A wealthy individual is rarely the only person an advisor needs to understand. The spouse co-owns the household balance sheet. The adult children might inherit. The family business borrows from the same bank. The family lawyer and accountant are key decision influencers. The trust structure connects several of these into a single legal instrument.
Financial Services Cloud (FSC) ships Relationship Maps and the Actionable Relationship Center (ARC) to capture and visualise these networks. The visualisation gets the marketing attention. The underlying data shape is what actually drives cross-sell, succession planning, and the KYC obligation that extends to connected parties.
The two related objects
Two FSC objects build the relationship graph:
Account-Account Relationship. A junction between two Account records that captures one specific relationship between them. The Role field on the junction defines what kind of relationship: Family Member, Business Partner, Trustee, Beneficiary, Influencer, Advisor.
Account-Contact Relationship. A junction between an Account and a Contact, used when the related party is represented as a Contact rather than a full Person Account. The Role field carries the same kind of semantics.
Both objects support bidirectional relationships. When Persona A is recorded as Spouse-of Persona B, the inverse relationship (B is Spouse-of A) gets created automatically. The bidirectional pattern means a query starting from either side of the relationship returns the same network.
The two-object split exists because not every related party warrants a full Person Account. A family lawyer who appears once across the book is fine as a Contact. A spouse who has their own banking relationship is a Person Account. The distinction is operational, not semantic.
Relationship Groups
Where Account-Account Relationship captures one-to-one links, Relationship Group captures a collection of related parties as a single bounded set. A Trust is a Relationship Group. A family partnership is a Relationship Group. A real-estate-investment LLC with five members is a Relationship Group.
The Group has its own Account record (typically a Business Account with a Trust or Group record type), and the members attach via Account-Account Relationship junctions with appropriate roles. The Group surface drives the trust-administration workflow, the partnership-reporting workflow, and the multi-member onboarding flow.
The distinction between a Household and a Relationship Group is sometimes fuzzy in early-implementation discussions. A reasonable rule: a Household is the family-relationship structure for cross-product wealth reporting; a Relationship Group is the legal-entity structure for specific instruments like trusts and partnerships. Some clients have both, attached to each other through additional Account-Account Relationships.
The Actionable Relationship Center (ARC)
ARC is the FSC Lightning component that visualises the relationship graph. The component renders a node-and-edge diagram with the focal Account in the centre and connected parties radiating outward. Each node shows the related party's name and key attributes; each edge shows the relationship Role.
Three behaviours that matter:
Configurable depth. The component shows direct relationships by default, but the configuration supports 2-hop and 3-hop expansion. A 3-hop view shows the spouse's family lawyer, which sometimes matters for wealth-planning conversations.
Action shortcuts. Each node carries quick-action buttons (log a call, create a task, open a Financial Account). An advisor working from the ARC view does not navigate away from the relationship context.
Filter and search. The component supports filtering nodes by relationship Role, by account status, by activity-recency. An advisor preparing for a meeting can pre-filter to "active beneficiaries" or "primary business contacts" to focus the conversation.
The component is configurable in the Lightning App Builder; custom data points can be surfaced on nodes via SOQL configuration. Custom node types (for example, "Family Office") can be added through metadata.
Where the cross-sell value comes from
The relationship-map data shape unlocks three distinct cross-sell motions:
Within-household cross-sell. An advisor managing one spouse can see the other spouse's product holdings and identify gaps. If the primary spouse has investment accounts but the secondary spouse does not, the next conversation can address the gap directly. The data is already present; the structure surfaces it.
Multi-generation cross-sell. When the adult children of a wealth client appear on the relationship map (as Person Accounts in their own right), the advisor can flag whether the bank has any relationship with each child. The likely-inheritor children become a structured prospecting list, with full context.
Business-to-personal cross-sell. A corporate banking client's owner-shareholder relationships appear on the map. The CFO of a borrowing business is also a personal-wealth prospect. The cross-pollination between corporate-banking and personal-banking books often produces the highest-quality leads in the bank.
Each of these requires the relationship data to be present, complete, and current. Implementations that skip the relationship-population work end up with empty ARC views and no cross-sell engine.
The data-quality challenge
The Account-Account Relationship and Account-Contact Relationship objects are easy to under-populate. Two patterns produce the most common gaps:
No initial seed. The implementation goes live without back-filling family relationships, advisor relationships, or business-ownership relationships. The advisors are expected to populate the data as they go. They do not. 6 months in, ARC is empty for most clients.
1-sided population. Spouse relationships get captured at account opening (because the bank captures spouse details on the application form) but no other family relationships do. The advisor sees the spouse but never the children, parents, or family business.
The fix is a structured one-time back-fill, followed by an Action Plan template that prompts advisors to update relationship data at every major touchpoint (annual review, life-event registration, new account opening). The back-fill is data-heavy; the maintenance is process-heavy.
Einstein Relationship Insights
For orgs with Einstein Relationship Insights enabled, FSC adds AI-driven relationship suggestions. The engine reads activity history, account ownership patterns, and external data sources to suggest relationships the human-populated data has missed.
A typical suggestion: "Person A and Person B share a mailing address and have called each other 6 times in the last month. They may be related." The advisor confirms or rejects; confirmed suggestions become Account-Account Relationship records.
Einstein Relationship Insights is not free. It carries an additional license cost and additional data-quality preconditions. Most production wealth orgs adopt it in the second or third year of FSC, after the manual relationship-population has reached a steady state and the marginal value of AI suggestions starts to dominate.
Compliance angle: connected-party KYC
Some jurisdictions require KYC obligations to extend to all related parties on certain account types. A wealth client with a trust structure means the trustees, beneficiaries, and settlor all need KYC files. A high-risk client means associated parties need enhanced screening.
The Account-Account Relationship records define the connected-party universe for these obligations. The compliance team builds reports filtered on relationship Role to identify who needs KYC done, who needs PEP screening, and who needs sanctions screening.
Implementations that under-populate the relationship data inherit a compliance gap that is invisible until a regulator asks. The compliance team's quarterly review against the relationship records is the structural check that catches the gap before the regulator does.
Building the relationship-map model and ARC configuration for an FSC rollout? Sapota's Salesforce team, certified on Financial Services Cloud Accredited Professional (AP-208), runs relationship architecture, ARC configuration, and connected-party KYC reporting on every FSC engagement. Get in touch ->
See our Salesforce service page for the team.
