ENCINITAS, Calif.— Oct. 8, 2013 — Seismic, the only platform that enables LiveDoc creation for brand-approved, real-time enterprise content management, today announced a new release that offers companies unprecedented opportunities to generate customized, compliant content.

“The days of manually preparing and updating individual presentations are over,” said Seismic CEO Doug Winter. “With Seismic, you literally have the ability to configure the right materials for each client meeting at your fingertips—in a matter of seconds. Seismic automatically pulls CRM and other information for each recipient, so you always have a timely, resonant presentation. We also help you streamline the compliance process, which can be a bottleneck for financial services firms to support the field with the collateral they need to be successful with clients.”

The Evolution of Content

Since the time of the stone tablet, the objective of a presentation has been the same: Deliver a customized experience to the person or people you’re presenting to, on-message and on-brand, every single time.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Managers must hunt through emails, databases, websites, whitepapers, intranets and elsewhere to find the relevant materials to compile a truly effective presentation. Not only is this a time-consuming process, but it may uncover data that is inaccurate, redundant, duplicated or incomplete. Such data, in turn, could lead to compliance issues, which cost $9.4 million for the average large company [1].

Financial Firms Face Stiff Demands

Wealth management firms, in particular, must balance the demands of compliance with clarity and consistency in their communications with clients. Information provided to clients contains facts and figures that reflect quarterly, monthly or even weekly changes in the market and must be delivered in a private, secure and compliant communication method. If a financial advisor is to update collateral manually, which frequently occurs, it can take hours of their time.

Complicated the challenge is the client expectation of a personalized customer experience now commonplace on sites such as Amazon and Netflix.  While many firms have business intelligence tools, CRM and a plethora of performance data they struggle to integrate all of it into client-facing content in a way that will personally resonate with each client.

Firms Respond to the Challenge

Nearly half of the financial firms surveyed in a 2012 Ernst & Young study are dedicating their strategic technology investments to “improving client experience and advisor effectiveness [2].” Over 75 percent of firms are focusing specifically on enabling financial advisors to spend more time with clients. Among other factors, this effort is enabled by integrating front- and back-office systems, simplifying business processes, reducing the administrative burden associated with each client and creating a holistic customer picture for each person.

Placing personalized services on a tablet also bolsters firms’ competitive advantage, the report found. In fact, tablets are a top CRM solution: 36 percent of wealth management firms are funding tablet-based CRM solutions for their advisors, according to Ernst & Young. By enabling compliant, instant presentations on tablet devices, Seismic is helping companies get ahead of the curve.

Seismic: Instant, Mobile, Customized Communication

“While Seismic can be used for any industry, they really understand the financial services business,” said Key Management Group CEO Anthony Whitbeck, CFP, CLU.  “Seismic also recognizes the importance and complexity of compliance, which made it easy to choose them as a partner for our business. Our ability to quickly produce compliant client presentations has, in fact, enabled us to expand our entire range of services.”

Seismic transforms the once difficult process of creating, updating and customizing presentations and other business collateral into a quick and painless process. Companies can immediately create collateral and presentations that will resonate with a prospect, boss or other recipient, on-demand and on any device.

By accessing a cloud-based library of your company’s business materials and brand content, Seismic instantly generates the presentation you need. Because the compliance department approves content templates in advance, compliance risks are eliminated while presentations are always up-to-date.

“Never before have financial advisors been able to fill out a LiveForm, tap on the screen of their tablet, and instantly receive a customized presentation,” said Winter. “Advisors can immediately capitalize on the interest of their prospects, boost relationships with their existing clients and build their own reputations. We’re excited to offer such a powerful tool to the financial services industry, as well as other industries.”

To read about the new features Seismic is offering, please visit here.

The new product is available now, and the release will be delivered as an automatic update to existing users.

Sources

[1] Ponemon Institute, “The True Cost of Compliance,” January 2011.