Guest Post by Amy Watson at Red Oak Compliance.

Asset Managers are heavily focused on bringing in new business and attracting the right clientele. Compliance, while important, is something you’d prefer to have running smoothly in the background rather than disrupting your day-to-day flow.

However, an increase in hefty fines throughout the asset management industry means compliance needs to be front-and-center. To make the most of your resources and to ensure you’re not caught by surprise when regulators review your materials, you need to ensure you’ve built efficient, compliant processes that are easy for your team to understand and comply with.

One particular pain point we’ve heard about from clients: keeping sales team collateral up to date and books and records compliant across an organization.

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When discussing content automation goals, buzzwords like ‘streamlining’, ‘consistency’, and ‘efficiency’ are often tossed around. These are good goals to strive for but are difficult to achieve due to business reasons beyond marketing’s control. After all, the products represent different strategies, ages, data, and audiences; therefore, the literature has to reflect this. In the end, the main goal of content automation should be to make the process as simple as your firm’s business rules and product nuances will allow.

In a recent content automation report, 23% of asset managers cited producing factsheets monthly.  So, the accuracy and timeliness of factsheets are becoming more and more crucial.  Yet, this does not necessarily mean less complex. The complexity of your factsheets is one of the main driving factors behind the cost of implementing and maintaining an automated solution. In this blog post, we’ll identify and discuss the top 3 factsheet automation complications:

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When meeting and consulting with clients, most investment data specialists refer to 5 datasets managers need to populate in their investment database profiles:

Performance, AUM, Holdings, Characteristics, and Personnel. These are the quantitative datasets. And yes, they are each very important.

However, we at APX Stream believe there are, in fact, 7-9 datasets for which managers need to account. These additional datasets include the qualitative narrative sets: Firm & Product Narratives, Firm & Product Personnel.

But it’s not simply a matter of checking these items off a list every quarter – to successfully execute a professional investment data marketing strategy, managers need to understand, not only the range of data points contained within each set, and account for them accordingly, but how they all work together to create a cohesive, data-driven story for your firm.

All the pieces must fit, and do so in a way that entices database subscribers (i.e. your future clients & investors) to pick up the phone or dash off an email inquiring about your portfolio management services.

So how should these pieces fit together and what are some ideas managers can employ to help improve their data marketing execution?

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Content automation has become a necessity, rather than a luxury, for most asset managers in today’s highly competitive environment. According to a survey of asset managers by the Fuse Research Network and Synthesis Technology, 95% of respondents use some kind of tool or process for automating content production. Most commonly, they use it for the creation of factsheets and pitchbooks.

The need for content automation is justifiable. Marketers need to get sales and marketing materials in the hands of salespeople, clients, and prospects as fast as possible. Now, investors, advisors, and consultants expect more frequent and timely product updates.

When implemented successfully, content automation solutions empower firms to produce fully compliant, client-ready sales and marketing content faster than their competitors. These tools reduce labor costs and relieve talented marketing professionals from the drudgery of content production. They minimize the potential for human errors that inadvertently deliver inaccurate and non-compliant information to the public. Plus, they eliminate one of the most common compliance headaches many asset managers face: keeping salespeople from stitching together their own non-compliant pitchbooks from a patchwork of outdated sales presentations.

Effective content automation solutions require two components: An in-house or commercial production tool and a reliable source of product data to populate the finished pieces. Unfortunately, data management is content automation’s Achilles heel for many firms.

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