The most successful marketing operations teams have one thing in common: they really own their fund data. Establishing clear ownership and responsibility for the data is critical. In order to take ownership of the data, the first step is to assign data management roles. We recommend building a written matrix defining the following:

• Your data providers (where the data comes from)
• Your data stewards/owners (the person responsible for the data)
• The data consumers (all the places it’s being used)

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A few common phrases we hear from investment marketers are, Our data is a bit of a mess and Our data could use a little housekeeping. In our experience, we have learned that marketers have become the de facto experts on fund data management and automation.

Fund marketers themselves are routinely chasing-down their financial data from many disparate sources, both internal and external. Then, they are trying to extract clean data for use in their customer-facing marketing materials. This process is made more challenging when there are tight time frames. Plus, it has to be done with the highest levels of accuracy and consistency in real-time.Read More

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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