A Complete Guide to Digital Asset Management for Financial Services | Insights

For two departments often considered at odds, your marketing and compliance teams share one remarkably similar goal: making sure everyone is using up-to-date, approved and compliant digital assets.

The key to reaching this goal? Robust digital asset management for financial services.

To avoid costly compliance errors, it's vital to ensure your teams know exactly where assets are held and which is the correct version to use.

Digital asset management for financial services (DAM) is a set of tools, workflows and practices that ensure your assets are used correctly, from brand guidelines to key product literature. Digital asset management solutions help you do this from a single, easily accessible platform that acts as a single source of truth across your organisation.

In this guide, we'll talk about some of the challenges financial services organisations face in marketing, compliance and regulated content management, and how a secure DAM for financial institutions can help you meet these.

Key Challenges managing financial services marketing assets with Financial Services Digital Asset Management

Effective financial services digital asset management presents several challenges for organisations, including:

Content accessibility and version control: Finance businesses need to ensure that up-to-date, approved versions of digital assets are easy to access and eliminate confusion caused by different versions stored in different places.

Maintaining brand consistency: To build and maintain a reputable brand, financial services organisations need to maintain consistency in key messaging across markets and regions. All digital assets need to align with up-to-date brand guidelines, approved by both marketing and compliance representatives.

These challenges have been compounded by the rise of remote work in the finance industry and the proliferation of content and digital storage solutions on the market. Globally, 18% of lenders offer full remote working, whilst 50% offer some form of hybrid work. The visibility issues this creates makes regulated content management significantly more difficult than for completely in-house teams.

For financial services institutions in particular, digital asset management challenges need to be met whilst complying with strict national and international regulatory practices.

Ensuring your marketing content meets all relevant industry regulations is essential. The consequences for failure could be both a hefty fine and significant reputational damage amongst your customer base.

Specifically, digital asset management for financial services needs to address:

Maintaining compliance whilst improving efficiency: capitalising on opportunities to promote your products and services requires your team to react quickly and work efficiently. Ensuring marketing materials comply with the right regulations, and that content workflows are themselves regulated correctly, can be time consuming and impact your ability to launch campaigns quickly.
Achieving greater integration with the compliance team: compliance teams are notoriously in demand. In larger organisations, they may be working across many departments or locations. Streamlining approvals processes, integrating everything onto a single platform and increasing the number of first-time approvals will allow for faster resolution of issues whilst fostering a closer marketing/compliance working relationship.

Financial Promotions and Consumer Duty

The FCA's Consumer Duty “requires firms to put their customers' needs first.” With the Consumer Duty now in full effect for all products, all promotional and marketing activities need to be balanced, and give adequate warning of risks associated with financial products.

Businesses need to record and store the evidence used to build compliant financial promotions, as well as record any decisions taken based on this. This information will be required to pass future audits.

Financial service providers without stringent digital asset procedures in place risk falling short of these requirements and facing the consequences of audit failure, either through failing to have the content approved by the right people or for failing to retire expired content.

Adapting to Consumer Duty won't be an isolated incident. The financial sector has experienced significant change over the last decade. As new ideas and technologies shape how finance works, and regulators respond to this, both marketing and compliance asset management for financial services will need to adapt quicker to evolving regulatory requirements.

What are the Benefits of Implementing a Digital Asset Management System for Financial Services Organisations?

Enhanced compliance and regulatory adherence

Having a ‘single source of truth' makes it easier for your compliance team to ensure your marketing content is compliant, and that everyone is using the correct guidelines. Compliance tools can also streamline regulated content management by automatically checking content against specific requirements before publication. This allows you to approve and publish regulated content more efficiently, whilst reducing compliance breaches caused by human error.

Maintaining robust audit trails and records

Digital asset management solutions allow you store all records needed for audits in one secure place, and to record when you update content. This doesn't just ensure you avoid fines from financial regulators - it saves your team hours of administrative work during audits and reduces the chance of human error impacting any outcomes.

Centralised management and streamlined workflows

Digital asset management for financial services reduces confusion, duplication and rework by centralising asset management. It also provides the opportunity to standardise and automate content workflows across your organisation, so key tasks are completed and signed off quicker.

