Why Financial Services Organizations Need a Powerful CMS

Conditioned by AI-enabled experiences provided by Amazon, Google, Siri, and Alexa, customers are holding the financial services industry to a higher standard – but institutions are struggling to keep up.

It's not difficult to see why the industry is lagging behind: it's too dependent on legacy content management systems — outdated software that is too embedded in the organization to easily replace. Organizations are also held back because of strict compliance and regulation standards, complex organizational structures, fragmented priorities, and talent shortages.

These problems can be solved with the opposite of a legacy system: a next-gen content management system, or CMS. Financial organizations should look to a central content management system to manage, update, and associate information about the business. But that's not enough: your CMS should also meet industry standards for compliance while supporting the goals and objectives of multiple teams and departments.

You might have an existing solution in place, but is it empowering your team to deliver great digital experiences? Or, is it setting them back with extra work caused by limited functionality?

Legacy systems have difficulty communicating with more modern solutions. If you're using a legacy CMS, chances are that it won't integrate easily with the technology that powers third-party digital experiences. If this is the case, your team will find it difficult to manage the most basic of digital experiences, such as connecting your publisher listings with your Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect.

This is typically a result of your legacy CMS being unable to store both structured and unstructured data in a way that allows the solutions within your tech stack to relay information back and forth. (And to add even more complexity, the financial industry also has a special lexicon which makes integrations with other platforms a bit more tricky; instead of another location, you may have another branch. Instead of pricing, you're likely discussing premiums or rates.)

Managing structured data enables third-parties to understand semantic concepts, and output that same data in unstructured formats. This is important because your CMS can only interact with other solutions if you're using a structured data model.

Financial Services firms should want to leverage a CMS with a repository of structured data about their brand. This provides a digital foundation for immersive experiences, like conversational AI and even generative content.

Without this central repository of structured information, the customer journey can fracture. The information on your website, mobile app, and other authenticated experiences can vary from the information in your listings. Many of your internal systems – like your CRM and marketing automation platforms – may not relay information between each other very accurately. And when customers turn to the methods that help them find answers – like your website's search bar or your AI-powered chatbot – they will make note when there's an information void.

Your customers have been trained to search for exactly what they want, and they expect answers because search engines have shown they can provide them.

Your organization can meet this need by storing your information in one CMS.

But how is this different from your legacy CMS?

The challenge with traditional content management systems is that your content and information is stored on a webpage. Although you may hyperlink to other webpages, there's no relationship between the information. As a result, it becomes repetitive across multiple webpages and siloed into certain areas of your CMS. Ultimately, your content becomes too difficult to manage because it lives on multiple stationary pages. There's no relationship between multiple data points – such as a specific branch location and their specific hours of operation – because the data is managed manually and individually per each single webpage.

A CMS for the modern enterprise should create relationships between different pieces of information. This gives your CMS context to leverage in chat and search experiences. It also allows you to manage your information at scale, ultimately delivering the right answers everywhere your customers are asking questions.

When you deliver these answers, you're able to meet your customers at the moment of intent — leading to a better customer experience, increased discoverability and conversion, and lower operational costs.

A next-gen CMS can help your organization by allowing information to be managed from one central location. This enables a bidirectional flow of information between all of the applications that power your digital experiences.

When your customers search for things like office locations, advisors, and mortgage offers, they're not searching for those keywords — they're searching for the real things those words refer to, and they're asking your brand directly to address their need.

They're showing a strong intent to actually work with your organization. A next-gen content management system can help you reach them.

Let's use an example: A potential customer searches for "best financial advisors near me who handle retirement planning." Delivering the correct answer requires information from across your organization: ratings ("best"), individual professional profiles ("financial advisor"), office location ("near me"), and specialty ("retirement planning").

How can your financial services organization deliver an answer to a question — either on your own site or in search results — that requires information from operations, facilities, and other departments?

With Yext's CMS, you can define the relationships between all these entities (e.g., your professionals, locations, hours, and more) so that an AI-powered discovery service like Alexa or Google can answer this question. This makes it easier for customers to find answers to that very specific, high-intent query – both on your site and on the SERP.

If a potential customer searches, for example, for a "financial advisor near me who speaks Spanish," and your website's information is structured to answer this question, then they can find Sofia Gonzalez's individual page (which includes her hours, office address, and phone number). The customer can then call or email to book an appointment directly from the result.

However, if your information is missing, or your CMS doesn't map entities to one another in a way that search engines can understand, your organization won't show up on the search engine results page — but a competitor will. This can lead that potential customer, who's looking for help with retirement planning, to choose a different financial advisor over one of your professionals.

Delivering the answers customers are now trained to expect, directly on your website, leads to a better customer experience and higher conversions — meaning more revenue. Your organization needs a CMS that enables you to take control of this experience.

A legacy CMS can create a disjointed and fractured journey, but the right next-generation CMS will deliver a great customer experience — and bookings and revenue.