Speaking at Salesforces' Dreamforce event this week in San Francisco, Mariadas advised companies in the industry to compile a document containing all of the regulation information about a Salesforce rollout that may be required in order to rebuff any compliance challenges.

"[Compliance] is the biggest issue in financial services regulation. What we did was involve our compliance teams early on and have open and honest conversations with them," said Mariadas.

"When we first started engaging with them they were coming up with questions, which we could answer. However, the next week they would have new questions. This would carry on and on."

He added: "What really helped us is producing a whitepaper explaining what Salesforce and Chatter are. Explaining that this is how we will use it, this is how we will not use it, what the risks are and what the mitigations for these risks are. You get to the point where it's all in one document and it addresses everyone's concerns."

Barclays deployed Salesforce's sales cloud and all of its main objects, half of which are bespoke, in 2009 to 2,000 people in the UK. It then went on to deploy this globally to 4,000 people across 14 countries.