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Financial Aid Agent Considerations

To use the Financial Aid Agent, consider supported functionality, usage, limitations, and security requirements.

Identity Verification for PII Access

Before providing any personalized financial aid information such as application status, award amounts, disbursement dates, or SAP status, the agent verifies the user's identity.

  • Authenticated Students: If the user is logged into the Experience Cloud site, the agent bypasses the email verification step.
  • Unauthenticated Prospects: The agent mandates a one-time password verification. The agent asks for an email address, sends a verification code, and requires the user to validate the code before answering personalized questions.

Person Account Requirement

To support guest identity verification via one-time password (OTP) verification, Person Accounts must be enabled in your org. The OTP email verification flow requires prospects to have a Person Account with a valid contact ID and email. Without these, the agent's verification chain fails. Use your organization's extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, such as MuleSoft, Informatica, or Salesforce Data Loader, to sync individual records from your financial aid management system to Person Accounts in Salesforce CRM.

Strict Limitations and Out of Scope Actions

The Financial Aid Agent is designed to provide factual information and only answer questions. The agent operates with a neutral, non-advisory tone and can’t perform the following actions:

  • Give financial advice, such as recommending a specific loan, or make judgments about a user’s financial situation.
  • Accept or decline financial aid awards.
  • Submit documents or applications.
  • Make changes to financial aid packages.
  • Display financial aid information by term or semester. The agent organizes data by academic award year only.

If a user asks the agent to perform these actions, the agent instructs them to contact the financial aid office or log into their student portal.

Data Model Object (DMO) Grounding

The agent relies on data from Data 360 to ground its responses. To provide this data, map your financial aid management system data to the Salesforce financial aid Data Model Objects (DMOs). Missing or incomplete DMO records prevent the agent from providing accurate student-specific answers.

For more information, see Set Up Data 360 for Education: Financial Aid.