Marketing Material Check

When meeting clients, prospects or investors, relationship managers, portfolio managers or distribution staff use marketing brochures, slide decks, tailored pitch books, multimedia and other essential means. These documents may contain a wide range of information, from general company information to particular details or explanations about investment strategies and products in a client pitch deck.

While, in some cases, companies use standardised sales materials, they often customise them for specific client situations, especially where wealth managers talk to high-net-worth individuals or asset managers pitch to institutional investors.

Financial institutions typically have compliance policies and teams specifically responsible for defining the marketing material do’s and don’ts and reviewing the whole documents before sending them to prospects and clients.

All this content requires different sets of footnotes and disclaimers, depending on the license of the legal entity, distribution country, and client category. More regulatory restrictions can apply if the marketing material displays product performance. Additionally, the marketing teams need to consider requirements such as wording or text font size, as an example.

If available, legal and compliance teams typically maintain these marketing material restrictions in lengthy spreadsheets. Most financial institutions maintain these regulatory restrictions and disclaimers in-house, which is an ongoing painful process.

The Challenge

Marketing and client-facing teams need to create marketing materials by manually extracting the required disclaimers and requirements repeatedly and copying them into slide decks and other materials. In addition, most asset and wealth management firms require pre-approval by the compliance teams before using the materials with clients. This review process can easily take up to two weeks, making it very difficult for sales teams to plan and prepare for client meetings.

Using non-compliant marketing materials can lead to significant legal, regulatory and reputational risks, especially because materials are typically sent to the client or prospect, providing them with evidence in case of non-compliance.

This guide explains how to embed the Apiax Marketing Material API in your content management system or content distribution tool (for example, web access for clients) to dynamically integrate the appropriate disclaimers and footnotes and provide you with the regulatory answers. This integration also minimises maintenance in case of regulatory change.

Pre-requirements

Before starting, ensure that you have:

• A SaaS subscription to the Apiax API (optional subscription to the platform)
• An active subscription for the relevant digital compliance rules (content)
• A user account with access rights
• A ready-to-use API authentication and access
• A capable end-user solution to integrate, such as an Order Management or Portfolio Management System

For more information, see Apiax initial account setup.

Use cases and studies

Apiax offers a series of business cases and provides studies to gain further insights into the business benefits of switching to embedded compliance rather than following traditional compliance approaches.
Refer to the use cases webpage on apiax.com or contact Apiax for more information and an overview of how you can move your business forward with ready-to-use solutions for embedded compliance.

Introduction

This integration guide provides step-by-step instructions for a business case, taking you through the process of embedding compliance into your environment, team or process. Follow these steps with your specific case and situation in mind. Adopt and extend rules, attributes and API requests where necessary.

Apiax offers test and live API keys, rule governance and versioning functions for you to test and validate changes before applying them.

Example to get started

Clara is a marketeer at Compliance Bank, Ltd., based in Switzerland. She wants to market a new brochure about an Irish registered investment fund, Vulcan Global Value Fund Plc - Vulcan Value Equity Fund USD Class Shares (IE00B8FGBZ03) to a non-qualified investor based in France. The brochure contains information about asset allocation and contains forward-looking statements.

Objective: Compliance Bank, Ltd. seeks to provide Clara with the most updated disclaimers and footnotes for her brochure automatically and effortlessly on an in-house developed tool powered by Apiax.

The figure below depicts the typical flow of a marketer or salesperson using an Apiax-powered content management tool to get automatically tailored information about general requirements for new marketing content, front page and end page disclaimers, and footnotes.