Augmentation in Capital Markets
This piece is part of “The Future of Client Coverage and Distribution” series.
What do we mean by augmentation and automation?
When we at Street Contxt think about the future of capital markets, especially in client facing roles, we think of the evolution of the role as being driven by a blend of augmentation and automation, both of which are a major trend we outlined in our first piece highlighting the three major trends in Capital Markets. Those words are both a little vague on their own, and usually elicit confusion, interest, excitement, terror, or a combination of all four. We wanted to spend some time digging into both. To begin with, let’s delve into some of our unique views on augmentation.
Augmentation in client facing roles
Augmentation is about making the individual smarter, better, and faster. Technology has evolved to enhance existing workflows, allowing individuals to scale processes and produce better results in less time. This allows the individual to reach more clients, provide a more personalized experience, and capture more data to continually refine and improve upon that standard.
A great example of this is Mail Merge; a tool built to provide basic email customization based on the recipient. Long term, we see that functionality evolving to augment and personalize the email in much more powerful and beneficial ways, for both the producer and client.
Street Contxt has now released Mail Merge for its Edge application, allowing users to customize both the subject line and greeting for recipients. Content senders can stand out to their clients, set up personalized introductions, and give their communication a more intimate feel.This form of ‘Simple’ Mail Merge would be a form of light augmentation, saving time when setting up personalized greetings.
Long term, we see Mail Merge evolving into a much more intelligent tool set – one that truly allows you to augment your content creation process, personalize your content at scale, and save you significant time. We’re working on turning that ‘Simple’ into a ‘Smart’ Mail Merge for our users.
Smart Mail Merge and deeper personalization
With a smarter Mail Merge, you can personalize all elements of the content and structure as well. Take the morning note, for instance; the idea still remains to write a morning note which includes market updates, commentary, highlights of new research, and any important upcoming events, but now that note can be augmented according to the recipient.
A simple example relates to corporate access and calendar maintenance. Using Mail Merge, users can include a {CORPORATE.ACCESS} tag in their emails to automatically pull up-to-date event details from a central calendar. Rather than manually copying and pasting these details into individual emails, Smart Mail Merge performs this task instantly and at scale. Users no longer need to go back in their emails to delete old events; Smart Mail Merge takes care of that too. This calendar can be placed anywhere within the content just by moving the tag. You’ll never have to copy and paste a calendar again.
Where this kind of augmentation becomes extremely powerful is where the included items become personalized on a recipient by recipient basis. An example of this could be the {RECOMMEND.RESEARCH.10} tag, which allows you to automatically include any number of recommended research report links based on the individual recipient’s historical engagement and interests. Each recipient receives a custom list of 10 relevant research reports based on their historical engagement with you and your firm. All of this happens seamlessly when you send your note.
That’s just the beginning – we’re now designing tags that will consider: the location of the recipient (to contextualize corporate access, analyst marketing, or any other events based on the city they are in), the analyst marketing calendars based on recent readership (highlighting upcoming marketing based on recent research or other readership), and a multitude of other impactful personalization vectors.
These tags will be a huge step towards augmenting the content creation process. While the morning note in this example is a highly curated and creative piece of content, elements of it are mundane and repetitive. That’s where we can help, saving the content sender substantial time that can then be focused on higher value activities.
This kind of augmentation will be a defining feature as we look towards the future of capital markets, and client facing roles. This is only one example of how individuals in a client facing role can personalize the client experience, save time, and focus on higher value activities – ultimately driving higher revenues and a higher ROI.
Over the coming weeks we’ll continue to delve into other examples of how augmentation and automation are driving more effective and efficient communications between both sides of the Street and represent a powerful shift towards the future of client coverage and distribution in Capital Markets.
Read the previous volumes in this series:
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