Global investment managers Schroders have been using Bynder for over five years. Since onboarding, the multinational finance company have come a long way on their DAM journey, embedding the tool at the heart of their digital ecosystem to support a range of marketing tasks – from centralizing assets and their brand identity, to transforming how they create and localize marketing materials.
Watch our interview above with Farzana Ali, Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders, as she explains the company’s five-year journey with Bynder and how exactly it’s benefitting their content operations. You can also read the highlights below.
Background
Multinational investment managers Schroders have been around for over 200 years, helping individuals, institutions, and intermediaries make smarter investment decisions. With over 6,000 employees based in six continents across the world, they needed an enterprise-grade digital asset management platform that could support their entire content lifecycle – from creation to distribution.
As a multi-brand business, acquisitions are also a fairly common occurrence, so having a single source of truth for everyone to understand their brand and easily access on-brand assets was a must-have.
Previous challenges
Back in 2017, Schroders rebranded themselves as a digital-first brand which encompassed major transformations across their business – including how they market the brand and provide services in the online space. This was the catalyst to optimize their internal processes and platform via a set of tools that could help them deliver industry-leading digital experiences and replace outdated ways of working.
Five years ago, people were running around the building with memory sticks trying to transfer large files. There was just no central repository for our digital assets.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
Aside from the lack of centralization for all their digital assets, Schroders’ content operations lacked the agility to get content to market quickly. They have a creative in-house team dedicated to creating marketing and brand materials for all markets, but the scale and demands of running a modern financial company led to team members spending a lot of time on simple asset requests, instead of higher-value creative work. Keeping all markets informed and aligned on the latest brand guidelines was a struggle, too.
Inefficient content operations had a big impact on our brand previously. There was a long way to speed to market.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
The transformation with Bynder
Bynder’s onboarding experts knew Schroders needed more than just a place to store their digital assets; they needed a multi-modular enterprise suite that could generate cost and time efficiencies across their content operations. Along with the core digital asset management capabilities, Schroders’ custom-made platform was complemented with the following Bynder modules:
- Brand Guidelines to create a digital home for their brand identity, so everyone knows exactly how to communicate the brand consistently
- Studio to scale and automate the production of branded marketing materials, helping to accelerate speed-to-market and free their creatives for other tasks
- Asset Workflow to streamline creative approvals and requests, getting everyone on the same page to easily review and provide feedback before pushing content live
- Dynamic Asset Transformation to automate how assets are delivered, sized, and SEO-optimized for their website, ensuring a top customer experience for their online visitors
They also have a Contentstack integration – their headless CMS – which connects to their DAM, providing a seamless exchange of assets between the two systems.
The Bynder team gave us a lot of attention and worked through every individual module. They were really helpful in rolling it out across the company and allowing everyone to adapt to a new platform.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
Everything centralized
At Schroders, 18 teams across 36 countries are using Bynder for accessing their digital assets as and when they need it – with the peace of mind that everything is easy to find, on-brand, and quickly shareable.
With the help of Bynder’s Asset Workflow module, Schroders carried out its biggest sustainability-focused campaign in 2020 – ‘Beyond Profit’ – rolled out in 24 languages. The campaign had tremendous results: a 352% increase in website traffic year-on-year, with 64% of visitors over an 8-month period being new to the brand.
One of the key reasons behind the success of this was using a great workflow tool that allowed us to operate efficiently across markets and teams, with a clear sign off and localization process.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
Digitally-dynamic brand guidelines fit for a digital-first brand
When you’re a company of Schroders’ scope and size, keeping everyone informed on the latest brand guidelines – as well as how brand assets should be created and leveraged – can be a daunting task. Especially considering Schroders' history of acquisitions.
Centralized and integrated with the Bynder DAM, all teams at Schroders (and external parties) can now quickly access their visually dynamic brand guidelines directly in their browser.
Scaling creative production with Studio
Schroders’ in-house creative teams needed a solution that could help them meet the high-volume content demands of a global financial company – without spending all their time on manual, repetitive tasks and admin that ate up all their time and resources.
With Bynder Studio, local markets can now produce on-brand creative assets independently via branded templates in a matter of minutes.
I think a huge amount of hours have been saved. We don't have to brief the in-house creative team and they can spend their time on bigger projects which utilize their skills more.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
Improving website experiences with Dynamic Asset Transformation
Supported by the integration with Contentstack, Schroders can now seamlessly deliver imagery to their CMS directly from Bynder with Dynamic Asset Transformation. They no longer need to store multiple derivatives of the same image in various sizes. Instead, DAT automatically optimizes the size, quality, and SEO performance of assets on their website, giving them time back in their day for other tasks.
One thing I love is that Bynder is constantly evolving and adapting, and it means that it makes our day-to-day life much easier.Farzana Ali
Brand & Advertising Manager at Schroders
Book a demo and see what Bynder can do for you
Over 4000 organizations worldwide use Bynder as their brand’s digital home for delivering exceptional content experiences. From centralized file storage and secure asset sharing to better brand consistency and project collaboration, we have a tailored solution to fit the needs of each and every customer. Why not see what Bynder can do for you with a free demo?
