've got plenty of time for questions, but we're gonna do this in an orderly fashion because that's the way I run my room. We have speakers in both of the aisles and if you'd like to ask them a question, I encourage you to come up. I'll let you know if they're both aisles are full, who to go with. But I'm gonna ask the first question while you guys are getting ready, 'cause I know you want to ask questions about this, so get your questions and get in line. So we talked about this, this was the front end joke about whether this was just a banking thing or not. This is not just financial services. So how do you see the applicability working to our non-financial services folks? Go ahead.

- No, absolutely. I think, look, you know, the beauty of this architecture with Pega Process Extender is for any industry or firm that uses Pega for case management and uses Salesforce for CRM or anything in their organization, you can easily integrate Pega Process Extender as long as you just have some sort of a unique key between the two platforms, right? So for us it was that financial account number, it's our unique number, which is available in Salesforce. It is our, you know, number that they use to initiate cases for clients, and we have that as a unique key and we are able to easily render that. So I think across any industry, any form, if you have these two platforms, you can very easily integrate these two.

- Yeah. Okay. Excellent. So question up here in front.

- [Speaker] I did really like the demo I was interested in if you use it in the opposite fashion ever, because our business is mostly, Salesforce will have information that Pega doesn't, and when trying to service the account, you have to open another system and it's time-

- No, yeah, that, that's a great question. You know, honestly, you can, right? For us, Salesforce is our advisor desktop, but you can easily use it the other way. Like we have MuleSoft that we use for orchestrating any data movement in and out of Salesforce, so I can easily expose a MuleSoft API that Pega can consume. So I think that's probably what one of my backlog features in Pega for the future is today it's financial account driven. We can easily have it show client and household information and household is system, or Salesforce is the system of record for households. So if I wanna surface that summary view, I can have Pega call a MuleSoft API, fetch data from Salesforce and show it that way. Similar to how we have contextual launch from Salesforce to Infinity, you can easily create a contextual launch from Infinity to Salesforce through that.

- [Speaker] Awesome, thanks.

- Over here. Oh, it's not on. Nope, you got it. Try it now.

- [Peter] All right, there we go. Good. Hey, Peter Coffee with Soft Serve. I was at Morgan Stanley at LPL, ran their desktops, so I get what you're doing. It's really cool what you did. I guess many questions, but how about adoption, right? The advisors are in their fifties, sixties, they're like, they want to go golfing, they want more time back. How did you handle that?

- Yeah, no, great question. Look, I think, you probably know this, it's their client associates that power the advisors when it comes to technology, right? So really our adoption was focused to make sure their client associates are aware of technology and are using it. And I think a huge shoutout goes to our change management and our, Marissa here from RBC change management standpoint. We involve change management from the day one of our POC, right? We didn't want to wait until we just had a sprint demo or a release demo to show them. We engaged them, we involved them from day one, so they knew what feature is coming with this integration. They were able to give us some of that custom UI/UI feedback that they have already heard from the field and what will make the most sense. So I think change management is a very important piece and we have really leveraged that to the maximum to gain adoption. Like our Salesforce instance is sitting at 97% adoption right now and that for a CRM to have in financial services is huge, right? So getting that, a huge shout out goes to the change management folks for that.

- [Peter] Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's great. Thanks for that. That answer is exactly what we did at Morgan Stanley.

- Awesome.

- Over here on the right.

- [Carl] Hello, Carl Holmquist from Accenture. You guys are showing some enhancements to the Pega Extender in year '25. I was just wondering, are those enhancements you're making or is that part of Pega's roadmap for the extender?

- No, so those actually features exist as part of the Pega Process Extender already. But what happens is, given again, we are on-prem with Pega and then Salesforce is on the cloud, right, so we require all those DX APIs to be onboarded and fully available externally so that Salesforce can consume and that authorization and authentication pattern works seamlessly. So that I think is the main kind of dependency right now. But I'll let Becky chime in as well, if there are any others that you think-

- Yeah, we've found like just from playing around with the POC, that the viewing the cases and taking action on the cases is pretty straightforward with how we've built our Pega application. The creating the case from Salesforce is a little more complicated because our, because like some of our processes we do money movement, transactions, journals, lots of assets. Some of the UIs are a little bit complicated, so we're gonna have to do a little bit more work, and you know, staying out of the box, but having it render properly in Salesforce. So, but yeah.

- Yeah, but I think just to answer your question, those features are available. It's just that our custom implementation with Pega makes it a little tricky to just jumpstart that, right? So that's why we have staggered those as features. We want to do, again, time to market, give whatever is ready and available upfront and then add features.

- Yeah, like that it's leveraging like the Create Case DX API. So. Yeah.

- [Carl] Oh, thank you very much.

- Yep.

- Over here.

- [Anush] Hi, this is Anush from Tech Mahindra. So you showed that Salesforce lists of all of the cases, I think, pulled from Pega via DX API. So when you click on the case then how's the authorization authentication case taken care of? And is it like seamless without a user being able to enter anything, or is it taken care of by the system?

