Manual processes for managing customer communications are a continued source of risk at banks

It’s been over a decade since the US subprime mortgage crisis escalated into a full-blown international banking and financial crisis. We all remember the bank bailouts, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the rescue of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall Street paid a price, but the real damage was to the individuals and families on Main Street who lost their homes and life savings.

The change was clearly required. And, in the years that followed, regulators and banks adopted sweeping measures to remove risk from the financial system, increase the health and stability of financial institutions, and better protect consumers. In fact, regulatory change seems to be a constant for financial services organizations, leaving marketers and communications teams struggling to keep up with the pace of change which is 3X the 2011 rate, while also facing stiffer penalties for missteps and non-compliance.

Modernizing customer communications systems and processes to adapt to the changing regulatory environment.

While regulators have altered rules around disclosures and operations, the systems that marketers rely on remain, for the most part, the same. These legacy systems rely on manual processes that involve significant effort on both the communications teams and IT teams to not only create new communications, but make relatively simple changes to existing content. It’s not unheard of for a change to a simple piece of content such as a web address or phone number to have to be made manually, repeatedly across multiple versions of communications templates – opening the door to error.

More complex changes, such as those to a piece of disclosure content, can also involve different teams updating hundreds of templates for the different print communications, email and Web pages where the content exists. Not only is this change process slow and costly, but it introduces significant compliance risk. And the failure to communicate these lending details accurately and consistently across all communications, by the required deadlines, can cost banks dearly.

The damage caused by operational risk failures can extend beyond costly fines and remediation events to impact the bank’s overall business and reputation. It’s only natural for consumers to question the competency of a financial institution that is unable to accurately manage their customer communications. Especially in light of technology advancements available.

An intelligent content hub streamlines manual processes

Customer communications management (CCM) solutions have evolved significantly from legacy days in which customer communications required programming by the IT function to manage content and changes. Today the creation and updating of customer communications can be fully managed by business users.
Leveraging a centralized content hub, these modern CCM solutions can share pieces of content (fragments or blocks) across multiple communications that reside in different channels. Abstracting management of content in an intelligent hub enables a single change to shared content to be instantly reflected in all communications using it – with 100% accuracy. In addition, communication variation management capabilities enable a master template to feed content and layouts to sub-variants to provide another, automated way of controlling content updates and targeting rules for related communications.

Significant savings in time, cost and regulatory compliance fines

By taking steps to modernize the processes and systems in place to manage customer communications, banks can have a direct and measurable impact on their bottom line. They can quickly and easily make updates to ensure they comply with regulatory requirements. They can deliver lending details accurately and transparently to consumers across all channels seamlessly. Most importantly, they can rest assured they’ve done their part to manage operational risk.

To learn more about modernizing your customer communications and regulatory disclosure content, download a case study, or contact us for a demo.