M&G selects digital print from dsi

A little investment can go a long way, and this was certainly the case for investment firm M&G.

Last year it decided to move away from general documentation for its investors, and to invest in digitally produced personalised booklets which, along with many commercial and environmental benefits, enabled M&G to invest in more meaningful relationships with its clients.

Kate Rowland of M&G says the company’s aim was “to continue to keep ahead of the market through providing enhanced, relevant communication for our investors”.
However, before it started utilising the benefits of digital print, M&G felt it was not quite managing to meet this aim.

Instead of tailored communications, its clients previously received a number of separate statement sheets showing the value of their investment, and numerous inserts, including a generic performance book for M&G’s complete range of funds. It was the same whether the recipient had two or two hundred funds.

Another problem was that more than one mailing was sometimes sent out to the same customer, leading to duplicated production and postage costs.

M&G decided to change things in the latter half of 2007, so the company’s information engineers specified an ideal solution for its print company, dsicmm, to implement that would enable M&G to offer personalised communications. This required dsicmm to invest in a new digital printing system.

According to Dave Reynolds, MD of dsi talisman, the litho arm of dsicmm, M&G’s communications had originally been printed on a litho press, the individual statement details were then laser printed on top of the pre-printed paper, and the general booklet was mass produced.

However, M&G’s changes meant that “now dsicmm required a digital machine that was capable of high quality at fast speeds”, Reynolds says.

The company chose to install the first IBM Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 digital colour press in the UK.

The InfoPrint 5000 is integrated with intelligent finishing equipment. This includes a Hunkeler guillotine, an MBO folder and Hohner stitching unit.

M&G’s bespoke platform, Nexdox, was used to produce the customised booklets. It converts client data into high volume, variable, colour digital output, without the need for M&G to change its data management.

The implementation of this new workflow system was completed within two months. For the first of M&G’s biannual mailings that were conducted using this system, dsicmm processed, printed, finished and mailed over 450,000 booklets, with a variable pagination between eight and 64 pages, equating to over seven million A4 sheets. All this work was conducted within a fortnight, says dsicmm.

Thanks to dsicmm’s new workflow, M&G’s investors now receive just one document, a fully personalised investment update booklet.

This includes an individual statement and graphical representation of the investor’s performance, along with a valuation and commentary on each of their funds. The balance that customers can still invest is calculated and placed within a subscription form. Details of any other funds that may be of interest are also included.

As only relevant documentation is printed, the amount of paper used has reduced by over 40 tonnes on a like-for-like mailing basis. The average pack weight has also been reduced by 90g per pack, creating less carbon emissions during posting, dsicmm says. The booklet is now produced using Revive 50:50 paper, which has half recycled, half virgin fibre.

The new system also provides commercial benefits for M&G, as the personalised booklets would have been too expensive to produce using the previous printing system.

According to Rowland, dsicmm managed to deliver M&G’s ideal solution. Describing the results of this change, she says: “The clear, concise, integrated communication has not only received positive comments from investors, but also from members of the financial services industry.

“The communication must be working, as we are experiencing a significant reduction in queries at our customer help desk. The cross-sell and up-sell benefits from delivering relevant targeted messages within the pack are also already being experienced by the business, even at these early stages.”
As the results are already beginning to show, converting to customised documents is proving to be a wise investment for M&G.


• www.mandg.co.uk
• www.dsigroup.com