- Yeah, no, I think because, you know, both Salesforce and Infinity for us, we have SSO enabled, right, so they've already gone through on the backend, like we use PingFed, Microsoft, you know, Azure AD as well. So they're already SSOed into those platforms. So when they launch, behind the scenes, those SAML authentication is happening and it's seamlessly transitioning that.

- [Anush] Okay. Thank.

- Thanks.

- Great. Over here.

- [Suki] Hey, Suki from CIBC. This is, by the way, great work, and we are looking to something similar as well. And the question is any challenging around when you have a complex case structures in Pega, and this is going towards the, you know, the UI, how do you manage that? I think you partially answered that a little bit, so I just wanna understand that if you had any challenge around when we have complex Pega applications, we have like five or six or 10 different case types, right? And how do you manage that when you're managing that work within the Salesforce?

- Yeah, let Becky take the complex questions.

- I might need Naveen's help on this one. So yeah, so the create case, it's a little bit like, I mean, we have to kind of go case by case and we'll have to see like what we might need to change. So I'm trying to think of a, there's like a couple examples that we found where we had used out of the box one way and we need to do it a different way to get it to render properly in Salesforce. And then there's a few things like we went to Pega for and we said, you know, this isn't quite working right? Like the drop down's not displaying right, and they were able to fix that in the product for us. So it is a little bit more complicated with create just because of the UI rendering.

- [Speaker] Did you have to create the UI in the different UI framework than-

- No, no, we were just using Pega's out of the box UI.

- [Speaker] Yeah. Okay.

- Yeah, add one thing, I think, you know, also, we had a request that we wanted to show, say, the Fed reference number for a wire in Salesforce. And that was not an attribute that was, you know, there initially part of the integration, it took the Pega team probably like less than a week to add that in the API and we were able to show that within the component in Salesforce. So kind of that iterative way, and we are always looking for kind of user experience and feedback people would give us. What's more important, what can we do to our advisors that avoids them going into that other platform to check for status or attributes, and this was one of them that allowed us creatively.

- And that's a really big thing for like some of these case types, that the regulators looking and changing the laws and we have to change Pega really quickly to accommodate. And then we can make those changes to these cases and we do it in Pega and then it's automatically available in Salesforce. So that's a huge win for us.

- [Speaker] Okay. Thank you.

- [Scott] Over here.

- [James] James Steiner from Merkle. I know this is a session predominantly focused on case management, but mindful of Pega's broader capabilities and how maybe this translates into next best action decisioning and supporting advisors and if there's any view of how these two tools will come together to help the advisors be able to be more effective in what they're selling and other things.

- No, I think we probably need Kareem on- But I feel, you know, that always the product is evolving. This is probably the very first step of integrating these two platforms, AI, gen AI, right, or next best actions. Like, you know, we surface MBAs in Salesforce using Salesforce data. I don't see a reason why in the coming months or years Pega Process Extender couldn't be leveraged to also surface any insight on, say, something that's delayed on SLAs, right, of a case or wire that hasn't happened, to surface that within another CRM platform. So I'm pretty sure that's at some point on the product roadmap or in the backlog for the Pega team.

- [James] Thank you.

- Over here.

- [Wendy] Good afternoon, Wendy from Blue Shield California. We have Pega for member services, care management, sales benefit administration is all in Salesforce. We have a use case today where member services need to know what's going on in care management and vice versa. My question really has to do that. If you're using this bidirectionally and we're gonna have MuleSoft too, can you also kick off the automation in either system based on the results of whatever that interaction is?

- Yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean we do that today, like within Salesforce we have, we integrate also e-sign capabilities. So that's where we orchestrate, you know, that similarly in Pega when an event happens or something has changed, right? You can easily call APIs to write information to Salesforce or send out notifications through different channels. I think, you know, the tech stack with Salesforce, MuleSoft, Pega, I think you absolutely can do that.

- [Wendy] Yeah, I was more interested in, let's say for example, that if the member services team is looking at something that's happening in care management and that has to then change something in the automation as far as the case that they might be working on, if based on the information that's going on in Salesforce, when it comes back into Pega, that can basically just go ahead and initiate whatever the automation that they already had built into that.

- So it's, yeah, so they're in Salesforce and they're actually like working on a Pega case. It's just with within Salesforce. So we have the UI built in Pega too. It's not completely headless. So the users can be doing, working on a case in Pega, there could be another user in Salesforce and they're getting real time updates between the two.

- Yeah, the latter part of their demonstration, what you saw, the Pega case environment when they clicked-

- [Wendy] I saw it open up, but you know, again, it's like, okay, there could be automation that's built in the background and I just wanna know that it's like literally like the case. And so, yeah. Okay, great. Thank you.

- That's very contextual and yes, you can.

- [Wendy] Yeah, great. Thank you.

- Okay, over here.

- [HY-EHN] Hi, this is HY-EHN. So we talked about the bidirectional integration between Salesforce and Pega and we also talked about both having a microservice architecture versus the DX API. So what, according to you have been the, like the most advantages decision to do the Salesforce to Pega integration using DX API instead instead of a MuleSoft microservice.

