Welcome to our weekly digital spotlight!
This week’s edition of Kurtosys Spotlight features the ultimate guide to fund communication, informative webinars past and present, challenger bank expansions, and a visual recap of last year’s fund landscape.
Digital Leader Spotlight: Jarlath Forde, Vice President, Manager Global Digital Solutions at Wellington Management
Digital leaders within the industry come from many different backgrounds; Wellington’s Jarlath Forde has experience from an engineering degree as well as being a visualisation and UX Design expert.
Working at Sapient Global Markets for almost twenty years, Jarlath worked as a global lead driving and building great UX experiences for the company’s capital markets and commodities clients – specialising in interaction design, and visualisation for desktop, and mobile. At this role, his leadership skills also became paramount in his position as Vice President of Solutions, Innovations Partnerships which entailed identifying and evaluating solution to transform business through innovation. He was also a prominent content writer for the company.
Now at Wellington Management, Jarlath acts as a digital influencer by creating experiences that are rich in content and powered by the best technologies on offer. Jarlath has also acted as a speaker for digital in the asset management world at such events as TSAM.
Jarlath is part of our Top Digital Leaders in Asset Management gallery, which you can see here.
Featured White Paper: Fund Communication Guide
One roadblock which investment marketers come across frequently is clarity in their language on fund documentation. So much so that the Investment Association have gleamed this exact response from their Asset Management Market Study Final Report in 2017 and have looked into it for themselves, as well as the FCA who have addressed guidance on fund objectives and benchmark reporting; two of the main problems that are flagged in documents.
This paper, the Fund Communication Guide from the IA, aims to help its members implement more cohesive communications to their customers, not just as a matter of compliance, but more as a way to avoid jargon and best meet the needs of investors through fund documents. Part one deals with the regulatory disclosure components when it comes to Key Investor Information Documents (KIIDs) – what customers should expect from a fund and how a manager is intending to achieve their set goals, for instance – whereas part two looks further into consumer research and drills into how firms should address writing their documentation to better connect with their customers.
As is the case with studies from the IA, the information given is presented as clearly as the intended documentation they are aiming to give advice for, with key messages, test findings and quantitative graphs used to convey their thoughts concisely and neatly.
Most notably in the whole relevant document is a list of terms that customers found the most confusing, with far more simple explanations given in a valuable glossary.
You can download the whole PDF document at this address.
Webinar: Go 1:1 or Go Home
As we found in our 2018 Digital Marketing in Asset Management survey, personalisation and targeting is the key priority for firms in the coming year, and will now be the main focus for a new webinar hosted by Idio.
Joined by our Head of Digital Rich Watts, Andrew Flook (Director, Asset Management Practice) will discuss more findings from the survey, specifically the use of artificial intelligence-enabled experiences to personalise their digital channels. What this means is that basic practices such as marketing automation and segmentation are the very least of what asset managers can do; indeed, 1 to 1 experiences need to be compliant yet also ahead-of-the-curve in a difficult regulatory landscape for the industry.
You can find out pointers in relation to sales and marketing workflows and personalisation tools and platforms across 45 minutes. It will take place on 5th March 2019 at 17.00 GMT. You can register for a place at this landing page, with places going quick!
Webinar replay: How to build a world-class Fund Center
We presented our latest webinar yesterday, entitled How to build a world-class Fund Center.
From our own research, around 70% of web traffic on an asset management website goes towards product fund pages; they are most certainly one of the most pertinent components of the website to develop. Yet how can they go from being merely functional to world class? Our product manager Grant Swart gave a thirty minute presentation about exactly this.
Missed it? Not to worry, you can check out a recording of the webinar below!
Featured Event: Horizons Future of Fund Management 2019
One of the most prestigious fund industry events returns next week, now in its 20th year.
The Horizons Future of Fund Management unites the best minds in investment management, with this year focusing on such themes as alternative investment, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, ESGs and all the most pertinent issues relating to the changing of the tide in the financial services industry.
Speakers at the event range from CEOs, to Head of Technology to UX experts from some of the leading fund managers in the world, retail stores and fintech companies, and there’s a downloadable information brochure available on the event’s main site, as well as a comprehensive calendar of the day’s swathe of talks and sessions, segmented by two categories: assets and alpha, and operations and digital.
It takes place on Tuesday 5 March at the Waldorf Hilton in London’s Aldwych (coincidentally near to our London HQ!), and the discussions begin at 09.00.
Check out the event’s website above to see the lowdown, and to register for tickets.
Fintech News: N26 Expansion
In our weekly coverage of challenger bank news, this week sees the further growth of Germany-based outfit N26, as reported by Banking Tech.
Having already secured a Series D funding round of $300 million last month (and prolonging their launch in the United States), the digital bank is now looking to set up shop in Brazil in a push to extend into the Latin American market.
It is still to decide whether the operation in Brazil will be as a bank (having not applied for a Brazilian banking license), but will compete with digital banks like Nubank, Banco Inter and C6Bank. It aims to become the “first global mobile bank”, now with over 2.3 million customers and working in 24 markets across Europe. In comparison to Nubank’s 5 million customers, it’s a tough market to compete in…
All of this news came about during MWC in Barcelona this week, along with the US operation looking to take flight in the first half of this year, followed by Brazil. Considering N26 launched in only 2013 in Germany without a banking license, this player has certainly come an awfully long way; we’ll keep a keen eye on its progress.
Social Spotlight: Visual Fund Delight
If you thought that numerical graphs were a nightmare left well alone in mathematics classes of the past, luckily the design masters over at Visual Capitalist have crafted a chart that is informative, compact, and visually appealing, as they know best:
Where Did Investors Put Their Money in 2018? 💸
This #infographic breaks it all down: https://t.co/7ZyIC2hksn pic.twitter.com/rwY4LnuLJ6
— Visual Capitalist (@VisualCap) February 20, 2019
Taking a look into how certain funds performed in the past year, the graphs segments fund by the assets they hold, displaying their growth, lack of, or decline, all segmented by colour for an attractive look.
Not just relying on the graphics alone, a short guide at the bottom of the chart looks to explain where investors put or withdrew their money, and with reasons why. As a short-and-sweet yet thorough examination of a year in fund activity, these visual representation is perfectly tweet-worthy and an invaluable infographic to refer to for comparison in the next year coming.
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