Improved marketing efficiency and collaboration

It’s easier to collaborate when all relevant team members have instant access to up-to-date brand assets. DAM tools allow you to archive obsolete assets for clarity, and send team members notifications when important assets are updated to keep everyone in the loop.

6 Best Practices for Managing Digital Assets in Financial Services

Select the right system: The DAM solution you choose should be able to address your organisation's unique needs. Spend time gathering in-depth requirements from key stakeholders before committing to a purchase.
Implement a centralised DAM hub: To work effectively, your DAM needs to make key digital assets instantly accessible to the relevant people. A centralised document storage hub is the most effective way of doing this.
Establish clear workflows and approval processes: To reduce compliance errors, ensure that you have robust content approvals processes in place before implementing your DAM solution - and that everyone is clear on how these work. It's vital that any DAM you use can support the unique approvals workflows you have as a financial services business.
Ensure data security and compliance: Pre implementation, review your data workflows, user access permissions and security processes to ensure compliance and reduce the risk of a data breach. Audit these regularly once your DAM solution is in place.
Regularly update and audit digital assets: Regularly review your digital assets to ensure out-of-date content is updated or retired, and to identify the need for any new assets.
Train teams on DAM tools and processes: Even the best DAM won't work if teams aren't trained, don't buy in or don't know how to use it. Ensure your colleagues receive training ahead of implementation, and schedule regular refresher sessions.

What can bethebrand Digital Asset Management offer Financial Services Organisations?

As a financial services organisation, your compliance needs are unique. It's important to choose a system that works around this as a baseline, and that you can customise to your business's specific requirements. If your goals extend beyond secure document storage towards complete marketing/compliance collaboration, a specialist financial services DAM platform should be where you focus. Designed to address challenges financial services marketing teams face in highly regulated environments, bethebrand's secure DAM for financial institutions offers a suite of finance-orientated DAM features, supported by our experienced client services team to adapt the system for your business's needs and circumstances.

Bethebrand offers a full range of capabilities, including:

Automated marketing asset lifecycle management, from ideation through initial publication, updates and retirement. bethebrand also offers a specialised content management tool for finance organisations' regulated content.
Version history and tracking: sail through audits with real-time change tracking and version history tools.
A central asset store: create a ‘single source of truth' and ensure your marketing and compliance teams are working with relevant, approved company assets.
Advanced user access and permissions: control which content each user can see, and what they do with that content to heighten security and reduce the risk of duplicate, non-approved assets being made and stored elsewhere.
Enhanced search features with enhanced metadata and tagging: immediately find the right content, on brand, approved, and compliant, every time.
Connection via API: connect your DAM to bethebrand's SeeDynamic and relevant third-party systems.

Case study: Close Brothers

UK asset management firm Close Brothers were experiencing slowdowns in productivity thanks to a legacy DAM solution that no longer met their needs. Bethebrand completely remapped key asset management workflows and implemented a new system ahead of a major rebrand, and the FCA's new Consumer Duty legislation.

Read full case study

The Future of Digital Asset Management for Financial Services

Digital asset management for financial services is set to become even more powerful. Advanced AI and machine learning features are set to transform how marketing and compliance teams create, approve and access digital assets.

AI and automation

Automated workflows

Automation with AI can streamline a range of digital asset management workflows that have previously been a time drain for your team. Examples of process automation in DAM include:

Automated tagging and categorising of content in the digital assets library
Automated approvals processes that notify individuals when action needs to be taken
Automated task assignment and project management tools

Enhanced search

AI-enabled search functionality for DAM will allow your team to search your assets with increasing specificity and accuracy - from keywords and filters to advanced search features like facial recognition.

Real-time compliance monitoring and automated content reviews

What if a good percentage of compliance issues could be flagged as soon as you create digital assets, with just the click of a button?

Bethebrand's SeeDynamic app allows you to automate compliance checks for marketing content. Customisable to your organisation's own rules and processes, SeeDynamic can flag where mandatory inclusions, substantiations and regulatory footers are needed, whilst ensuring content is up-to-date and readable.

Want to see our DAM and SeeDynamic in action? Get in touch today for an initial consultation.

Insight - A Complete Guide to Digital Asset Management for Financial Services