The Problem
A large US life insurance and financial services company was struggling with high costs and inefficiencies in the creation and updating of regulatory documents for its annuities and investment funds. The company prepared and distributed regulatory documents using a system of manual processes and traditional typesetting. This procedure was time- consuming and highly inefficient, creating persistent challenges for the organization that slowed production, required inordinate amounts of time from internal staff, and easily consumed a production budget of some $2 million per year.
The company faced two core problems:
- Workflows were siloed and segregated. Document production took place through two separate workflows, one for content management and one for traditional typesetting. This division created duplication and prevented scalability. PDF exchange with vendors and manual hosting caused significant operational delays.
- The editing and filing process was a manual affair. Internal teams were required to manually review and edit every document for errors, compliance and branding issues, and to refile each document individually. To ensure consistency across fund communications, staff had to read all language in documents for multiple funds— the vast majority of which was identical—to identify and correct a handful of differences embedded in the text. Simply implementing changes to fund names and descriptions across an offering of more than 100 funds took up hours of staff time. Also, staff was forced to manually edit documents multiple times to implement changes from repeated reviews by the business side, and to manually provide the business team with updates on document status.
These problems were becoming more acute. The production team was facing rising expectations for speed, accuracy, and regulatory compliance, but progress was constrained by outdated systems and workflows. Despite the availability of modern digital document production solutions, an organizational resistance to change kept the firm wedded to legacy systems and procedures. The potential of costs of switching to a new solution, possible workflow disruptions during the implementation process and questions about the actual value of moving away from traditional production methods created strong internal pushback against any change.
The Solution
In 2022, the firm hired a new head of VP Legal Operations – Annuities. The new leader became an internal champion for change. After assessing the legacy production process, he approached senior leadership and presented a compelling case: The risks of not changing the process far outweighed the risks of change. Volumes were increasing, costs were rising, and regulatory and compliance demands were mounting. Meanwhile, new technology solutions offered ways to dramatically enhance efficiency, automating many of the functions that now slowed production and consumed resources.
Senior leadership was convinced. After an extensive search, the firm engaged Broadridge to implement an automated composition and filing service for all 40 Act Fund legal documents, variable annuity product documents, and shareholder reporting for NCSR (and later TSR) requirements. To minimize any implementation disruptions, Broadridge provided extensive support for document conversion and proofing and accelerated document migration to an aggressive timeline that was completed within six weeks.
The organization-wide solution was built on Broadridge’s DocuBuilder, an automated publishing solution that connects content across documents and outputs. This connection enables users making edits to a single document to immediately identify other documents in which the same content is used and update multiple documents simultaneously. The solution eliminates the tedious manual steps necessary to keep content aligned across documents in traditional legacy document production processes. The solution integrates XBRL capabilities and Broadridge’s Managed Services Filing team to tag documents, compile a filing package for documents, and file with the SEC.
The Results
The Broadridge solution eliminated internal silos by consolidating legacy typesetting and content management workflows into single content solution. It brought all document types —including prospectuses, summary prospectuses, variable annuities, statutory filings, and XBRL—under a single umbrella for centralized oversight. In so doing, it enabled the firm to standardize language and structure, aligning content across teams and product lines. Critically, it streamlined e-delivery, printing, and distribution by eliminating the need to manually package and transmit PDFs to vendors. These changes significantly reduced time required to update and file prospectuses and other material, improved content quality, minimized compliance risk, and lowered costs.
The implementation of the Broadridge solution generated a rapid 10-15% reduction in costs for the document production team. However, across the entire organization, costs savings were much greater, with the cost of overall fund communication and compliance dropping by 50% or more.
Equally as important were costs avoided. Since the Broadridge solution was implemented, the SEC’s Tailored Shareholder Reports rule and other regulatory changes have significantly increased documentation requirements, pushing annual prospectus production volumes for the company from 70-75 per year to 350-400. The switch to the Broadridge system enabled the company to handle that five-time increase in production volume with no growth in headcount. What began as an internal push for cost- effectiveness led to the creation of a scalable, modernized system capable of handling a growing regulatory workload without additional resources.
