Zennify is Certified in the Claude Partner Network. Here’s what it means for financial services

Michael Rouleau

Chief Executive Officer

Since Claudeforce was announced in August, Claude, powered by Anthropic, has been sitting inside the stack many financial institutions already run. The question I hear now from banks, credit unions, insurers and wealth firms is who can put it into production in a way a risk committee will approve.

For anyone new to it, the Claude Partner Network is how Anthropic works with the firms that put Claude into production for customers. The Services Track recognizes partners for building a certified delivery team, delivering Claude use cases for clients, and proving the work through public customer references.

We’ve spent the last year doing that work, first on our own business as customer zero, and now for clients.

What Certified in the Claude Partner Network means for financial services

Being Certified in the Claude Partner Network means our forward deployed engineers (FDEs) and consultants hold Claude certifications and are putting Claude to work inside financial institutions. For banks, credit unions, insurers and wealth management firms, that matters most in the security and compliance review, which is where AI projects tend to stall. Every client build adds to what our team knows about AI governance in a regulated environment, including what an agent can do on its own, what stays with a person, and how to show an examiner the difference.

The model is still one layer. I've argued all year that customer experience, data and AI pay off when you run them as one connected system. What Claude does for you depends on whether your data agrees with itself, whether the experience starts from the question your people ask, and whether governance is built into the architecture. For institutions on Salesforce, Claudeforce helps with the last one. Claude runs inside the Salesforce Trust Boundary, and an agent signs in as the person using it and inherits their permissions.

The team behind it

Our certified team spans architecture, development, consulting, project management and our PMO, including our forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Claude knowledge sits with the people who scope the work, the people who build it, and the people who run delivery.

AI on Salesforce needs people who know the data, the platform and the model, and who stay close enough to a client’s team to get the work live. That’s the role our FDEs play, working inside the client’s environment alongside their people through to production.

Several of our certified architects also hold Data Cloud, Databricks or Salesforce AI certifications. The person designing how an agent reasons is often the same person who knows how the data underneath it is modeled. In financial services, projects move or stall on that overlap.

Governance at the center

Sam Kerr, one of our certified architects, works across Databricks, Salesforce and Claude. Here’s how he sees the shift:

“Financial institutions spend years if not decades establishing enterprise data infrastructure and governance for regulated industries. Now we live in an agentic world where the public has perception of rogue AI agents infiltrating systems and accessing data they are not supposed to, and that is a real issue. Data governance needs to be at the center of all human and AI activity within a financial institution.

“For me the data infrastructure and governance must be the hub of all AI activity, with key focus on identity management, zero trust, and observability. Once your governance strategy can gate all AI activity, the data layer for what your AI reasons over requires optimized business context which arguably is more important than the using the most advanced AI model. Your platform stack needs to deliver the ontology and semantics of the business for your AI to provide true value and not be another generalized chat bot making inferred assumptions in its decision making.

“Your data is your most valuable asset and it should be protected in a way that enables AI without leaking your most sensitive data to it. This becomes both an art and a science to maximize value, maintain security, and avoid excessive costs.”

What this means for you

If you run on Salesforce, Claude now runs inside the platform you already govern, so your risk team is reviewing an extension of something it already covers. We know both sides of that, Financial Services Cloud and Claude, and we've put them together in production. We also stay until people use it. An agent creates value once it’s part of how your teams work every day, so we build adoption into every engagement.

If you're choosing a partner for AI, ask two questions: who on their team is certified, and what they have running in production at a regulated institution.

Where to start

Most institutions I talk to have one of the three layers in good shape. Very few have all three.

Our Digital Maturity Assessment scores your data, experience and AI against your peers and hands back a roadmap in 48 hours, ordered by what has to come first. It costs nothing, and the output is yours to keep.