LEAP serves as the production partner for many businesses in the investment management, banking, credit and lending, insurance, FinTech and financial reporting sectors. Our specialist expertise in creative production for the finance sector covers a range of services, and one area in particular has seen a lot of recent growth.
We speak with Studio Services Manager Mike Dobrin to find out more.
What has been keeping your team busy over the past months?
We have been working with several of our clients in the finance sector to update vast numbers of PowerPoint slides and other types of documents such as brochures, fact sheets, press ads and presentation materials.
What sparked the increase in demand for these services?
Recently, several of our finance sector clients rebranded. This meant they needed to do a thorough overhaul of documents used for their internal and external communications.
What is involved in this type of work?
For M&G Investments, we supported them with the design, creation and full customisation of a new set of PowerPoint templates and toolkits to fit their new brand guidelines. Then, we applied these templates to all of their legacy slides. This required each and every slide to be re-formatted, proofed and a given a final consistency check before delivery.
Because we are dealing with the finance sector, everything has to be perfectly accurate and handled through a secure and confidential workflow. There is a lot to cover and we have to deliver it all within tight turn around times so that our clients can roll out everything they need for a full rebrand ASAP.
How do you make it happen?
Each file is handled by a dedicated team of artworkers and proofreaders and is overseen by project managers who provide the quality assurance checks and keep things running efficiently.
What kind of volumes are we talking about?
Over three months, LEAP’s team of PowerPoint operators, proofreaders and project managers reformatted nearly 7,000 slides across hundreds of decks, and that was just for one client.
We formatted 1,200 slides in just one month for another client.
Is this a one-off project, or is there more to it?
We continue to work with the M&G internal design studio to update their other documents. We need to make sure the application forms, letterheads, fact sheets, leaflets, and brochures are also consistent with their new brand.
Our longstanding client Jupiter Asset Management also rebranded recently. Since LEAP is their dedicated EMEA production services partner, we’ve been working with them a lot recently. We’ve been supporting their production department and internal studio on all sorts of document updates. Some of the work is a bit more creative as we’re involved in redesigning layouts and selecting imagery from their asset management system. We’ve also been providing specialist MS Word templating.
We have a few other clients going through rebrands and the workflows and requirements for them are similar.
What happens once everyone has rebranded, does the work dry up?
There are a lot of finance sector companies that use us on an ongoing basis because there will always be documents that need to be updated with new data or localised for different offices.
Something like a modest regulatory amendment could have a thousand touchpoints across one client’s documents.
Clients such as Vanguard Asset Management and the UK and US offices of T Rowe Price might send us 20-40 documents per month for updating. Some of our other clients also use us to produce their annual reports. These are usually more than 100 pages long. This keeps things ticking over nicely.
It sounds like a lot of high volume, very detail-oriented work, do you ever get bored?
Fortunately, we have specialists who really do enjoy these types of projects. We take pride in being able to exceed our clients’ expectations by consistently delivering great work with friendly efficiency.
What else do you do for the finance sector?
We also work with finance sector clients along with their creative and media agencies on other types of projects for all sorts of B2B and B2C marketing communications. Designers and developers in our studio animate and build digital marketing content for online and D-OOH.
As LEAP is an integrated marketing production company, we also have colleagues working on press ads, editorial design, creating employer-branding assets, making commercials, explainer videos, infographics, or translating and transcreating marketing campaigns into different languages. We also have a London printworks and a worldwide network of managed print partnerships to handle those business requirements.
That covers a lot, but who do I need to speak to to find out more?
The first point of call is our client services team. They’ll find out what you need and set you on the right path to get it delivered.