Charles Schwab was built around the simple idea of putting clients first. They keep clients at the heart of everything they do by offering a better, more modern way to build and manage wealth. Charles Schwab is an American multinational financial services company headquartered in Westlake, Texas. They are a publicly traded company (NYSE: SCHW) and one of the largest banking institutions in the United States.
With a large and dynamic budget that was widely distributed across roughly 100 cost centers and numerous managers, the Charles Schwab marketing department knew they needed a better system to track their marketing spend. Their outdated spreadsheet system was no longer working for them, nor their tight target spend of -/+ 0.5%. They needed a solution that would compile their marketing spend into one place, keep data up to date without manual reconciliation, and remove the significant manual labor involved in generating updates for the executive suite.
They needed something that would provide them with the flexibility, accessibility, and scalability required to be successful. They chose Allocadia.
“We got to help decide how the tool was built to meet our specific needs,” says one team member, “We definitely feel like it was a partnership – and I can say that is something we look for in the vendors we work with.”
Since implementing Allocadia, and then integrating Workfront to their tech stack, the team has better visibility into their marketing investments. Everyone knows where they stand with their spend, and has a simpler, faster, and streamlined process for budget management that allows them to pull reports on who hasn’t updated their work or who has more than a 10% variance in approved spend.
They also have analytics on demand and “that’s a huge value for the leadership and executive teams. For example, when the CMO wants to know how much of the media team’s money is committed, a report can be generated quickly in Allocadia.” Additionally, they have improved transparency into finance with numbers broken out monthly. Spending more accurately was one of the team’s major priorities and now they can show progress and results in real time.
Read all the details about how Allocadia helped Charles Schwab improve marketing budget management in the full case study.