For financial service institutions in this highly-regulated, complex industry, ensuring disclosures and regulated content are accurate, compliant and auditable is critical.
Working closely with banking clients – VPs of Strategy, Operations, Execution, Digital Services, Compliance/Risk/Legal teams – we see and solve the daunting demands they face coordinating enterprise-wide marketing. Managing a high volume of offers, increasing personalization and time-to-market, while ensuring collateral is compliant to mitigate risk – it’s a lot. We get it. From top banks to major wealth management firms, our solutions teams have become trusted, reliable resources. Collaborating across the enterprise to deliver proven platform solutions to a range of finserv marketing teams often requires new approaches.
Today, purposely-built cloud technology is allowing banks to create better customer experiences while supporting the critical need for regulatory compliance. We help clients gain valuable benefits by tapping the cloud platform technology for disclosure management.
What makes it work? Automation and collaboration.
Here is a summary case study in streamlining for compliance success. It offers insight into how automating marketing disclosures helped one midwest financial services firm reduce regulatory risk and increase time-to-market. We’ll explain how the platform was seamlessly integrated with the bank’s existing technology investments to provide a complete solution – for offer management, marketing review powered by AI, and disclosure management.
About the Client
When they approached us, the First National Bank of Omaha’s (FNBO) direct marketing efforts required them to 1) become more targeted and personalized, 2) shorten their campaigns and increase frequency, and 3) do more analytical A/B testing to show the efficacy of these campaigns.
The client produces roughly 1,500 different variations of creative materials a year, all requiring financial disclosure elements. These SoCTs (Summary of Credit Terms) include Schumer Box content, any reward terms and bonus offers. The disclosures can consist of multiple paragraphs, which must be precisely sized and positioned in unique layouts specific to each form of communication and regulatory requirements.
Each piece can have up to six different layouts for multiple uses. The scale and complexity just continued to grow. Until recently, producing these materials involved using a very slow, manual process fraught with risk, piecing together Excel and Word documents, repeated for every new communication and revision.
“A large campaign might have 20 different variations. In the past, all 20 had to go to agencies to be mocked up individually and then sent to our print provider,” explained Cori Swanson, Senior Manager of Strategic Implementation.
FNBO knew it needed to find a way to streamline its process to accelerate its time to market while reducing regulatory risk. Automating its disclosure management program was key. FNBO decided to employ Naehas Disclosure Management to automate its disclosure creation and compliance processes.
“I realized that we’d never get to where we needed to be by slowly tweaking process details,” explained Nicole Wojtalewicz, Managing Director of Marketing Operations.
A Look Inside the Platform Solution
To better understand the business impact financial service institutions can realize, it helps to have a clear sense of just what the Naehas Disclosure Management solution includes.
Five key components drive the technology.
- A rules-based engine which automates disclosure creation based on offer and product attributes
- The ability to share content to simplify global changes
- Automated Quality Assurance tools including Digital Compare, AI and Machine Learning
- Task-based workflow for managing change requests
- Compliance searchability to find the exact offer and disclosure requested by the regulator out of millions of touches
The ROI of AI
Here’s a quick glance at ways in which Artificial Intelligence-powered engines met that need.
What It Provided: Platform Partnership Deliverables
- Risk Management
- Auditability and Traceability
- Speed-to-Market
- Scalability
- Innovation
How It Worked: Managing Regulatory Compliance Efficiently and Effectively
- Automatically creates disclosures
- Ensures consistency across entire enterprise
- Intelligently reviews disclosures
- Delivers for all products to all channels
Business Impact
- Time-to-Market
- SoCT development and approval reduced from 3 weeks to 1 day;
- Implemented in 1 month with more than 100 unique business rules
Cost Savings
- 100% reduction in agency costs for disclosure change management
Risk Reduction
- No need for legal to review each change;
- Reduced regulatory risk and improved consistency
Revenue
- 33% of marketing staff time freed to work on creative, messaging, and better customer experience to land and expand relationships
Operational Outcomes: An efficient, streamlined process
Today, FNBO’s process is entirely different. The bank now uses Naehas Disclosure platform solution to generate its SoCTs automatically, and contain all of FNBO’s approved layouts, variable content, rates, dates, and over 100 business rules, which drive the creation of consistent and compliant SoCTs.
All that Marketing Operations staff need to do now is create a project and specify the parameters. Naehas automatically selects, inserts, and updates all language and content, such as the introductory offers, rewards programs, and all pricing options. The Naehas platform automatically generates PDFs for each version, and proofing is quick and easy, since all of the business rules and content have already passed muster with the bank’s legal and compliance departments.
There is no opportunity for human error. Fewer touchpoints minimize compliance risk.
The bank’s legal staff no longer need to review individual SoCTs and has been able to abolish lengthy review meetings. This enables its creative marketing teams to focus on more valuable marketing activities, rather than being tasked with proofreading.
Client Feedback
FNBO found that the Naehas Disclosure Management improved enterprise profitability and differentiation by executing personalized offers flawlessly while automating marketing and service disclosures for all customer touchpoints.
“We never thought it would be possible to automate this process with the hundreds of combinations. Naehas did it in a month, and it works like magic.“
Of particular advantage to the bank, turnaround times have been reduced from several weeks to a day, allowing greater responsiveness to marketing and rate-change needs.
When to Apply AI?
Time to market and streamlined compliance are critical components in maintaining a competitive edge in this industry. That’s the primary reason marketers must stay current with industry innovations.
Today, there are multiple use cases for platform technology that automates a financial service institution’s processes – with a laser focus on compliance, accuracy, traceability and auditability. In addition to disclosure management, AI can be applied to Marketing Disclosures, Regulated Content, Customer Agreements, and Welcome Kits.
There are many measurable benefits realized by leveraging disclosure management platform technology. This is one of many examples we offer as a trusted partner who has successfully delivered innovative, secure, collaborative, AI-powered technology. For those financial services marketing teams focused on improving the customer experience and meeting complex compliance regulatory guidelines, automation is key.
Check out an infographic on this case study here: https://www.naehas.com/resource-center/automating-disclosures-fnbo-infographic/
