Organizations are grappling with challenges to deal with explosion of digital content. Content management lifecycle is going through massive transformation. I see a shift towards automatic content recognition, content management of external and unstructured data like social media, centralization of content into CLOUD, hyper personalized and intelligent content delivery & last but of course not the least great degree of focus on search & content discovery.

Financial services organization must take notice of these trends to cope up with anytime anywhere content paradigm.

Following trends are disrupting different stages of content life cycle across capture & recognition, management, storage and archiving, content distribution and delivery, search and e-discovery.

Multi-channel capture & recognition -

Days of OCR, ICR based text content recognition has come off age. With the arrival of nexus of forces, content recognition is gone beyond text to image, audio, video. Automatic content discovery (ACR) provide opportunity helping incremental sales in recognizing Music to trigger a itune transaction, smart TVs enabling possibilities to drive interaction & transaction through behind the scene content (for Sport, Drama and financial news etc) and context and location based Shopping services to convert instore shoppers into ecommerce customer. Organizations needs to invest in central metadata management solution to standardize watermark, metadata for the content, also Mobile platform providers like Apple and Google needs to expose APIs for ACR to enable innovation using Apps.

Usecase - Financial services organizations can use some of the techniques to draw more traffic to website and also drive high volume of cards payments transaction.

Social Content Manage-

More and more business critical activities are happening in social media; for example many organizations are using Social media for marketing, customer servicing and even for sells (American express). Internal collaboration tools like Yammer also use for employee service and satisfaction and feedback platform. This warrants tracking and record management of activity streams, blogs, photo's, convention, sound bites, videos etc. Companies like IBM, Opentext are providing capabilities to manage this. Expect more rigor and maturities as it goes mainstream. 

Usecase- FS organizations starting to recognize the power of social media and starts to use it for early problem detection, customer services and in-bound marketing in retail and wealth management customers.

Content Storage in CLOUD-

Enterprise content sync and sharing is gaining popularity. Likes of Dropbox, OneDrive, Gdrive, iCLOUD providing SaaS based model to enable central information & backup management across devices. This is actually helping BYOD adoption and a true anytime anywhere access to content. Regulatory requirements are still a barrier to this for wider adoption. Once right security, Geo specific data-center and device management techniques are applied we will see wider adoption.

Usecase - FS customers can store many customer centric documents for processes like KYC, onboarding, statements, personal details like passport, address proof etc in cloud to improve process efficiency.

Multi-channel Intelligent content delivery -

Multi-channel personalized, context aware content delivery framework based on user's location, gender, customer demographic & transaction history, proximity to other devices, time of day etc becoming critical to deliver right customer experience. A combination of Mobile, IoT, Big data & real time in-memory analytics (Context modelling, preference modelling), customer centric UX design (standards - WCAG AAA, ISO 9241,human centric design standards like ISO 13407) and 360 view of enterprise customer will help wider adoption.

Usecase - FS organizations can use this to drive rewards and loyalty for the 3rd party. Personalized targeting and sales conversion. It can be used to drive Digital detoxing and superior UX, communication and notification services, for example during day time when u are busy in office avoid sending stock price details etc.

Search & E-discovery-

Content discovery -Massive shift from structured data search to unstructured data search happening before our eyes. Importance of metadata is increasing day by day. Drawing relationship between unstructured and semi-structured data to get more comprehensive profile of the customer, or identify illegal, fraud activities are becoming key. A combination of advanced content analytics — such as text, social and sentiment analytics will drive the effective content discovery. Enablement of search and SQL APIs will fuel rapid adoption across existing BI and analytics tools.

Video searching will become mainstream and apart from simple metadata tagging we will see audio transcription and facial recognition, sentiment and relationship will be converted into searchable objects.

Voice search & interaction - Lots of work going on in this space with IBM Watson paying TV quiz show Jeopardy, Apple, Google and Microsoft proving a text to speech and NL capabilities. This is progressing towards cognitive & artificial intelligence.

Mobile search is more popular for context and location based sales and marketing purposes. Restaurants, hotels and retailers, are effectively utilizing mobile search-based advertising to drive more revenue.

Usecase - FS organization can use this for mobile wallet based payments advisor capabilities. It will also drive rewards and loyalty for the 3rd party.