Harris Khan- Financial printing digitalised, industry sees seismic shift.
- Costs for the production and publication of financial documents such as securities prospectuses lowered drastically, the time involved reduced considerably.
- Issuers, banks and attorneys can now produce prospectuses with a perfect design themselves entirely, it is no longer necessary to commission a “financial printer”, the audit-secure logging of all changes is safeguarded and supported by IT.
- Marcus Behrend heads marketing for the new SMASHDOCs’ solution for “Financial Printing”.
Munich, 8 October 2020 – SMASHDOCs, the leading global development and marketing platform for collaborative word processing solutions, is taking on another market that has been analog to date – financial printing. “Our new solution reduces the costs for the production of financial documents such as securities prospectuses by 70 per cent for issuers, banks and attorneys. In addition, the processing times are about 50 per cent shorter compared to a cooperation with a financial printer,” says Christian Marchsreiter, the founder and CEO of the Munich-based smartwork solutions GmbH. SMASHDOCs is a highly scalable platform and already has solutions for the production of books, for agreement projects and for the creation of brochures and annual reports. Renowned companies such as Wolters Kluwer, Holzbrinck Publishing Group and Deutsche Rentenversicherung already use SMASHDOCs’ solutions on a large scale.
SMASHDOCs revolutionises financial printing
“We are simplifying and accelerating the production of securities prospectuses dramatically. All the manual, cost-intensive work stages of a financial printer are now superfluous. The number of pages and change runs no longer play a role of any kind when it comes to the costs. Any number of proofs can now be created free of charge at any point in time,” says Marchsreiter. “In the future it will now no longer be necessary to commission a financial printer. A whole industry will soon experience a seismic shift because of our new solution,” adds the digital entrepreneur.
Financial printing finally digitalised
Issuers as well as their banks and law firms can manage all document versions and changes themselves and publish these totally independently of a financial printer. At any point in time they can create both a perfectly designed initial version and as many proofs as desired. They can create so-called “blacklining, cumulative or strikethrough proofs” themselves with one click of a mouse. In this respect SMASHDOCs always ensures perfect interplay with Microsoft WORD, meaning that all those involved in the process who are working offline can be seamlessly integrated into the web-based creative and approval process. All the changes are automatically logged to ensure a complete audit trail.
The cooperation with traditional financial printers is a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. Fees of as much as 250,000 euros are not a rarity. In the case of a securities prospectus with 400 pages, for example, with a price of 30 euros per page an issuer can expect to have to pay 12,000 euros just for a version with the initial layout. The customary change procedures are also invoiced for each page that requires amendment, meaning that the costs multiply. In addition, comparative and change reports are repeatedly required during the production process; to date these have been prepared manually and regularly lead to enormous time pressure and exploding costs. “This is now a thing of the past. Issuers, attorneys and banks can finally breathe a sigh of relief,” promises Marchsreiter.
Marcus Behrend heads marketing for Financial Printing
smartwork solutions GmbH has been able to acquire the industry expert Marcus Behrend for the marketing of the new solution for financial printing from SMASHDOCs. The specialist for financial communication looks back on many years’ experience in the field of financial printing and was most recently responsible for business development in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Eastern Europe at Donnelley Financial Solutions. Prior to this he had worked at Merrill Germany and Bloomberg PolarLake. “SMASHDOCs Financial Printing is the logical, digital future in our industry for all those wanting to publish while keeping a close eye on the costs and the time involved. For everybody therefore,” says Behrend.
Financial printers are companies which convert a prospectus text that has usually been prepared using Microsoft WORD, as well as all the customary tables and graphics, into a professional, print-ready layout. In the manual process the financial printer creates the layout page for page using his layout program. Once the first version has been produced, this is submitted to the regulatory authorities and then undergoes a large number of change runs, with all the changes having to be incorporated into the already composed document manually. In this respect, every change has to be documented meticulously for liability reasons. So-called “blacklining, strikethrough and cumulative proofs” as well as “global searches” are indispensable intermediate editorial stages which cause considerable additional manual work for the financial printer and thus drive the costs up enormously.
Marchsreiter and Behrend are throwing down the gauntlet to what has to date been the analog financial printing industry: “Our team is available for live demonstrations at www.financial-printing.de,” says the duo.
About SMASHDOCs
SMASHDOCs is a web-based development and marketing platform for collaborative word processing solutions for professional teams and is based on a unique, patented versioning and change tracking technology.
The platform developed by smartwork solutions GmbH, a Munich-based software company, makes challenging word processing projects easy to manage and this makes teams more productive. The latest information is to be found under www.smashdocs.net
