The Struggles of a Vendor-Controlled Batch Job
In Financial Services, all anyone is talking about is Agentic AI. Yet most financial institutions we work with are still relying on a third party to manage the nightly batch job from their Core into their Salesforce and nCino environment. Ironically enough, this might be the most important layer to own when preparing for an Agentic future.
On the surface, it makes sense that most institutions rely on a third party. A batch job is a highly complex task that is often overlooked when first implementing Financial Services Cloud or nCino because the number one priority is getting the application right for the business.
However, this lack of a long-term strategy often manifests itself into ongoing data issues, inefficient and long-running batch jobs, and a bottleneck that leads to frustrated Admins and Business Users (and sometimes customers). It creates a situation where your internal teams are constantly waiting days to figure out why the sync is failing, weeks to add a new field, and months to add data to a new Object. In this article, we’ll explore the true costs of depending on a vendor for your integrations and outline a clear path to regaining ownership.
The Hidden Costs of a Managed Integration
When institutions rely on a third party to manage their integrations (especially the core batch job), we often see three key issues:
- Loss of Agility: We commonly see institutions that have successfully increased the output of their internal Salesforce development team, only to be bottlenecked by the data/integration side. When your business urgently has a new priority, your request enters an external development cycle that is often dictated by the vendor’s schedule or even a statement of work if the change is large enough.
- “Black Box” Issue: When a data issue arises in the org or the batch job errors out, your internal team lacks the visibility or knowledge to investigate the root cause. The only option is to submit a support ticket and wait, which completely undermines your ability to govern your own data and trust the information within your own systems.
- Lack of Internal Knowledge: By outsourcing this work, the most critical knowledge of your data often ends up belonging to the vendor instead of your team. Skilled Admins are trained to become experts in logging tickets rather than troubleshooting the actual problem. Ultimately, this creates a dangerous dependency in which you have zero leverage if the vendor raises prices or the one person who knows the integration leaves.
Where MuleSoft Comes In
MuleSoft has rightly built its reputation on real-time, API-led integration. However, a powerful and often overlooked use case is its ability to handle batch processing performantly. We recently put this philosophy into practice for a large regional bank that was still relying on a slow and clunky batch job managed by a third party. By replacing it with MuleSoft, they not only gained complete control and visibility of what was happening but reduced their data processing time into Salesforce by a full day.
Ultimately, MuleSoft provides a standards-based, reliable, and scalable platform that handles both batch and real-time use cases. For Salesforce and nCino customers, there’s also an added benefit of having the tool fit seamlessly into the existing workflows of your Administrators and Developers. MuleSoft actions can be called from Flows, Flow Orchestrators, and Agents built on Agentforce.
Strategic Benefits of Ownership
By replacing this black box with a modern integration strategy, institutions can see numerous benefits:
- Drive Greater Agility: A scalable, modern platform allows you to quickly react to urgent business needs. Instead of entering a vendor’s queue, you can innovate on your own timeline.
- Increase Employee Satisfaction: By streamlining processes and reducing data entry, your Relationship Managers can focus on what they do best: building relationships and generating revenue.
- Deliver on New Initiatives: When your business launches a new initiative, a simple data request shouldn’t stall the project for weeks. Having your own platform means your internal team can react immediately, turning them into strategic partners who consistently deliver on your most important projects.
- Future Proof Your Organization: While it’s all you can hear about, data truly is the fuel for the next Agentic AI revolution. And it’s going to be difficult to participate in that revolution with data you don’t control. Owning your integration layer is the critical first step to making AI actionable, especially within Salesforce.
Introducing Our MuleSoft Accelerator
If these challenges sound familiar, the good news is you don’t have to start from scratch. To help our clients make the transition quickly, we have developed a reusable asset and process for replacing nightly batch jobs with MuleSoft. If you’re ready to learn more, let’s schedule time to talk.
Lucro is a boutique consulting firm focused on helping Financial Institutions unlock the full potential of the nCino and Salesforce platform. Learn more about who we are and what we do, or follow us on LinkedIn.