Short answer
Person Accounts are a Salesforce record type that combines an account and a contact into one record, so you can manage individual consumers rather than businesses. They are common in wealth management, banking and insurance orgs, often alongside Financial Services Cloud households.
Person Accounts explained
By default Salesforce assumes every contact belongs to a business account. Person Accounts let an individual be the account, with personal fields such as birthdate and home address, while still working with opportunities, cases and financial accounts. In FSC, person accounts are usually grouped into households for a family-level view.
Enabling Person Accounts cannot be undone, and it affects reports, integrations and page layouts, so it should be a deliberate design decision.
How Vantage Point helps: we decide with you whether Person Accounts fit your model and handle the data migration and integration changes they require.
Frequently asked questions
Can Person Accounts be turned off once enabled?
No. Enabling Person Accounts is permanent for that org, so test it in a sandbox first.
Do I need Person Accounts for Financial Services Cloud?
FSC supports both Person Accounts and an individual model based on contacts. Most new FSC implementations use Person Accounts.