Financial Institutions have a lot of advantages when it comes to making presentations. They have strong brand presence, name recognition, and prestige. They have vast marketing and sales enablement resources that can create compelling and compliant presentations. On top of that, have highly trained and specialized staff that can execute and manage presentations. So why are banking presentations such a cumbersome time suck?
When it comes to presentations banks have special needs – three in particular. First is branding. Financial institutions, especially the larger ones, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build their brand and trust amongst their clientele. Second is regulatory compliance. Given the high stakes and huge responsibility of managing other people’s money, banks must adhere to strict regulatory guidelines. What they can do, what they can say, and to whom, is highly regulated by the SEC and FINRA. And third is the banker, the actual person/people, balancing their responsibilities to their banking institution, to the law, and above all, to their clients.
Brand Compliance
Brand compliance refers graphics, colors, fonts, logos, templates and messaging that creates the bank’s image. Your bank can achieve brand compliance in presentations by implementing a presentation management strategy. That means treating presentations like any other marketing communications asset, such as TV, Social Posts, Events. There’s a process. It starts with planning — With– who is the audience, what should the slides look like, what should they say, what is the net takeaway by the intended audience, what are the results of the presentation. Every presentation should be created with that discipline, and should be tracked for success or failure, just like an ad.
Regulatory Compliance
For banks, this is risk management. Whether it’s a wealth manager working one-on-one advising an individual on their retirement funds, or an investment banker pitching and opportunity to a pension fund manager, banks are required, by law, to include disclosure and safe harbor statements. When banking presentations use financial data, disclosures must be included. One presentation could have many, different disclosure statements depending on what claims and data are on the slide. Slide linking and slide tagging are two relatively simple means you can include on your presentations to force the right disclosure to the right financial statements. Furthermore, slide locking prevents random edits at someone’s whim. These measures will ensure that your presentations are compliant with industry regulations and will reduce the bank’s risk.
Relationship
Technology is great and keeping compliant with the all the rules is required. But ultimately, banking is about relationships. Whether it’s a commercial banker selling loans to local business, a wealth manager helping new parents save for their child’s college or high-powered investment banker raising funds for an IPO, it all comes down to credibility, trust and relationships. That’s the intimate human connection built over time – and is the ultimate responsibility of the banker themself. And since the banker is closest to the client, they inherently understand what’s relevant and how to position it, personally, for that specific client. It’s not one size fits all. Cookie cutter decks won’t cut it. The banker needs flexibility to customize content to their client. Yet, they still need to present data, ideas, capabilities, opportunities, and of course risks within parameters set by the brand and regulation.
A good banking presentation management strategy allows banks to have all three, without draining human resources. And Shufflrr does this. Out the gate, slides are branded with proper design and messaging, disclosures are locked and linked to meet regulatory requirements, some slides are unlocked to allow bankers the ability to customize for their client, and finally, all files are available in a slide library where bankers can quickly grab & go or drag & drop their custom presentation together, in minutes instead of hour. And you can get all this for free from us.
