Business Tech

Keeping Content Compliant with Presentation Management

Financial advisors have to make presentations almost every day. This can include presenting earnings reports, introducing new product offerings, and discussing marketing and sales materials with clients.

The majority of the information in advisors’ presentations can be highly sensitive. Legal and financial content, which constitute a significant portion of what is being presented, must be compliant, accurate and up to date. These requirements make the presentation process more difficult. Getting compliance to approve content can be time consuming and complicated.

However, failure to ensure compliance in presented content can lead to regulatory bodies – including the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) – levying significant fines on your financial advisory practice. These fines, and the resulting negative press, can have a serious impact on your business’ bottom line.

AlexAnndra Ontra Shufflrr“Serious errors can include leaving out disclosure statements or using the wrong pricing,” said AlexAnndra Ontra, Co-founder of Shufflrr, and author of Presentation Management: The New Strategy for Enterprise Content. “They might also present products that are not suitable for specific investors. Content meant internally for broker-dealers can be accidentally disseminated in a client presentation.”

Presentation management as a solution
When people think of presentations, PowerPoint often comes to mind. Although it has more features and graphics, it has not changed significantly over the last 30 years, and it’s often used improperly. One possible solution to the aforementioned problems is presentation management, which has progressed on the technological side to enable organizations to apply a more cohesive strategy to their presentations.

Presentation management is ideal for regulated industries – such as finance – that require adherence to strict guidelines and dealing with sensitive information. It can help financial advisors to ensure that their content remains compliant. They can transform single-use presentations, making them easier to use and available on demand. This enables financial advisors to control their brand and message, and improve the return on investment in the content that they create for clients.

“Presentation management ensures only accurate, up-to-date information and above all, compliant content, is made available to presenters,” said Ontra. “Presentation management is a must-have for regulated businesses, and any industry that uses presentations and wants their team to stay on brand and on message.

Presentation management consists of four key components:
1. Centrally managed location for presentations and other files: One person or a team is responsible for collecting all content and storing it in one location that can be easily accessed by anyone at the company who needs it.

2. Controlled permissions: This ensures that only the right people can access the proper information. It also includes what action can be done with the content (e.g., download, edit, share, present).

3. Forced messaging: This attaches disclosure statements to accompany corresponding content, ensuring advisors that their presentations follow the rules.

4. Organization-wide updates: Content is constantly being refined and updated until it’s proven to convert. This ensures that updates are dispersed unilaterally throughout the organization.

“Shufflrr helped U.S. Bank to cut down the time it takes to create a presentation from five hours to five minutes,” said Ontra. “In 2018 alone, Shufflrr produced a total of $60 million in corporate savings for their clients, enabling them to maximize their presentation ROI.”

Integrating presentation management into practice
To properly implement presentation management, your firm should name a director of presentation management. A part-time associate, marketing executive or a team of people can be in charge of your firm’s presentation management activities. This includes collecting all communication assets to publishing slides for your organization to use.

pm quote550x400Content is crucial to presentation management, which is why the process starts with collecting all firm content. Old PowerPoint decks, earning reports and marketing brochures can all be useful to presentations, but at most firms, these documents are found across the company network. The director of presentation management can gather all vital assets and put them in one, easy to access location.

You can then create a library of slides for use in all presentation management. Once you’ve collected all the content, you can identify your best designed and messaging slides.

Eliminate duplicate slides and prepare them for your people to use and re-use those published slides, on-demand.

“Presentation management enables you to host the files in a central, cloud-based repository where the files are automatically formatted as slides, ready to present,” said Ontra. “Every file is a slide. That means that users can search and see slide 18 of a 45 slide deck, or page 27 or a 200 page PDF.”

Introducing new strategies into an operation can be tricky because employees become set in their ways. Therefore, you should appeal to advisors and other employees’ self-interests when rolling out presentation management. Do so by explaining – or rather showing – them how presentation management will help them to do their job more effectively, sell more financial products and build a stronger relationship with their clients.

repChange can be difficult, especially in large financial institutions that have many different practices. Therefore, launch your presentation management in phases. Start with one department, such as wealth management, and document the results. Determine what worked, what didn’t, and then slowly roll it out across the other divisions in your organization.

Conclusion
Presentation management makes the entire process easier for individual financial advisors and the organization. From creation and distribution to sharing, tracking and broadcasting, it can improve the efficiency of every facet of your workflow.

Shufflrr is presentation management technology that puts a strategy around the creation, distribution, updating and publishing of presentations across the entire company. For more information, visit: www.shufflrr.com

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