The financial services industry has faced drastic transformations over the past decade, resulting in increased complexity and regulatory requirements. Consequently, there’s a growing need for effective knowledge management in financial consulting services.
Maybe you’ve noticed your employees and customers have been asking the same questions repeatedly, or you’ve noticed a lack of organization for company resources. If these challenges are frequent and nagging, it’s probably time for a knowledge management system.
At Creatives On Call, our experts can craft quality knowledge management systems catered to your business operations. In turn, you can deliver proactive responses in real-time, ensure your team is consistent and promote efficiency throughout your organization.
Why Invest In Knowledge Management?
Surviving and thriving in the complex financial world means efficiently leveraging institutional knowledge across a skilled workforce. That’s where a robust knowledge management program delivers competitive advantages:
- Reducing compliance infractions: Standardizing regulatory, policy and procedural information assets minimizes oversights and errors that lead to fines.
- Making employees more productive: Consolidating research, analyses and insights in central repositories lets workers spend less time tracking down information.
- Getting new talent up to speed: Onboarding processes augmented with expertise access accelerate proficiency.
- Strengthening client service: Customer-facing teams equipped with full client history visibility offer better consultations.
- Sparking innovation: Removing silos connects experts across departments to collaborate on new product development.
- Preserving know-how: Codified knowledge in databases withstands attrition risks as employees inevitably change roles.
- Achieving data-driven success: Collective intelligence fuels both quantitative analytics and qualitative customer insights for precision engagement.
- Pinpointing growth opportunities: Gaps found in content frameworks inform recruitment and training strategies targeting shortcomings.
Now more than ever, financial services firms must optimize knowledge sharing to further quality, consistency and competitive capabilities enterprise-wide. With over 200 financial creative and marketing initiatives launched just in the last few years, Creatives On Call has the depth and experience to help you implement a knowledge management platform that sets your team on a path to success.
Key Components of a Financial Knowledge Management System
So, what does a designed knowledge management platform look like? While banks may have different priorities from other financial sectors like insurance, there are key components that make up these platforms:
Centralized Repository
A central repository serves as the foundation for organizing and housing institutional knowledge. Financial firms may leverage document management systems, SharePoint or purpose-built applications to consolidate research, analyses, product information, regulatory guidelines, training content and other documentation into a single, searchable collection. Centralization breaks down information silos.
Taxonomy
A taxonomy provides the classification scheme for systematically organizing documents and data within the repository per the specific lines of business, products, functions, entities and processes financial companies oversee. This hierarchical organizational system with distinct categories and metadata-enhanced sorting allows both human and automated systems to store and discover relevant content quickly without getting lost across millions of assets.
Metadata Framework
The metadata framework requires defining standardized fields for capturing document attributes like ownership, publication dates, version histories, as well as reviewing workflow stages, usage rights and other descriptive data applied consistently across assets. Rigorous metadata paired with taxonomy classifications enhances findability, tracks lifecycles and allows filtering to subsections of content.
Search and Discovery
Sophisticated search and discovery tools empower users to tap into the knowledge management system’s wealth of institutional expertise with ease. Quick search bars, descriptive filters, hierarchical faceted navigation, tag clouds showing popular concepts, saved search alerts and more allow for quick discovery of information.
Access Controls
With confidential data prevalent across financial organizations, knowledge management systems incorporate access controls to protect sensitive, licensed and proprietary information from unauthorized internal or external visibility. Settings, permission levels, authentication protocols, secure logins and similar functionality prevent viewed content from being mishandled.
Distribution Tools
Pull-based search takes users only partially along the knowledge sharing journey. Relevant content must also push outward to employees based on personalization algorithms aligned with their business roles, interests and activities. Distribution tools ranging from portal homepages to email newsletters and alert channels allow ongoing information discovery automation.
Analytics
Analytics examine usage trends, content gaps, expert activities, data lineages and other intelligence derived from employee interactions with the knowledge management ecosystem. Financial executives use visual dashboards and reports to strengthen personalization, demonstrate return on investment (ROI), overhaul taxonomy alignment, highlight redundant or outdated materials due for retirement, and feed improvements.
Curation Workflow
An automation-enhanced human review process provides quality control and consistency across the knowledge platform. Financial reviewers flag outdated legacy items needing revisions or archival while ensuring new assets meet standards for instructional documents, legal disclaimers, confidential markings, brand tone standards and more before publication to maintain trust.
User Experience
Well-designed, intuitive user experiences remove adoption hurdles by integrating systems into daily workflows rather than introducing new burdensome channels. Interfaces balance corporate visual identity with performance factors like rapid page loads, prominent real-time search bars, consistency, multi-device delivery and customer support access.
Knowledge Management: The Creatives On Call Approach
What does Creatives On Call offer when it comes to knowledge management? Let’s dive into our approach.
Knowledge Creation
First, our team helps identify and capture the information you want to document, whether it’s frequently asked questions or troubleshooting instructions for a complex financial process.
Knowledge Sharing
Then, we help you organize the collected information based on your audience’s needs. This includes helping you find the right software to implement. One of our experts can work with you to identify the best system for your needs, as we understand this can be a burdensome process.
Once the software is chosen, Creatives On Call helps you publish your content and make it accessible to users. Then, we promote your new knowledge base through channels that ensure effective distribution both internally and externally.
Knowledge Improvement
Creatives On Call also helps you establish data analysis systems, which allows you to continuously improve your existing knowledge. When your knowledge systems are regularly analyzed, you’ll have peace of mind knowing the information will remain relevant and accurate.
Our goal is to make this process as easy as possible to get your team on track for an optimized workflow. When everyone knows where to go for answers, you can spend less time tracking down information and more time being efficient.
Look To Creatives On Call
As an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy, Creatives On Call specializes in helping businesses solve marketing and communications challenges. From assisting in building a data segmentation system to financial web app development, we’re here to help you make a name for yourself in the industry.
While we believe in the power of marketing as an ongoing effort, we can also connect you with our knowledge management team for a single project. Or, we’ll build your dream team for financial marketing services with copywriters, web developers and more.
Wherever you are in your marketing journey, we’re here to meet you and get to work. Contact us today to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is knowledge management in finance?
Knowledge management in finance refers to the strategies, processes and systems that financial services companies use to capture, store, share and apply knowledge and expertise related to financial products, markets, regulations and customer needs across the organization. Effective knowledge management enables financial firms to leverage collective intelligence to make better decisions, improve compliance, develop innovative offerings and provide exceptional client service.
What are the three main areas of knowledge management?
There are many important areas of knowledge management, but three key facets are people, processes and technology. These focus on connecting the right knowledge with the right people, using processes to improve knowledge sharing and use, and leveraging technology as an enabler of more effective knowledge flows.
