Getting Buy-in from IT for Fund Fact Sheet Automation

By Kim Rebecca

Automating the quarter-end production of fund fact sheets and other marketing materials can be a life saver for marketers. It dramatically reduces errors and improves time-to-market. However, convincing your organization to get on board with an automation initiative isn’t always easy. Making a solid business case to leadership and key stakeholders is essential. At most firms, the IT group is often the hardest to convince, but their buy-in is absolutely critical. You simply cannot move forward on this type of project without dedicated resources from IT. The IT manager will want to be sure that outsourcing a solution to a vendor is the right move and that dedicating resources to an automation project is a good investment. So, how should you present your case to IT decision makers?

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Global Asset and Wealth Manager Uses Data Automation to Achieve Marketing Goals

Summary:

Our client is one of the largest asset and wealth managers in the world, with $1.5 trillion assets under management. In order to maintain their prestigious reputation with their global investors, accurate data and a quick time-to-market are of the utmost importance to the executive marketing team.

The client’s goals were to:

• Increase the marketing department’s ability to turnaround website and marketing collateral materials quickly
• Reduce their overall vendor/solution count and related costs
• Identify and resolve data issues quickly
• Clarify the role of the internal solution
• Create more reliable flows of data both to and from the internal data warehouse

The Opportunity:

As with many financial services firms, this mutual fund company found itself with a couple key challenges: 1) An internal product data warehousing project which was sub-optimal for supporting marketing needs. 2) An external data automation specialty firm that was very rigid and unresponsive to the evolving needs and timelines of the marketing organization. In response to these challenges, Synthesis had the opportunity to develop a data management solution to help them streamline their data aggregation process, reduce errors, and improve time-to-market. In order to do so, we first identified the client’s needs:

• An efficient and accurate solution for processing a large amount of fund data – over 1 million data points per quarter.
• A solution for feeding clean, consistent data into the Synthesis automation platform, which produces over 35 document sets every quarter.
• Accurate and timely data to meet critical deadlines.
• A scalable and flexible solution that allows for any future changes or modifications.
• A solution that could easily integrate with other 3rd parties that handle other aspects of their communication strategy.

The Solution:

Synthesis’ data management solution (DMS) presented the ideal solution to this challenge. Based on the strength of our product and our excellent client services team, the DMS was selected to act as the principal data aggregator for all mutual fund product data. Synthesis conducted a thorough analysis of every data point to create a scalable solution that could be easily updated and modified without being cost prohibitive. We worked hand-in-hand with the client to define business and data validation rules to deliver clean, accurate, timely and consistent data to their marketing team. It pushes out data to the Synthesis publishing solution and also delivers custom feeds to the website, and the internal data warehouse.

The Results:

The marketing team is no longer bogged down by their data process. The responsibility is taken off of marketing and put back in the hands of the data owners.

• Clean, consistent data: The marketing team never has to worry about inaccurate or inconsistent data. Data is perfect and delivered on time.
• Faster turn-around times: As soon as each data set is ready, it is automatically delivered to the Synthesis automation platform for updates to marketing documents like fund factsheets and product guides, which has improved turnaround times.
• Improved workflow: The high visibility of the  platform has greatly improved the client’s internal organization and workflow structure.
• Custom reporting: Reporting functionality is customized to track any statistics required by the client including total number of data points reported, number of funds, number of share classes, and more.
• Reverse data-feed functionality: The clean data produced by feeds into other 3rd party vendor systems to ensure consistency across all of the client’s communication channels.

Major Mutual Fund Company Sees a 70% Time-to-Market Improvement with Data Automation

Summary:

Synthesis won a RFP competition from a major mutual fund company seeking a data automation solution.  This organization had found itself spending up to five person-weeks every month collecting spreadsheet and PDF-based data from a wide variety of fund management companies and hand-coding it into formats suitable for their database facilities. The goal of the RFP was to find a vendor capable of automating this extremely diverse flow of information.

The Opportunity:

The requirements called for validating, cleaning, and loading a large number of data source files of different types and formats. The large number of files from disparate sources made the process and workflow all that more difficult to manage and streamline. In addition, the client required the vendor to output a clean, publish-ready data file for website publishing.

The Solution:

Because this situation is not atypical within the financial services sector, Synthesis was already equipped with an appropriate and extensive set of tools capable of importing such raw data as XML, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, CSV files, database .tar and .bk files, webpages, e-mails, and third party feeds (i.e., Vestec, Bysis, StateStreet, Lipper, Morningstar, FundStation).

The Marketing Content Solution solution Synthesis deployed to support this project is currently handling more than 65 source files in Excel format, plus e-mail and website data feeds. Each month, the client provides the set of source data files to the Synthesis team and, within a few hours, 100% of the data is loaded, validated and ready for client review.

The Results

Once the data loading is finalized, the system builds the data files particular to the website database and transfers the data in a ready-to-load format to the website database team.  The results of this implementation are a 80% reduction in client labor and a 70% improvement in time to market for the data.

This solution scenario and result is typical of many Synthesis Technology clients. Even those with more organized data infrastructures often find themselves struggling with the reporting side (marketing and client communications) use of the data. Synthesis suite of products and services are often the key to reducing the problems and risks associated with financial data aggregation and reporting.