Due to the competitive nature of the financial services industry, content automation has become a strategic priority for many.  With a finish line goal to improve scalability, risk management and brand compliance, the race is on to improve marketing and sales operations.  The challenge firms face is knowing how to approach content automation.  Is it better to build or buy?  What are the differences between the leading vendors, and their approaches?

In 2017, we commissioned some research on how asset managers are automating content production.  The research found 3 common models: Fully outsourced, DIY, and hybrid.  Here’s a brief description of each and the pros and cons.

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Every investment marketer would love to get tedious tasks, like updating factsheets, off of their plate. Automation is a great way to accomplish this. When you’re considering how to automate your factsheets or other investment marketing collateral, there are essentially four different approaches you can consider.

Your options are:

• Outsource to a service bureau,
• Implement a “DIY” solution in-house,
• Buy a technology-enabled service (a hybrid of #1 and #2), or
• Build a custom solution in-house (Read our Build vs. Buy guide).

There are pros and cons with each of these options and, depending on your firm’s situation and goals, one of these options will be the best fit. Firms operating under tight budgets and resources will often gravitate toward the first option on this list — outsourcing factsheets to a service bureau. The manual production of marketing collateral like factsheets, commentaries, and client reports is labor-intensive and laden with risk. Not to mention, it’s often the least gratifying work that the marketing team does. “Kicking it over the fence” to a fully outsourced service provider often seems like the most attractive option. Read More

Hi, I’m Kim Rebecca. Throughout my career in the global asset management industry, I’ve had the opportunity to help facilitate data-heavy content automation.  I’ve done this on thousands of regulatory documents, marketing collateral, presentations, web pages and so on. Actually, it’s probably hundreds of thousands. One of the key advantages of content automation is the accommodation of the ever-expanding scope of distribution. It allows product marketers such as myself to bolster their bragging rights. I’ve had the good fortune to help three global asset managers with their content automation efforts ­­— prominent and well-recognized firms managing assets galore. I was thus somewhat surprised to find that a common challenge in the implementation phase of all of their automation was something seemingly basic: the identification and articulation of something called business rules.Read More

There’s a real temptation in most aspects of life to focus on the headlines and not pay close attention to the subheadings, caveats, and gory details.

We see this in politics; The candidate says he or she will cut taxes or fund free yoga lessons for everyone (yeah!) but the guy talking about the programs that will go wanting or where the revenue will come from is a downer and his voice gets lost in the news cycle.

We see this in entertainment; The arena-filling rock band puts on a show for the ages, but there is no attention given to the artists mixing the sound to make it really rock in the acoustically-disastrous venue. Or, the logistics teams that figure out how to get nine semi-trucks full of equipment and crew from St. Louis to Chicago and setup for the next gig in 48-hours. (In one of my future-life alternate careers, I personally want to work in logistics for a multi-purpose arena and help organize its conversion from NBA setup, to hockey game setup, to Monster Truck setup, to rock venue and back again to NBA configuration – all in a 12-day period.)

We see it in the financial services business…Read More