When it comes to the automation of marketing materials like fact sheets, people often have a hard time letting go of their InDesign templates. This is understandable. Preserving the InDesign functionality gives marketers a sense of security, especially if they’ve been using this program for years. We see this scenario all the time in both large and small investment company marketing departments.

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By Emilie Totten

Last month, our CEO, John Toepfer, was invited to speak at the Financial Technology Forum (FTF) held at Trump Tower in Chicago. This two-day event brought together CTO-level executives from Asset Management firms to discuss the issues around pitchbook automation, vendor management, CRM integration, data governance, and other IT-related topics. The Financial Technology Forum events are a division of Institutional Investor and held bi-annually for its members.Read More

In today’s fast-paced, tech-driven environment, investment product marketers can’t really afford to dismiss document automation as just a “nice to have”. Marketing departments at investment management companies of all sizes are increasingly utilizing automation to improve productivity and mitigate risk. Good marketers in any industry plan for the future to ensure that their operations scale in pace with their growing business. Similar to their colleagues, to remain competitive, investment product marketers must be strategic. They must determine how to effectively use automation to produce key sales support materials such as fund fact sheets, commentaries and website content — and it’s important to get the timing right.

There are typically three key indicators that your firm should start seriously considering a marketing production automation solution:

• You’re marketing 14 products or more
• Your current process can’t keep pace with demand
• Your data processes have become unwieldy—and risky

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By John Toepfer

There is art to producing multi-language documents of any sort, but the bar is set particularly high when focusing on data-driven documents of a recurring nature.  With documents like mutual fund factsheets, the cost and production timeline are key metrics of organizational success.  A traditional process of shipping off document files to a translation agency and counting the days for receipt of finished foreign language material – and a large bill – can be ridiculous.

In the age of content management systems and Google Translate, there is definitely a better way.

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