The asset management industry is under constant pressure to keep fees as low as possible. To do this, while remaining profitable, you have to find ways to keep your business costs down.
Once cost-cutting strategy that has been proven effective time and time again is outsourcing. Technology vendors are rapidly emerging to solve business problems by building cheaper, quicker, more sophisticated solutions than businesses can build in house. Outsourcing to a tech vendor is a huge cost savings whilst delivering often to a higher standard than previously available.
One area that certainly lends itself to outsourcing is fund marketing document production. Asset management firms’ realize that vendors now have technological and process maturity to be able to provide highly scalable and cost effective solutions. Outsourced services and products can go a long way to improving quality, business day cycles and presentation flexibility.
That said, outsourcing may not be right for every asset manager, but here are five signs it may be time to re-evaluate your current processes and consider outsourcing your fund marketing document production.
1. You need to reduce production costs
The first benefit in outsourcing is the cost saving. Producing fund marketing documents internally is expensive because dedicated resources are required. In other words, manual production of documents like fund factsheets rips people away from the main focus of their jobs (i.e. servicing clients or marketing funds). Passing the responsibility on to a vendor allows internal users to focus on reviewing output rather than producing it.
2. The production process takes forever
Often, outsourced production can speed up the output of the required documents and their time to market. Automated systems manage most of the production within vendors with data loading and outputs automatically handled. Add the benefits from cloud computing (any vendor worth their salt will use cloud computing) with the quick rate of production and you have yourself a pretty heady cocktail of speed enhancements. This comes together to improve the speed of distribution by days, and even better, weeks.
3. You want to make changes more easily
Changes to internally driven systems at asset managers can often require significant IT involvement. Their involvement includes either incorporating new data feeds, building new templates or updating the look and feel of documents. Even in more advanced, adjustable systems this can still require significant time and acquired and enacted knowledge . Utilizing an outsourced vendor can remove these problems. Resources are available to integrate new content and outputs immediately so managers will see their content within a much shorter time frame. With this ability, they can manage their rollouts with way more flexibility.
4. You want to improve quality
If you’re manually producing your fund marketing documents you are exposing your company to the risk of human error. Mistakes happen easily if 1000s of documents need to be created and amended manually, and these errors can have serious legal consequences. Conversely, by outsourcing your fund document production to a vendor that uses an automated process you’re removing the risk of human error and improving the quality of the finished product.
5. Your document approval process can do with an overhaul
If you’re still managing your fund marketing document approvals over email your process can do with an overhaul. Many fund marketers spend hours of their valuable time trying to get all the relevant parties to approve the required documents. This is completely unnecessary. By outsourcing your fund document production to a reputable vendor you’ll benefit from their automated workflow management processes, which will ease the process of document approvals and sign-off. Thus, leaving you, the fund marketer, with more time to do actual marketing work.
Ready to outsource?
Outsourcing fund marketing document production is something that can really provide benefits to an asset management company. If you’ve noticed any of these signs mentioned above, it may be time to re-consider your document production process. The cost benefits alone justify the proposition. The solution becomes really compelling when you pair the savings alongside the production speed and change responsiveness. To find out more about what outsourcing your document production would entail visit www.kurtosys.com/docpress
