Denver-based Investment Company Automates Custom Commentaries
Summary:
Synthesis enables a large Denver-based Investment company to automate custom commentaries. As a result, they produce a large quantity of monthly and quarterly commentary documents with customized content.
The Opportunity:
Commentary documents have become a popular medium for fund managers to communicate strategy and market condition information to potential and current investors. These product-focused documents combine current performance information about a financial product with a portfolio manager’s insight into how current economic conditions have impacted the fund’s performance.
The three main challenges with producing these documents, especially in larger quantities, are:
- Content and exhibits are customized by fund, category, and audience. Additionally, some content may be shared between commentaries while other content is product specific.
- A larger group of contributors is often involved in developing the material. The oversight and management of a multi-party document workflow can be cumbersome.
- Time-to-market is critical. These documents typically include information about the recent economic climate and events and thus usually have a very short period of usefulness.
The Solution:
The Synthesis Marketing Content Solution platform allows portfolio managers or financial writers to create their content within the familiar environment of MS Word and to easily mark-up the content’s applicability by product or market. Once the MS Word files are loaded, the system breaks out the material and includes the appropriate text in the appropriate output documents. A final edit pass can be made per document once the material has been loaded. Layout changes, table configuration, and additional content can be easily added by marketing personnel rather than a designer.
This solution provides a customer-specific business process workflow that is easily managed through a solution dashboard. This interface eliminates the guesswork about status, the release date and availability of commentary documents.
Results:
The client currently produces 331 pages of mutual fund commentaries quarterly and is successfully meeting their time to market goals. Originally, the client chose to produce their documents in MS Word format, based on their expected need to edit individual documents. However, the user group discovered how easy it is to control changes, and switched to a PDF output. Synthesis automation technology builds the documents in such a way that the client can switch outputs with the click of a button.
