AI for regulatory content management: a silver bullet for financial services?

For financial institutions, keeping abreast of the rising tide of regulation and legislation is a daily and growing concern. Regulators are moving rapidly to fortify oversight and controls around a number of emerging areas, including cyber security, data governance and enterprise resilience. Complying with the regulations of different countries and carrying out international business deals is becoming increasingly complex and difficult – something that only piles on the pressure for organizations that may already feel like they’re drowning in red tape.

Last Tuesday, HSBC were fined £57.4m by the PRA for failing to protect customer deposits with sufficient systems and controls. This latest penalty from the financial watchdog highlights the severity of non-compliance in the industry, with many firms desperately seeking new technologies and solutions to help them effectively manage regulatory content and ensure adherence. One area that shows promise is leveraging AI for regulatory content management – could this be the silver bullet financial services institutions need?

Navigating complex content landscapes: the growing imperative for financial institutions

Financial services firms today face immense difficulties when it comes to creating, managing, translating and distributing the vast array of content necessary to serve their global operations and varied audiences. Highly structured regulatory content like lengthy policy documents, dense legalese contracts, and regularly updated compliance manuals must be meticulously managed. At the same time, content to engage customers and provide transparent disclosures like marketing materials, transaction statements, and fund fact sheets require very different approaches. Translating these materials accurately and adapting them locally also poses immense challenges.

If content is not created collaboratively with both compliance and business units in mind, adhered to by employees, distributed properly to customers, and translated accurately into every necessary language, major problems can arise. Regulatory infractions, penalties, unhappy customers, and damage to the brand reputation are all at stake if firms cannot get a handle on both their regulatory and marketing content. This spread of risk across domains makes solving the content problem a major imperative. Without control and visibility into all enterprise content, financial firms leave themselves vulnerable to very real, very substantial impacts.

As financial services institutions look to new technologies to solve their regulatory challenges, content management and translation capabilities must be part of the equation. Advanced solutions that can parse the nuances of both structured and unstructured content while enabling seamless collaboration, distribution and localization could hold the key to overcoming these multifaceted content problems.

Structured content: the reusable building blocks for content control

One solution that is gathering attention for its potential to alleviate regulatory and marketing content challenges is the structured content approach. Also known as "atomic" or "componentized" content, structured content refers to breaking down content into its most granular parts that contain a single thought or piece of information. These content "atoms" can then be dynamically reused, reconfigured, and repurposed efficiently across various contexts.

For example, a financial services firm could create regulatory policy content by housing key facts, product specifications, disclaimer statements, and other elements as individual components. These can then be assembled in different combinations into final documents targeted for compliance officers, sales teams, consumers, or other audiences. Disclaimer and policy components can also be rapidly sent through necessary review and approval workflows rather than lengthy full documents. The same disclaimer statement component can be reused across a customer brochure, marketing website, and official policy document without having to manually rewrite or translate each time. Materials published in English can quickly be localized just by translating components once, dramatically reducing translation costs across exponentially more final content. Updates also become simpler by editing single elements rather than entire manuscripts.

Structured content opens immense potential for automatically managing, governing, and distributing higher volumes of compliant yet impactful content. Key facts, disclosures statements, and other components can be validated against regulations just once and then reused. Content can be automatically published via templates to various channels, ensuring customers, advisors, and employees access timely and accurate materials. For global financial institutions weighed down by complex, disjointed content processes, structured content introduces both simplicity and scale.

Intelligent content: how AI takes reuse and automation to the next level

When financial institutions combine the power of structured content with AI capabilities, even greater potential is unlocked through what can be called "intelligent content." Rather than just reusable content components, AI empowers components that possess their own embedded intelligence, are self-organizing, and interact automatically with content across the enterprise.

For example, regulatory policy content components such as product specifications can have AI models tuned to understand semantic context. As new customer marketing content is assembled, these AI models make personalized recommendations for relevant components to include that meet regulatory guidelines. Intelligent assets can automatically apply the right metadata tags for better findability, dynamically respond to queries for reuse, and trigger the optimal workflows.

This intelligent content, enabled through AI and automation, has been proven to drive major efficiency gains around content development, maintenance, translation, and delivery. By optimizing reuse, it lowers content development investments by 50% or more. Automating localization reduces translation costs by over 40%, increasing content reach. Moving to structured authoring systems cuts desktop publishing outlays to zero. And the savings multiply through each stage of the content lifecycle. What could be achieved in simply managing regulatory requirements becomes transformational across the entire content universe.

For stretched content teams manually attempting to produce compliant, impactful content, intelligent solutions provide welcome relief—lowering costs substantially while accelerating value.

The smarter path: AI-powered content solutions for financial firms

As financial services firms struggle under the weight of complex and growing content demands, new intelligent solutions provide a way forward. By combining structured content approaches that componentize and enable reuse with the power of AI to automatically govern, assemble, translate and distribute, the content lifecycle can be optimized like never before. This not only translates to hard cost savings from content development to delivery, but also reduces risk, ensures compliance, and allows teams to focus on creating content that truly resonates. For global institutions managing high volumes of multifaceted content, intelligent content solutions powered by AI may prove the most valuable investment yet.

Realize the potential of intelligent content:

As financial institutions strive to transform content creation, management and delivery, unlock new efficiencies with Tridion. Our AI-enhanced CCMS solution optimizes processes, reduces risks, and frees teams to create high-impact content.