- Yeah, I can start, and Becky, you can probably chime in. But I think it's because the architecture with DX APIs allows for seamless kind of, if you wanna add an attribute, it's just point and click, right? It's all configuration to add new attributes within DX APIs to be available. If I'm orchestrating that same thing through MuleSoft, now Pega has to expose those APIs. MuleSoft will have to act as that middleware to, you know, still fetch that information from Pega, right? That's why having DX APIs already available and that we can consume within Salesforce, eliminate the need to create another layer to maintain from any changes.

- [HY-EHN] So does Salesforce have anything similar where we can avoid having a, because we were talking about the , for the other way we are going to leverage MuleSoft. Like can Salesforce have, does Salesforce have anything that can be delivered to do a similar thing and not go through the MuleSoft service way?

- You have, like, you can always create a web service layer within Salesforce that you can expose for any other platform to consume. I think it's easier. That's why like probably three years ago or four years when Salesforce bought MuleSoft, that's really become kind of the middleware for any data movement in and out of Salesforce. So whether you expose it directly from Salesforce as a web service or you use MuleSoft, I think, it's totally up to-

- [HY-EHN] So that's going to take care of the UI changes as well,

- Not the UI changes.

- [HY-EHN] DX does that, right?

- Yes, not DX, it's the Pega Process Extender framework that does it. DX APIs is just orchestrating the data movement. So that, I would say, kind of a Salesforce package for Pega, I think, is what you're looking for, I don't think that that today is available in that aspect.

- [HY-EHN] Thank you.

- Yep.

- Oh, we got somebody running up from the back to get the question before the clock runs out.

- [Speaker] Full disclosure, I'm a Pega employee. Thank you very much for telling this story. We did bring the extender out a couple years ago and Alan is very passionate about it and he's looking for use cases. So thank you, you all work in product marketing. And you know what I will say to everyone in the room is if you are thinking about this or doing it, we are looking for use cases. So definitely get in touch. But my two questions are, you're in the cloud on Salesforce, when are you move into cloud on Pega?

- Is there another question?

- No, I think we have active discussion. So yeah, that's on our roadmap for sure.

- [Speaker] Okay. Well thank you so much. We loved the presentation, I love the use case.

- Yeah, by the way, use case, this is Fortune over here by the way. So if you, use cases, see Fortune for those.

- Alright, thanks guys.

- [Speaker] Thank you.

- We have one more. Alright. I didn't recognize you without your glasses when you ran up to the microphone.

- [Dennis] Yeah, my name is Dennis. I'm from Cognizant. Great demo. Great capability. Just quick questions. I mean obviously both the tools are great for UI building and things like that, but when writing the stories and the user stories, did you have some design principles on where are you going to write the validation rules versus business rules that are already there in your case management system, and where there are things that you are advised to the community on how do you actually build and where to do the development work? Is there-

- No, I think the beauty of this architecture, we don't have to write those rules in Salesforce. Pega Process Extender does it for us. Like you write the rules once in Pega and you expose those case types through Extender and that makes it available through native Pega UI within Salesforce. So we are not duplicating any of those rules within Salesforce. Had this package not existed, that's when really we had to probably build the same UI/UX that we have within Pega and all those rules within Salesforce to translate accurate data back to Pega. But because of this package that exists, we don't have to do any of that.

- [Dennis] Okay, so none of these use cases have a native Pega Salesforce UI being used, it's actually all the-

- It's all Pega. All we've done is we just need a Salesforce admin to configure the package and those component to be available on a Lightning record page within Salesforce. That's about it.

- [Dennis] Got it. Okay, one more question, you said, so I was looking at the timeline. It took about four, five months to get to the InfoSec and then still about an year to get to the, from the read-only to make updates to the request, right? 2035 is the timeline you're looking at. Anything, any learnings? Like if someone is doing this newly for the InfoSec and other things, what we can prioritize and look forward to?

- I mean, I would say you wanna be out, I mean you wanna be out of the box, you know, as a person who had owned apps that were very highly customized, I think our guardrail score was too low to even be factored in. You need to be out of the box. Like that would be the big thing to leverage this. And I think it's took us a while 'cause we wanted, 'cause we're also rolling out, like we're modernizing the app, we're rolling out new functions, we're working with change management. So we're kind of trying to manage how much we're rolling out at at once. So, yeah.

- And I'll just add, I think it's really getting our folks comfortable with an on-prem and SaaS integration. It's always hard when you say you're gonna move data with a cloud platform or cloud infrastructure. Yeah, it just takes longer to have those conversations and meetings. Probably each one of you can attest to that. That's one of the reasons.

- [Dennis] More about the network boundaries than the authentication

- Network boundaries gateways, right security, how is this data being encrypted, stored at rest, and all of that fun stuff that comes with such implementations.

- [Dennis] Awesome, great job.

- Thank you.

- Alright folks, unfortunately we are at time. That was a great, that's actually one of the best Q&A sessions I've seen so far. They really got you guys good. Well please thank Rohit and Becky one more time for giving us this-