Magnolia & Digital Transformation in Financial Services

By Natalie Evans

June 29, 2018

API, Cloud, CMS, content management, Content Management System, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Content Management, Financial Services, Headless CMS, Magnolia

Banks, payment processors and others in the financial services sector have largely embraced new technologies in stride, but have struggled thus far to avoid disruptions and security breaches. Collaboration, information sharing, and communication are all essential ingredients in the operation of any successful financial services organization.

This typically requires financial institutions to manage a wide variety of content across multiple departments within the organization. A reliable financial services content management system can help your institution more effectively organize your content and other business assets, which ultimately enables you to provide better service to your clients.

The financial industry can be broken down into groups and a customized CMS solutions can provide the following benefits:

• Banking – A CMS enables banking institutions to increase shares of wallet, while lowering operating costs and maintaining compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.

• Investment Management – Investment firms can benefit from greater transparency and an increased ability to manage risk and compliance.

• Insurance – Insurance companies will be able to more effectively combine IT and business functions to drive growth and manage compliance.

So what are some of the key benefits that a CMS can offer?

• Enhanced content security – Content security is critical in the financial services industry, as companies routinely handle sensitive personal information. CMS systems are designed to grant access only to authorized personnel with unique user IDs and passwords.

• Content centralization – All content is organized in one centralized location for easy sharing and collaboration.

• Greater accuracy – Accuracy is important to any financial services organization. CMS's improves accuracy when updating content.

Recently Magnolia CMS has been making waves in the fintech industry. They recently, released a press release “Key Financial Companies Bank on Magnolia’s Integration Strengths”, with so many CMS options out there I wanted to find out a bit more about Magnolia and how they are impacting the financial industry. I was lucky enough to connect with Pascal Mangold, CEO of Magnolia CMS to shed some light on the topic. 

Could you give me a little a back ground of how the company came about?

“Magnolia started small, driven by two innovators who wanted to build a flexible and powerful CMS. Boris Kraft and I founded Magnolia in Basel, Switzerland in 1997. Our vision was to create one of the first open source content management systems based on Java. Magnolia has since come a long way, but our core promise has always been to create a powerful customizable platform that allows brands to develop their digital presence exactly the way they want.”

I understand that the majority of your clients are in the Financial and Government industry. Could you tell me why your CMS is so desirable amongst them?

“Magnolia CMS is integration-ready, with a rich set of integration and customization points, open-suite model and flexible UI. This means that our clients can leverage their existing technology investments and stay open for the future. This is particularly important in the financial industry, and also in the public sector. These organizations often have to keep legacy systems running even as they move along the digital transformation journey. Magnolia’s strong integration capabilities, combined with powerful REST APIs, give them full flexibility for integrating in-house systems and third-party microservices.

In addition, Magnolia CMS helps organizations in the financial and public sectors enhance governance and compliance. They can define content ownership and roles. There are previews of content, features and robust workflows. These make governance processes easier and more predictable.”

What are some of the challenges facing the financial industry when they are selecting the appropriate CMS?

“I would say that the challenges are quite similar across industries when selecting the appropriate CMS. The digital ecosystem is changing rapidly, so organizations need to be very clear on what their business goals are and what functions they need in order to achieve those goals. It’s tempting to buy a turn-key, monolithic solution, but it is usually an overkill and most of the additional features go wasted. A best-of-breed approach lets you partition the costs and provides you with best-in-class technology. But you need more effort in planning and strategy to stitch together the requirements that make sense for your business. 

You don’t necessarily need to invest in a Ferrari, when a high-end sports bike could do the job—a flexible vehicle that you can customize or break down into parts that you can replace and interchange, to get the optimal transport machine that works for you.”

How do you see the technology evolving around driving Digital Transformation Strategy for Exceptional Customer Experience in the coming years?

“I think the cloud will become increasingly important. The way businesses view and design their information architecture is changing. A cloud infrastructure gives them even more speed, agility and flexibility to launch and switch course as they need to. We will also see more emphasis on data and measurability. Technologies that thrive would be the ones that provide easy-to-use tools that can track and capture clear, tangible results. These are tools that in effect allow you to measure customer experience success and demonstrate how digital transformation strategies tie back directly to business goals and outcomes.”

Ending Notes

Magnolia CMS can provide a state-of-the-art financial company CMS that will streamline and simplify the entire document management process. You’ll be able to reuse content across multiple channels, helping you operate more efficiently and reduce costs. Their CMS is also extremely flexible and adaptable to your changing business needs. You can easily make changes and upgrades as your business evolves over time.

The rise of fintech has huge implications for the industry and one of the main priorities for financial services firms embarking on these endeavors is to optimize the end user experience, especially for their customers. The race to create the most seamless, efficient and intuitive banking experience through modern technologies has grown significantly in the past few years, and it is doubtful that a bank that does not get on board with these efforts will be able to maintain a competitive edge in the near future.

Here are some interesting stats that I found by Jaeiro Digital. They surveyed 95 middle-level and senior-level managers in the financial services industry to learn about their organizations’ attitudes and progress when it comes to digital transformation.

• 23% say their company is behind the digital curve.
• 47% are working to implement new technologies.
• 51% believe their existing technology is holding them back.
• 39% say technologies are deployed by different departments

Natalie Evans

Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.