There is a moment in every technology cycle when the question stops being “should we change?” and starts being “how long can we afford not to?” For financial institutions running on the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) managed package, that moment has arrived.
Salesforce has not deprecated the managed package. It has not issued an end-of-life date. It has not sent an urgent migration notice. And that, paradoxically, is precisely why this moment is so easy to miss.
The shift is quieter than a product discontinuation. It shows up in release notes. It is visible in where Salesforce is investing engineering resources. It is in the language Salesforce uses with new customers. And for those who are paying attention, the signal is unmistakable: the future of Financial Services Cloud is on the core Salesforce platform — what the industry is now calling FSC Core — and that future is being built right now.
“Every Salesforce release brings more power to Core. If you’re not actively exploring these changes yet, now’s a good time to start.”
When Salesforce launched Financial Services Cloud in 2016, the managed package was the right architecture for the moment. Financial institutions needed industry-specific data models — households, financial accounts, relationship mapping — and a managed package allowed Salesforce to deliver those capabilities quickly, on top of the existing Sales and Service Cloud foundation.
By 2019, however, Salesforce began to recognize the limitations of that approach. Managed packages carry inherent constraints: namespace dependencies that complicate customization, upgrade cycles that Salesforce controls, and architectural friction that creates distance between FSC features and the broader capabilities of the Salesforce platform. The decision was made to rebuild FSC’s core capabilities as native standard objects on the platform itself.
That rebuild has been underway for six years. And in 2024 and 2025, it reached a critical inflection point.
The introduction of Financial Account Management Standard Objects in 2024 represented what many in the ecosystem described as Salesforce’s biggest Core release to date. This was not an incremental update — it was a signal that the architectural foundations of FSC were being fundamentally relocated.
By Summer 2025, Salesforce continued to decouple FSC functionality from the managed package at an accelerating pace. Financial Plans and Goals migrated to standard objects. Salesforce Go — a centralized workspace for FSC configuration and feature activation — was introduced, making the on-platform experience meaningfully easier to manage. Real-time data refresh capabilities improved. And Equifax consumer credit data integration via Data Cloud became available directly for lenders and credit-focused institutions.
Each of these advances was built for FSC Core. None of them were managed package features. The pattern is consistent across every release cycle: new capabilities land on Core first, and in many cases, exclusively.
The managed package is not being abandoned. It is being left behind.
For institutions that are paying close attention, the divergence is already tangible. Here is what it looks like on the ground:
The managed package is stable. Salesforce has committed to supporting it. For institutions with complex, heavily customized FSC managed package implementations — built over years, integrated with core banking systems, and deeply embedded in daily operations — the case for staying put can feel compelling.
But the “wait and see” strategy carries its own risks, and they are compounding with every release cycle.
First, there is the innovation gap. Every quarter that passes without action on Core is a quarter in which the feature differential widens. The institutions that begin the transition now will be six, twelve, eighteen months ahead on AI readiness, data model maturity, and integration capability.
Second, there is the migration complexity risk. The longer an organization waits, the more custom code, integrations, and business processes become entrenched around managed package objects and namespaces. Early movers can migrate with relatively cleaner environments. Later movers will face larger, more expensive, more disruptive transitions.
Third, there is the talent and knowledge risk. As the Salesforce ecosystem continues to shift toward Core, the pool of architects and developers with deep managed package expertise will shrink relative to those building expertise in FSC Core. Getting ahead of this curve means access to better implementation talent.
The institutions that move first will not just avoid a migration headache. They will build a genuine competitive advantage in how they serve clients and deploy technology.
This is the first post in a ten-part series designed to give financial services and banking leaders — from Salesforce architects to CIOs to business decision makers — a complete picture of what the transition to FSC Core means, why it matters, and how to approach it strategically.
Salesforce has not announced the end of the managed package. But it has been unambiguous about where it is building the future. For financial institutions, the question is no longer whether to make this transition. It is whether to lead it or be dragged into it.
The institutions that treat this moment as a strategic opportunity rather than a future obligation will be better positioned on every dimension that matters: technology capability, AI readiness, integration flexibility, talent access, and the ability to serve clients in ways that were not possible on the architecture of 2016.
The platform is at a crossroads. The direction is clear. The only question is when your organization decides to move.
NEXT IN THE SERIES
Post 2: What “On-Platform” Actually Means — Demystifying FSC Core for Financial Institutions