Mutual Funds Comms Experience
A product strategy redefining the mutual funds regulatory communication experience
Client
Broadridge
Role
Associate Design Director
Industry
Finance
Focus
Product Strategy
The Challenge
Broadridge is a global fintech partnering with the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. The project scope was to understand the mutual funds experience journey from the perspectives of funds firms, advisors and investors, with respect to regulatory and other fund-related communications. The learnings would help support and validate the creation of a long-term product strategy to solidify and grow revenue.
Journey Mapping
Using qualitative research with internal stakeholders and clients, I mapped the end-to-end journey across funds and advisors, highlighting key interactions, pain points, and regulatory communications. The journey spans four stages: consider and attract, build and onboard, protect and retain, and scale - capturing how products are evaluated, proposed, managed, and evolved over time.
Research
Stakeholder interviews informed initial hypotheses, later validated through empathy interviews with ten fund organizations. This revealed six core insights, including gaps in targeted communication at launch, low engagement with dense regulatory content, and limited actionable data. These challenges hinder funds’ ability to effectively support advisors and identify investor opportunities.
Insight #1
Advisors are looking to streamline processes, utilize digital tools, and/or bypass traditional person-to-person conversations in their relationships with funds.
Insight #2
As direct retail and hybrid investor activity grows, fund communications with investors need to be easily comprehensible and digestible.
Insight #3
Funds view any investor communication as an opportunity to build brand and relationships, but doing so successfully requires more actionable, meaningful, and consumable content.
Insight #4
Digitizing content is a priority for funds in order to improve efficiency, engagement, and tracking, but regulatory and operational challenges are perceived barriers.
Insight #5
Funds are tracking marketing effectiveness to advisors mainly based on brand awareness and asset growth, instead of more nuanced metrics that could improve advisor segmentation, and enhance target marketing.
Insight #6
Reg comms are product based, but Advisors and Funds want to communicate at a higher level focused on strategies, models and life goals.
Opportunity Areas and Ideation
Insights translated into three opportunity areas: improving digital advisor experiences, transforming regulatory communications into interactive tools, and leveraging Broadridge data for strategic insights. These themes guided a collaborative ideation workshop, where “How might we” prompts helped generate solutions focused on strengthening advisor relationships and enabling data-driven decisions.
Opportunity Area #1
Empower advisors and shareholders in their fund interactions.
Broadridge can be a provider of tools funds can leverage that enable advisors and investors to interact with funds and fund materials on their own terms, without the need for further explanation from, or interaction with, another party.
Opportunity Area #2
Help funds navigate digital migration with actionable content.
Broadridge can be the collaboration partner that helps funds infuse effective calls to action within investor communication touchpoints, and navigate regulatory and operational constraints as funds move to digital channels.
Opportunity Area #3
Help funds leverage data and metrics to better meet client needs.
Broadridge can be a trusted data and metrics partner that gives funds a more meaningful and useful understanding of their customer base, enabling them to tap into their full marketing, and investor relationship potential.
Experience Strategy
I synthesized workshop outputs into five concepts supporting three initiatives: experience configuration, enabling customizable, compliant journeys; interaction and tracking, making communications interactive and measurable; and overview and refinement, using data to optimize segmentation and evolve journeys. Together, these define a scalable strategy to enhance engagement and long-term value.
Experience Configuration
Investor Journey Builder
Compliant Journey Templates
Broadridge can offer compliant journey templates to outline scheduled investor touchpoints (e.g. investment, onboarding, annual reports, proxy voting, etc.) based on existing segmentation. Funds can customize these templates or create new ones selecting from triggers, actions, and communication channels.
Resource Library
While configuring the journeys, funds can sync them with existing firm content including marketing, thought leadership, and educational material. This will generate a resource library to help complement communications with additional, contextualized content.
Brokerage Co-Branding
When funds are sold through a brokerage/advisor, both digital and printed communications can be co-branded, uploading the brokerage logo and looping in advisors at each investor touchpoint.
Interaction and Tracking
Compose Communication
Communication Builder
At each touchpoint, marketing teams can leverage the communication builder to enhance content. Funds can include CTAs inviting investors to explore other products, learn more through educational material or discuss with their advisors. Broadridge will package them to meet compliance regulations.
Content Suggestions
By collecting investors’ portfolio performance and engagement data, marketing teams will receive automated suggestions around additional product opportunities and contextualized resources.
Seamless Investor Authentication
Broadridge can leverage investor data to provide seamless navigation and re-direct them to their funds or brokerage platforms through frictionless authentication.
Interaction and Tracking
Interactive Documents
Regulatory Communications Summaries
Broadridge can provide tools to capture key facts and updates from regulatory documents related to investors data and goals, generating summaries in the form of cover letters, infographics, and/or explainer videos.
Interactive Documents
As investors navigate regulatory documents, they can leverage hyperlinks, FAQs, rollover help, and search capabilities to filter down to critical content and follow pathways to related information.
Document Interaction Tracker
Funds can keep track of investors’ search queries and document interactions to customize upcoming communications and generate additional education content.
Interaction and Tracking
Advisors Tools
Advisors Notifications
When investor relationships are intermediated by advisors, each communication touchpoint will generate notifications that keeps advisors in the loop and provide them with context around additional marketing content.
Advisors Support Content
Notified advisors can be provided with overviews of the investment performance, cross-referencing shareholders engagement, market events, and leadership content. This material will support dialogue around new opportunities and portfolio strategy.
Overview and Refinement
Dashboard and Insights
Funds Dashboard and Insights
Investor transactional and engagement analytics can be leveraged by funds to identify most engaging touchpoints and potential gaps. Insights can be generated to improve follow-ups, edit current journey configurations and highlight opportunities for educational content.
Improved Segmentation and Templates
Successful journey implementations and investors behavioral data can be leveraged by Broadridge to create new journey templates for funds and complement existing segmentation data.
Advisor Performance Review
Advisors can use data analytics to evaluate their marketability towards clients and measure brokerage performance against benchmarks, while evaluating new fund categories to extend their offer.