by Emilie Totten

A few weeks ago, my friend Susan Weiner published “Investment commentary numbers: How to get them right.” It’s an excellent blog post about how to prevent numerical errors from being published in investment commentary. Susan is a financial writer-editor at InvestmentWriting.com and author of the book, Financial Blogging: How to Write Powerful Posts that Attract Clients. As a former investment marketing professional turned financial writing consultant, she is no stranger to the intricacies involved in producing these important documents. Read More

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Why do sales departments fight presentation automation? Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to asset management marketers about pitchbooks. The typical sentiment is that these sales tools are a pain to update and manage. Also, they are a point of contention between the marketing and sales teams. Marketers spend a lot of time keeping their slide library up-to-date and organized. But often times, these beautiful and compliant pitch materials become compromised once they get into the hands of the sales force. “It’s total piracy!” said one Product Management Executive we spoke to.

It’s true though. Salespeople are notorious for going rogue. They like customizing their own decks or using old versions saved on their desktop without thinking twice about branding or compliance.Read More

(The following blog post is the third in a series on the need for the Investment Management Industry to embrace sound data management practices. You can access the first and second posts here.)

Earlier today I was on a conference call with one of the largest asset management firms in the world.  The call was with marketing people representing operational groups in London, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and New York. The purpose of the call was to discuss factsheet automation and the need to unify their operations.  Interestingly, we could hardly stay on topic about documents and automation tools because their real problem was source data.

During the call, each group expressed their internal challenges in collecting clean, verifiably accurate and finalized data for reporting use.

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By Emilie Totten

Investment marketers need to stay on top of changing compliance issues, especially in the social media sphere. Marketers in the U.K. are currently facing new social media rules proposed by the FCA.Read More