Is your system for managing regulated customer communications past its due date?

Is your system for managing regulated customer communications past its due date?

For banks, staying compliant with a constant stream of regulatory changes is not only part of doing business, but it’s also a top priority. It’s something banks have learned to do well – and invested in heavily over the years.

But, many of the legacy systems they now depend on are well past their due date, and that impacts their ability to keep pace with modern business requirements. Based on old technology, legacy systems are often complex, hard to maintain, slow, and error-prone. Technical debt – the lack of legacy system modernization – is considered a pervasive challenge to banks and a huge impediment to their transformation and future success (Deloitte 2020).

Updating regulatory disclosures by the deadlines is a challenge

Teams tasked with managing customer communications are keenly aware of the challenges posed by legacy systems. They are on the front line, in terms of adding and updating the disclosures content used across their credit product customer communications. Applying updates by established deadlines is often at risk due to the scope of the change and the complexity of the change management process.

Credit card communications are a good case in point. The average bank has 15 credit card products with 6+ versions of each product. Communications span each stage of the customer journey, different communication channels, and need to accommodate regional differences and languages. In the end, banks often manage 200+ communication templates for their credit card communications. And, with every regulatory disclosure change cycle, each template is manually updated, by multiple teams, one-at-a-time — opening the door to inconsistency and error.

Preparing for increased scrutiny and enforcements

A few trends are expected to further increase the challenge of managing regulatory disclosures. With recent amendments to the Canadian Bank Act via Bill C-86, info box disclosures are now mandatory for all consumer credit products and the maximum penalty for regulatory violations has increased from $500K to $10M. Banks can also expect greater scrutiny with the number of enforcement staff increasing 130% for the 2020/21 budget.

Keeping pace with regulatory changes by modernizing your disclosures

If your customer communication management (CCM) solution has a questionable shelf life, now is a good time to prepare for the future and explore alternatives. Solutions are available to modernize your management of regulatory disclosures and dynamically apply updates in just a fraction of the time. When choosing a solution, here are some things to look for:

Manage your content, for all channels, in a central content hub

• Having one central system that controls your content eliminates redundant duplication of effort, reduces risk of error from having too many hands in the pot, and simplifies the management process

Give your business users control; eliminate reliance on IT

• Ensure the solution enables your business users to take control and doesn’t require IT coding to create communications or make content changes. This will increase speed and business agility while reducing costs.

Intelligently share content

• The ability to share fragments (a small piece of content within a block) and blocks of content across communications and channels means a single change can be instantly applied to all communications using it – with 100% accuracy. This is a game-changer, particularly when it comes to disclosures management.

Control variations, not duplicate templates

• Look for a solution that enables you to share a single template for multiple versions of a similar communication. These solutions enable content to be inherited from a master to variants and sub-variants of the communication to also streamline updates and dramatically increase efficiency. Not only does this accelerate time to market, it significantly reduced the number of templates under management.

Instantly proof communications while authoring

• Ensure instant proofs are available throughout the authoring process – no longer will you have to rely on back and forth communications with IT and third parties which can eat up weeks of time.

Streamline the review process

• Modern, cloud-based approval workflows deliver increased insight and improved collaboration between stakeholders.

Is your legacy system for managing disclosures past its expiry date? Contact Messagepoint to learn how our solution can streamline your process and give you increased control – enabling your team to update disclosure content accurately, across all content and channels, consuming only a fraction of the time and cost. To learn more, download a case study, or contact us for a demo.