Global asset manager automates the creation of disclosure and marketing materials with Apiax and FE fundinfo

The challenge

Asset managers need to ensure that marketing materials are in line with the regulatory standards in each country before their sales units are able to distribute them to clients and prospects.

The regulatory landscape related to disclosure standards is enormous and varies significantly across countries. This leads to complex compliance monitoring, approval processes and increases the already high risks of missing the required regulatory standards in the targeted distribution country.

Regulatory requirements apply to disclaimers and footnotes on disclosure materials, as well as to layout and wording. They vary across countries with the available licenses of distributing entities. Today, many stakeholders are involved in approval processes that are still manual, lengthy and prone to errors.

Our client, a leading global asset manager with more than 350 investment fund opportunities distributed to customers in over 30 countries, was in need of a digital solution to speed up the creation process of compliant marketing materials in line with the need to equip sales units for successful go-to-market activities.

The solution

Our client adopts Apiax and FE fundinfo in its creation and monitoring process for disclosure materials, and simplifies the creation process of marketing materials.

Apiax provides the client with simple solutions displaying disclaimers, presentation footnotes and additional guidance on layout and wording to support the creation of marketing materials in line with the most recent regulatory standards in the targeted distribution country.

Users benefit from automatically generated disclaimers and footnotes for client presentations, investor fund factsheets, research and marketing materials. These text extracts are directly applied into internal sales enablement tools with no human interaction or can be copied and pasted into the target media. Translation of such building blocks is provided in multiple languages in line with local regulatory obligations.

All the activities are stored within an audit trail and can be used by compliance and risk management units for their monitoring and approval procedures.

As soon as financial instruments – particularly investment funds and structured products – are included in the materials, the logic for deriving the exact disclosure standards depends very much on the financial instrument itself. To reduce the complexity within the compilation process, Apiax works with FE fundinfo to leverage the financial instrument data and link it to the Apiax solution.

Attributes such as domicile, instrument type, legal structure, among other key attributes, are sourced directly from FE fundinfo, a global leader in investment fund data and technology. This leads to an even faster and simple user experience when creating marketing materials.

The result

The solution, developed by Apiax and FE fundinfo, automates the creation of compliant marketing materials and covers more than 100’000 securities in over 30 countries.

Maintaining and updating this framework does not require involvement from IT. In fact, everything is established with a web-based application with an API integration linked to the Apiax digital rule repository and FE fundinfo.