A significant part of delivering a factual, advisory or educational client experience in financial services is the delivery of content through regulated channels. As financial health, advice and guidance become increasingly digital, the data that underpins the experience comes into sharp focus to facilitate the digital transition. As technology moves the digital world towards a connected Internet of Things (IoT), automated voice control, augmented and mixed reality experiences, our clients will demand content to fill those experiences both in person and online. It is, however, getting increasingly difficult to deliver regulatory-compliant personalized content (e.g. text, video, audio, images, visualizations and charts) without the content metadata being efficiently classified for the audience. Recent regulations, such as the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), may further compound this by driving the need of third parties to provide compliance-approved content to new aggregated services and products.

To present content to any financial audience, it has to be both accurate and legally compliant for the audience. As digital experiences quickly become more personal, the quality of the client experience will be directly affected because content is not efficiently compliant or tagged with reference metadata to drive the content interactions with the audience. In order to deliver a first-class digital experience at scale, be it through automated advice or enriched client interaction, the industry needs to get the metadata layer right first and then from that point onwards the client experience potential is unlocked, production processes can be built and digital content distributed to meet the real-time expectations of the future.

Facilitating Client Experience at Scale

For financial services to play an active part in digitizing their services for the emerging user experience platforms, there needs to be a far better understanding and standardization of the key underlying processes that support the delivery of regulated content at scale. The incumbent organizations have dealt with these challenges well in the physical world of offices, branches, conferences and events, where the delivery of content is slow, controlled, manageable and less dynamic. However, as we digitally transform the end-to-end processes, there is an increased need to be real-time, scale fast and cross international borders to deliver digital services, material and experiences. The legacy methods do not fit with this and are not widely standardized across the industry.

Personalized Financial Content

As the financial market and products are regulated, no matter what the delivery mechanism may be, the data and content has to be delivered with context and has to be suitable for the specific interaction with the specific person. This means that financial information providers are strictly controlled in how they can market or sell a fund, often with different rules per region, country and investor type (professional/non-professional).

To deliver the personalized content, and supporting material such as product-related video, audio, charts or text, there is a growing matrix of content metadata to manage for each person/audience:

• language/content translation
• investor types (professional/non-professional, etc.)
• investor type certification (self-certified or certified, validation conditions)
• regulatory jurisdiction (country, region)
• data rules and visibility logic (show/hide)
• legal disclaimers.

It is becoming increasingly costly and complex to manufacture, approve and manage content due to all the audience delivery variables and metadata options.

The issue that needs to be solved is about regulation, and what can and cannot be done for the investor type that the online service is interacting with. For most observers it seems simple, the classic question posed is: “Why can’t we have a Netflix for fund management?” Well we could, the algorithms could personalize and present the universe of product information for someone really easily, but look a little deeper and financial services is a very controlled and regulated market. In order to replicate what Netflix does, financial services would also need to try to replicate the entire supply chain/global film industry standards and their underpinning publishing and certification processes, too.

To support various business lines and clients, a B2B relationship generally requires content that is compliant for professional audiences, B2C communication requires retail approved material, and B2B2C requires both professional and retail content. Currently, content is awkwardly restricted to what an advisor or client can download from websites, email, spreadsheets or fund platforms. As the process becomes more digital, the complexity of content delivery becomes more challenging. Currently, online advice via robo-advisors tends to focus on one or two countries only, and therefore the underlying complexity of managing compliant content at scale has not yet been encountered.

Increasing Demand for Compliant Content

In the future, the production workflows and delivery of financial products supported by digital content have to be fast and hyperconnected. The complexity can be harsh, and inefficiently dealing with this could severely limit the scalability and compliance of any advanced online financial service provider or big tech platform. It is a problem as only the larger financial service providers of globally accessible content achieve this at scale, as they need to distribute at volume internationally to many types of investors, through many different channels. Even then, the categorization and automation of content is disjointed, highly inefficient and does not cover all digital media content types required to support a rich digital client experience. It is ripe for disruption. Every single financial advisor, be they robo or live, needs to choose how they wish to deliver their content effectively while also being legally compliant with local regulation. This is a huge blind spot for scaling content internationally and therefore digitally (which by its nature has no borders).

Like with Netflix, international and local regulations govern these complex content distribution, registration and suitability rules. The marketing and servicing challenge for any provider of product, financial marketing or educational collateral is to deliver the right content to the right person without being in breach of local regulations. In effect, you need a form of digital rights management, ultimately with a personal and certified digital identity or account to control the suitable delivery of the highly regulated promotional or supporting material for financial products.

A Solution

In order to deliver content to adequately support the whole client experience, the data needs to be consistent right across all contributing and subscribing parties. It’s analogous to delivering straight-through processing (STP). End-to-end processes were identified, analysed and fully understood, the process inputs and outputs were mapped, optimized and automation standards agreed and set to allow universal processing of the information. The automation principles still stand and remain solid, even when applied to the customer journeys of today. To unlock this digital transformation blocker, the global finance industry and regulators need to agree, form and sign up to:

• An open standard for classifying financial marketing and regulatory content types.
• A central rules engine representing the latest local content regulation.
• A common transmission “platform” for global distribution and regulatory submissions.
• Multimedia-enablement – applicable to all content types and formats.
• Open API access based on product entitlements.

Until this is resolved, there will always be duplication and inefficiencies; there will be a block to delivering content freely and appropriately to investors through accessible channels, and the customer will suffer. But once this is resolved, content can be manufactured and delivered appropriately online to serve innovative services in innovative ways, increasing the quality of the client experiences we can offer.

Looking at other industries, there may be an answer to power this transformation. In the second quarter of 2017, Spotify purchased Mediachain to resolve their issue with attribution of music to artists utilizing blockchain. Online financial services have in effect the same problem in reverse, for publications, digital assets and content. This content distribution challenge is a perfect use case for a distributed ledger to resolve.

The Future

There is a future where controlled documents and content would be federated from all product providers, collectively stored and managed, rather than a disparate financial service landscape where every single provider builds and maintains a content entitlements engine. There could be an online international entitlements broker that can recognize an individual by their digital identity and auto filter the information they should be receiving depending on their profile. Utilizing advances in digital identity, distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts, each personalized delivery channel could have content tagged for accountability, appropriate delivery and authenticity.

In only a few years’ time our clients could be augmenting their reality with financial data; they could be asking Amazon’s Alexa about their financial health and the alternative financial options and products available to meet their life goals. But unless the content is classified and the metadata assigned to drive what she says, might she become the first robot to not comply, give unsuitable advice at scale and have to be shut down by the regulator?