Fidelity Investments has a new business providing financial institutions with technology to create compliant public communications material.
Called Saifr, the new business will offer tools powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) models trained on tens of millions of compliance-reviewed data records. The goal is to foster greater collaboration between a firm’s marketing and compliance teams creating, reviewing and approving client communications, said Vall Herard, managing director of Saifr.
“Ensuring that marketing materials are compliant with various regulatory rules requires multiple touchpoints inside and outside an organization, including content creation, compliance feedback, revisions, email, and workflow hand-offs,” Herard said in a statement. “As a result, the process can be inefficient and create the opportunity for friction and risk.”
Saifr will offer two products at launch that enable “a human-machine partnership,” Herard said. The primary technology, SaifrReview, provides a workflow tool to create written materials, social media posts, audio records and videos. Marketers and compliance professionals can collaborate in the dashboard and track where a piece of content is in the approval process.
The second product, SaifrScan, will analyze and score a firm’s communications. SaifrScan is designed to integrate with any firm’s existing document or social media workflows and flag potential regulatory or corporate compliance violations across text, images and videos.
The goal is to uncover risks and noncompliant content before it is sent for review by compliance professionals, helping to save some time for more creative and complex tasks. Saifr’s engine is designed to improve itself over time and incorporate future regulatory changes.
For independent vendors like Advisor Websites, which creates websites and marketing materials for financial advisors that adhere to compliance regulations, Fidelity’s new business validates their value proposition. A recent Advisor Websites survey of 500 financial advisors found that personalization, automation and tailored content drive digital marketing engagement, but cumbersome compliance review processes can hamper these efforts, said Graham Turner, CEO of Advisor Websites.
“As financial advisors look to grow their digital marketing efforts, it is essential that they partner with organizations who understand both their business and the regulatory requirements, but are also nimble enough to evolve with the industry,” Turner said in an email.
Snappy Kraken, which provides marketing technology to financial advisors and was named one of Financial Planning’s
“I see the biggest time-saving gains here between those tasked with creating content and those tasked with reviewing/approving it for compliance,” Gonzalez said in an email. “This continues to confirm the need for efficient content creation and communication. Compliance, comms and marketing professionals will get to move much faster.”
Snappy Kraken recently introduced three new marketing programs designed to help advisors accelerate growth: a series of live workshops, a conference and $1,000 advertising credits. According to CEO Robert Sofia, the company doubled its revenue and grew its advisor headcount by more than a third in 2021.
Saifr was developed in Fidelity Labs, Fidelity’s in-house technology incubator, and will charge financial services firms an annual subscription fee that varies depending on a client’s needs, such as the firm’s size, how many businesses and individuals Saifr’s solutions are supporting, and more, Herard said.
The product will also be available to firms that do not custody assets with Fidelity.
"Saifr’s target users are the marketing and compliance professionals within [financial] institutions, or anyone who has a hand in the creation, review and filing of public communications with regulators," Herard said.
