How Financial Services Organizations Are Lowering Costs

Every company creates and manages documentation, knowledge, and other content as part of running the business, and financial services organizations are no exception. However, not all companies are at risk of significant fines and penalties if that documentation is not accurate and delivered in a timely manner. From policies and procedures to technical documentation to customer content, financial services and financial technology companies need a way to create and manage consistent, accurate, and cost-effective content. Let us show you how a component content management system (CCMS) can help.

Regulatory compliance in the financial services industry is crucial for protecting consumers, maintaining financial stability, combating financial crimes, and ensuring ethical conduct. Key to this compliance is providing accurate information, adhering to fair lending practices, and disclosing accurate and timely information to customers and investors.

Consider the financial analyst who provides information to banks and investors. They must follow strict procedures that guide their actions and communication. The information they share must be up to date and delivered on time. Financial advisors are similar. They work with consumers to set up banking and investment accounts and process loan agreements and mortgages. This work involves following strict policies and procedures and includes sharing information during the process and after.

Regulations serve as a framework to guide the operations of financial institutions and promote trust and confidence in the industry. But regulations are not set in stone, and how financial institutions adhere to them is also not set in stone. Policies and procedures change regularly to keep up with internal compliance requirements and changing regulations. Documentation can change, such as loan agreement terms, banking documentation, and other customer-based documentation. These documents also change according to region, with some regions having stricter regulations.

This is where a component content management system can help. A CCMS offers essential features that can help financial services companies reduce costs by creating and managing all the different types of documents and content they need. And it does it in a way that enables faster updates to that content, as well as delivery to multiple channels, ensuring content is consistent across channels.

Let’s start by looking at how you can use a CCMS to manage policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures typically follow standard formats that dictate how they are structured and what information they contain. It’s not unusual for some of this information to be the same across documents. A CCMS can serve as the central repository for all policy and procedure documents, allowing users to store and organize content in a structured manner.

Because a CCMS uses a structured authoring model, one of its benefits is content reuse. Policies and procedures are broken down into smaller reusable components, allowing authors to focus on creating and maintaining individual components rather than entire documents. Components can be reused across multiple content assets, reducing the time and effort required to create documentation while increasing the accuracy and consistency of the information. 

A good example is the creation of standard operating procedures (SOPs). Multiple people may be involved in writing an SOP, including policy managers and legal, each responsible for different sections (components) in the SOP. The author can pull in existing components and assign new components to other contributors as the SOP is put together.

Once the SOP is drafted, the content is put through a review and approval workflow where reviewers can make comments, request changes, or approve the content at the individual component level. If a change is required, only the impacted components must go through the review and approval workflow again. Once approved, the changes will automatically reflect in all the documents that use that component.

Version control is another key feature of a CCMS that supports accountability and compliance. All content in the CCMS has an audit trail. Any change made is tracked, including when and by whom. As changes are made, versions are created, and you can track where each version of a component is used.

Additionally, a CCMS lets you publish your policies and procedures to multiple channels and in multiple languages, including an employee portal, a help center, or a printed document. And with TMS integrations, you can also publish your documentation and knowledge in multiple languages.

The features that support the creation and management of policies and procedures also apply to help and other customer-facing documentation. In this case, documentation is created and managed to support customer support portals, customer support teams, employees, and even developers.

Customers who log into their online bank or investment accounts need access to information on their products, including loan applications, loan agreements, repayment schedules, interest rates, and terms and conditions. This information is typically organized in a standardized format to ensure clarity, accuracy, and compliance with regulatory requirements.

They may also be looking for answers to questions about new products. This information must be accurate because customers are making decisions using this information. Inaccurate information can lead to bad decisions that make the company liable.

A CCMS enables a financial services company to manage this content easily, keeping it up to date as changes are needed and having those changes reflected as soon as they are approved. Collaboration, review and approval workflows, versioning, and audit trails all apply to managing this type of documentation as well because inaccurate or inconsistent information leads to confusion and‌ costly decisions.

Another example of how you can use a CCMS for help and technical documentation in financial services is payment processing platforms. These platforms create a ton of documentation for end users and developers. You can use the CCMS to create help center content, such as user guides, that teach end users how to use the application, as well as support developers, including API documentation and release notes as they work to integrate payment processing between banks and their applications.

We previously touched on the ability to build ‌documents from existing components. This is important because there is often a lot of similar content across financial documentation and knowledge. Product names, descriptions, terms and conditions, and other legal content are good examples of content you can put into components to reuse.

In addition, when you are working with multiple countries and regions, product names may be different. There may be different rules and regulations around what is included in documents or how to provide that information to customers. Regulations may also affect how policies and procedures are written or applied in different regions.

In a CCMS, you can create not only components that contain multiple paragraphs but also reusable images, topics, snippets, sentences, variables, and more. This allows you to easily swap out content when you are publishing content based on filters and other rules. For example, a policy for a US bank is different from a policy for a UK bank. Or maybe the PDF version of a product’s documentation can contain information that doesn’t change often, whereas the same product document in an online resource center contains additional information that is updated more often.

It’s also important to talk about support for multilingual content. It can be time-consuming to translate financial services content, especially if you need to translate entire documents at a time. With a CCMS, content is translated at the component level, so you only need to send the changed components to translation when individual components are updated. When the translated version is received, any document that uses that component is automatically updated and published to all channels. The ability to translate content at the component level reduces translation costs and improves efficiency.

A component content management system is a critical tool for financial services companies, providing an efficient, scalable, and cost-effective way to create and manage content in a way that is compliant with regulations. With a CCMS, companies can create and manage policies and procedures, technical documentation, and customer content in a structured manner, automating and streamlining routine tasks like content review.

It enables better control over content authoring and publishing while ensuring accuracy and consistency across documents and channels. It also enables companies to quickly update and publish content in multiple languages. All of these features can help financial services companies reduce costs while ensuring regulatory compliance and keeping their customers informed in a timely manner.

Ready to learn how the Paligo CCMS can help you with your documentation? Request a demo today.