Financial service firms tap a wealth of KM features

Knowledge management solutions are helping banks and other financial service companies protect customer accounts, target prospects with relevant content and manage documentation across the enterprise.

One of the most critical uses of knowledge management in financial institutions is to protect customer information. The companies need to know when a data compromise is likely and when one occurs, and must have quick access to data to recover from such a compromise.

That was evident when Target stores and some other retailers experienced data breaches at the start of the last holiday shopping season. An estimated 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million customer addresses were stolen, according to published reports.

Rule Loving, assistant VP of operations systems at StonehamBank, had become concerned about such breaches after a major problem—although smaller than the Target incident—a few years earlier.

Quick action to lessen risk

The Target breach gave Loving the opportunity to use the recently installed browser-based version of FoxtrotOne from EnableSoft, which employs a pre-written script to quickly take the steps necessary to recover from the card breach: reissuance of cards, lower ATM withdrawal and spending limits, and customer notification.

Within 48 hours after Target announced the breach, StonehamBank alerted the approximately 900 customers who had been impacted, lowered spending limits (a temporary precaution) and issued new debit cards. The 900 customers represented about 10 percent of the bank’s debit cardholders. Reissuing that many cards in a short time without Foxtrot-One’s automated script would have been daunting, according to Loving.

The rapid action reduced the risk for cardholders, who could quickly activate the new cards while also having less risk of loss until activation due to the lower limits. The quick response also enabled the bank to mitigate lost revenue from interchange fees, which are paid by merchant-acquiring banks to cardholder-issuing banks.

“We try to stay up on compromises and address them early. When something like this happens, it’s not going to happen once, so we built a process and scripts so that we are prepared for the next one,” Loving said. “This really helped us manage a bad situation.”

Engaging prospects and customers

McGladrey LLP, a provider of assurance, tax and consulting services to middle market companies, wanted to better target clients with its content, which includes thought leadership, economic forecasts, charts and other visuals and video. “We needed to move to a digital marketing platform. We wanted to increase our click-through rate,” says Ken Foster, the company’s digital media director. “We were using an open source content management system, but it wasn’t enough to reach the people we wanted with leadership content. And it wasn’t friendly across mobile devices.”

Already a customer, using the Adobe Test and Target and Adobe Analytic products, McGladrey looked to Adobe again in January 2012, adding Adobe Experience Manager to enhance marketing to prospects and engagement of customers. All three products are elements of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud solution, which McGladrey fully implemented in fall 2013.

“We needed more intelligence in order to deliver content that meant more to each particular [site] visitor,” Foster says. “Our clients had also been saying that content was difficult to find.”

Adobe Experience Manager includes customizable templates, which enable a small team to manage content and site functionality. It works in conjunction with McGladrey’s other Adobe products to prioritize the most meaningful content for site visitors. Experience Manager also includes taxonomy and tagging capabilities that allow users to find content by industry, author, content type and other criteria. Content for specific subjects is dynamically linked so site visitors can easily find additional content related to their initial searches, increasing their engagement on the McGladrey site. They can also create their own custom navigation by combining various perspectives. Click-through rates and engagement have increased significantly since the adoption of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, according to Foster.

Another important feature was the mobile capability. McGladrey used responsive Web design to deliver a website optimized for different mobile devices. Click-through rates for mobile site visitors have increased from 15 percent to 50 percent, and the mobile traffic has increased by 8 percent, Foster says.

He hopes to continue to expand the use of Adobe modules throughout the enterprise, getting more McGladrey authors to use the Adobe Marketing Cloud tools as part of their workflows to improve prospecting and customer engagement efforts.

“The digital platform will be our foundation for growth,” Foster says.