M&I Institutional Trust Services
April, 2008 - M&I Institutional Trust Services, a division of Marshall & Ilsley Trust Company N.A., is one of the premier retirement plan providers in the country. Today it services approximately 830 clients and 385,000 retirement plan participants, with over $103 Billion in assets under management. In 2003, M&I was challenged with changing the way it produced participant enrollment and education materials in order to meet the increasing and changing demands of its clients and the marketplace. M&I's focus on customer service meant the solution needed to be very flexible to accommodate client needs, while still keeping costs to a minimum. Managing a wide variety of plan types, unique plan provisions, client logos, and client-specific content needs, open architecture fund selection and delivery requirements made meeting the demand for customized enrollment materials difficult to manage. M&I needed a way to effectively and efficiently create and distribute customized communication material for retirement plan participants.
Bowne Marketing Communications provided M&I with a web-based publishing solution that streamlined the enrollment material creation and production process. Not only did the online system provide M&I with a means to create highly-customized plan specific materials for different types of communication kits, but it also provided the company with a way to quickly implement new or customized content for its enrollment materials. The online system streamlines the ordering and tracking process. Customized and personalized enrollment materials are created, printed and mailed within 48 hours.
The system flexibility allows M&I to provide its clients the opportunity to design content unique to its plan and participants for a more targeted education process. All the plan level materials, including plan provisions, educational content, forms (enrollment and beneficiary), as well as fund performance information, is combined into a single perfect-bound booklet. The booklets are mailed directly to the newly eligible participant's home or shipped to enrollment meeting locations through the online ordering process. Bowne's system also allows for content and design flexibility that is unique to the M&I “brand.” A proprietary risk return chart, which visually displays the plan funds within their asset class category, allows participants to understand the relative risk/return characteristics of funds within the plan. Bowne's system produces M&I's proprietary fund fact sheet for publicly and non-publicly traded funds using a standard format. Templates were developed to allow M&I complete control over the content on a plan by plan basis. Also, the ability to upload PDF documents is invaluable when working with highly customized plans. Booklets can also be customized with cover images, using image libraries specific to the client's preferences.
This partnership was extended even further through a combined effort with Bowne Translation Services which has allowed M&I to produce enrollment materials in Spanish using the same customization and production process.
