Do you ever feel like you’re constantly trying to tame the data beast? We work with some of the best fund marketing teams in the industry, so we’ve learned that in many cases marketers have become the de facto experts on fund data.  We have a few stats in this Synthesis Clean Data Infographic supporting what we’ve learned.

Fund marketers are routinely chasing-down their data from many disparate sources (both internal and external) and then trying to extract good clean data for use in their customer-facing marketing materials.

Often times, fund marketers become data experts by default. To make matters more challenging, utilizing the data for marketing must be done within a very tight time frame with the highest levels of accuracy and consistency.

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In a budget-conscious financial services industry, marketing spend is a top concern.  That’s why, when we meet new firms looking to invest in automating their factsheet production, one of the first questions marketers ask is, ‘How much will factsheet automation it cost?’.  Before digging into their business requirements, our dreaded answer is: It depends. There are many factors to be considered. Firms take many approaches, and one size does NOT fit all.

Among the major dependencies affecting the cost of automating your marketing documents are:

• Complexity of your designs
• Number of templates and variations you have
• Complexity of your data
• Extent of your language requirements
• Amount of flexibility you have with requirements
• Number of documents to be produced

The complexity of your factsheets and flexibility of your firm’s operating model will ultimately determine the cost for automating them during production. To give you a better idea of what this means, let’s look at a few common scenarios. These are actual case studies of companies who have implemented factsheet automation recently with Synthesis and how much it cost them.Read More

I’ve been in the computer-driven publishing industry my entire working life. For better or worse, that’s going on 30 years and six firms worth of experience building and selling systems to support the print (or print-like) communications needs of large businesses selling or supporting high-value goods and services. I’ve worked with Airlines, Pharmaceuticals, Auto Parts, Reference Publishers, Military, and Financial business. All have significant data-and-rules driven content publishing needs, including well-designed print artifacts. Supporting publishing in the financial services world makes up a majority of this experience, but we gain wisdom by understanding similarities and differences between multiple business sectors and markets.

For 87.3% of my long and illustrious career in supporting print communications, people have taken the position that Print is Dead… or soon will be. While there are specific examples and versions of this narrative that are true, I’m here to talk today about where and why it is not true!

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I had conversations this week with two new prospective investment management clients. Each expressed a “scaling problem” with marketing efforts as being their chief reason for looking into document and data automation.

I very much like that phrase. It’s straight out of my pitchbook on how a solution like Synthesis solves problems with scaling investment management marketing.  I usually define a scaling problem as:

The point in time in which either the number of documents, users, staff required, or variety of documents to meet the communication needs has passed some tipping point.

My takeaway from these two conversations is quite interesting. Although each firm was experiencing valid issues, the firm profiles and the scope of their work was vastly different. The key to efficient and profitable growth is scalability.Read More