Business Writing for Financial Professionals

Why Should You Attend:

A study by the College Board’s National Commission on Writing concludes that a third of employees in United States blue-chip companies write poorly, causing corporations to spend as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. This problem is especially significant as the flattening of the global marketplace has increasingly burdened financial professionals to write high-profile, complex documents for diverse audiences on the fly. They often perform this essential work in diverse locations, such as commuter trains, hotel lobbies, and conference rooms during fast-paced, noisy business meetings, and under exceedingly tight time pressures. While many financial professionals benefit from using templates when developing major documents, circumstances often demand they think on their feet by either adapting the template to the situation or abandoning it for an alternative method.

As a result of these demands, writers ranging from tax consultants and investment risk analysts to equity research reporters and sales forecasters need a toolbox of memorable and practical strategies, techniques, and tips that will guide them through the writing process. This webinar includes the key principles of focused, high-impact writing regardless of the financial document. Working through the phases of revising (ideas), editing (expression), and proofreading (overlooked errors), this session looks at the rewriting process from these levels:

1. the document level of purposefulness;

2. the paragraph level of emphasis, unity, coherence, and visual appeal;

3. the sentence level of impact, clarity, conciseness, consistency, and correctness;

Learning Objectives:

Attending this webinar will enable participants to:

• Focus the audience on the purpose of the message
• Determine the appropriate level of content
• Organize data to focus the reader
• Heighten the importance of facts to address the reader’s concerns

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

This webinar includes the following learning points:

• Four levels of quality controlling finance-related messages

• Using a structure that reinforces the purpose
• Emphasizing key points through solid paragraphing

• Employing formatting devices to guide readers through complex data

• Highlighting the relevance of data through transitions
• Editing sentences for clarity through active voice

• Applying the principles of conciseness to get to the point

• Maintaining a consistent message through parallel structure

• Remedying the most prevalent sentence errors that compromise the quality of language

Who Will Benefit:

This webinar will provide valuable assistance to:

• Accounting professionals
• Banking managers
• Business forecasters
• Economic advisors
• Equity researchers
• Financial planners
• Insurance professionals
• Investment consultants
• Risk analysts
• Tax specialists

Phil Vassallo
Consultant, Philip Vassallo

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., has designed, delivered, and supervised communication training programs for more than 20,000 executive, managerial, supervisory, administrative, and technical professionals internationally over the past three decades. Dr. Vassallo is the author of the books How to Write Fast Under Pressure, The Art of E-Mail Writing, and The Art of On-the-Job Writing. He has edited major reports for the US government, City of New York, and the corporate world. He also writes the blog Words on the Line, which offers practical tips for developing writers. He has taught internationally, currently as a faculty member of the Beijing International MBA program.

Topic Background:

Financial professionals realize that demonstrating mastery of their profession is not limited to preparing and presenting meeting briefings and firing off summary emails on business issues. True writing proficiency emerges from their ability to draft and edit operational and financial inquiries, fiscal analyses, revenue forecasts, internal justifications, appropriation requests, client proposals, business cases, and a whole host of other financial documents depending on their organizational responsibilities. Meanwhile their formal training in these vital skills has been limited to academic contexts, and their company may not necessarily use standardized methods for composing these diverse documents. Thus, specialized training in financial business writing is essential to ensure that financial professionals write documents which express their organizational objectives and business purposes.

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