Banking on DAM: Digital Asset Management for financial services

When you think of finance, you think more about monetary assets, rather than digital ones. But having a robust digital asset management (DAM) strategy in financial services is absolutely vital. Banking today has gone beyond the purely transactional, with consumers looking for advice, spend analysis and projections on top of the usual checking and savings accounts.

Financial Services: DAM is a trusted partner

Digital asset management in financial services is about more than just making sure you have stock photography to accompany the latest terms and conditions. Whether it’s in insurance, retail banking, wealth management or more, consumers must have trust in their institutions.

That trust is built from being right the first time, every time.

In every interaction, financial services organizations must share accurate information to the correct customer for the correct reason.

Spread across branch networks, administrative offices, contact centers and third party partners, financial services suffer the same challenges as large businesses in any other sector.

But in such a heavily regulated industry, there needs to be a cast-iron approvals and permissions process in place to keep customer information in the correct hands. When businesses still rely on spreadsheets, emails and social networks for collaboration, it’s just asking for trouble.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system manages all this and more.

Your 5 DAM essentials for a frictionless financial services experience

Metadata to make the most of your assets

Matching the right asset to the right purpose is difficult when you have multiple assets. When you have multiple assets that only have very subtle distinctions – a percentage point on an image strapline or a branch photograph varying only ever so slightly by location – getting it wrong is all too easy. A financial services DAM uses metadata to automatically tag every variant of every image means searching and finding the correct image becomes much easier and virtually eliminates the potential for error.

A lesson in asset management

An advert for utility company, Yorkshire Water, attracted derision and was subsequently taken off air when it was discovered that the assets used to promote the county had nothing to do with Yorkshire at all. A shot of people driving in the county was actually filmed in the Ukraine – the left-hand steering wheel gave it away. The ‘local’ bar featured was from stock footage filmed in a ski resort near the Black Sea. Images of rolling countryside were identified as possibly being from Herefordshire.

It's possible that these erroneous assets had been sitting in an agency’s database and purely human error – or complacency – led them to be used. But with a DAM where assets were fully cataloged and tagged with their origin, content and use case, it’s unlikely a brand would open itself up to similar criticism.

Source: The Guardian

Transform workflows with DAM

Emails waste time. They also waste energy. By sending emails back and forth across the business, looking for images, information and approvals, your company is burning up employee and environmental resources. A Digital Asset Management system centralizes all the relevant assets, attaches permissions where necessary so only approved users can share or alter them, prevents duplicated asset creation and helps teams move efficiently through their content creation processes.

Secure brand consistency and regulatory compliance

Permissions aren’t just there to give users status. In the heavily regulated world of finance, changing the wrong details – showing an out-of-date rate or agreement term, using the wrong asset to illustrate a product – can have far-reaching implications, both in terms of trust and cost to the brand. With DAM, you can create content knowing that assets have only been via the people qualified to use them and inadvertent mistakes are avoided.

Automate digital assets for maximum efficiency

Customers’ online behaviors trigger multiple communications every minute of every day. Browsing the internet can result in retargeted ads, personalized emails, door drops and more. Those assets need to be created and sent to customers – sometimes in seconds. Automation doesn’t just free up employees to do higher value tasks. It allows you to reach customers quickly and accurately, before your competitors do.

Supercharge personalization at scale

Banking is a highly personal business. While in retail, a bicycle will be the same bicycle marketed to everyone, give or take adding some extra lights or changing the seat height. But banking products are almost infinitely customizable depending on the customer’s circumstances. Being able to personalize offers at scale while staying within regulations and acting quickly is something a digital asset management system is uniquely capable of doing.

DAM for pensions management

Managing administration and customer communications for 50 Dutch pension funds, AZL has to generate customized materials quickly. Its existing systems couldn’t keep pace with growing customer expectations.

Moving to censhare’s DAM for financial services, the company changed from its time-consuming processes where just getting a signature could take 45 days, to mix and match content production that was fast but still highly compliant.

The company now keeps more than one million pension holders up to date, 75% faster than before.

Read more in a AZL customer success story.