Insights by John Toepfer, CEO and Chris Ruppenstein, Director of Sales at Synthesis Technology

Today, nearly every segment of the economy is seeing an increase in wage pressures and tighter labor markets. As a result, asset management executives are looking to efficiently allocate resources amongst already capacity-constrained teams and business units. This means manual, time-consuming tasks should and must be automated.

Deloitte’s 2022 Investment Management Outlook report showed 45% of survey respondents see operational efficiency as a top driver for digitization. Similarily, Synthesis Technology’s 2021 Asset Management Martech survey also showed operational efficiency as a top driver in terms of Martech stack changes over the next two years (82%). And while most asset management firms have some automation in place, they still are not investing enough in data management solutions. Only 24% of responding firms reported having a data management solution for product data, and even fewer (13%) reported having an integrated product data management and content automation system.

The lack of efficient data processes negatively impacts managers’ efficiency, bottom line, and competitiveness. For example, taking a month after quarter-end to update and distribute marketing and sales materials is costly, puts marketing and sales teams at a disadvantage, and may lead to investors and prospects looking elsewhere.

Managers also face increasing data governance and compliance scrutiny from the due diligence requirements of potential investors and consultants as well as internal stakeholders.

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It’s easy to underestimate what it costs to run your marketing operations. For asset managers, producing content is not an easy task. The materials are data-heavy, constantly changing, and usually go through several rounds of review. Creating a streamlined process is critical to realizing a return on investment. But how do you measure it?

There are three steps to building a solid ROI calculation, and the first step is to understand your true organizational production costs. Very few people know how to really measure this. Most of the time, managers simply look at their departmental head-count (FTE) cost and estimate what percentage of their time goes into updating and distributing content and literature. This broad-brush approach would seem to capture the costs well but often results in a gross underestimation of the true costs.  A full accounting should cover direct labor costs, managerial labor costs, opportunity costs, and error and risk-related costs.

We’ve had two clients undertake a full and detailed Six Sigma cost analysis of their baseline costs and risks associated with manual or semi-automated literature production. The results were staggering.
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In 2018, we conducted a Mutual Fund Fact Sheet Production Study, where we analyzed 235 factsheets from 47 asset management firms of all shapes and sizes. A few factors observed included publish date, modification date and how the file was produced.  The two most observed methods were using automation and producing factsheets manually.  To find the firm’s production method, we turned to the metadata to show us what applications, software, or tools they were using to create the PDFs. After digging deeper into the metadata, we identified some key reasons why firms have longer production durations or later release dates. We were also able to make some observations about what drives efficiency, and the findings were pretty shocking. Read on to get the scoop!

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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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