In this episode
Melissa Ryan, Vice President and Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Federated Hermes, consolidated more than twenty websites into a single global front door on Optimizely after the merger of Federated Investors and Hermes Investment Management — and the platform work turned out to be the least difficult part. Recorded with Greg Kihlström at Opticon 2026 in New York, the conversation covers what a replatform forces a large regulated organization to decide out loud: who owns a page, who signs off on design, what finally gets retired, and how much of segmentation can safely move from what a visitor declares to what their behavior implies. Ryan also draws a line most vendors blur — between AI that accelerates a human’s draft and a system that publishes on its own — and explains which of the two is realistically deployable inside an asset manager in the next year.
Key takeaways
- The rebrand drove the replatform, not the other way around. Combining Federated Investors and Hermes Investment Management created two of everything — two marketing automation platforms, two analytics stacks, twenty-plus websites — and the consolidation into one global front door was the follow-on to the brand merger, driven by SEO and a consistent brand experience.
- Design and content layout were the hardest internal agreement, not the technology. Design is subjective, everyone has a favorite, and a conservative financial-services context narrows the acceptable range further; the resolution was small internal workshops that identified what was collectively working before sending feedback back to the agency.
- Self-declared segmentation is a regulatory requirement, not an unfinished project. Certain content is role-restricted, so a visitor must attest to being a financial advisor, institutional investor, or individual investor before it can be shown — behavioral inference cannot substitute for that attestation.
- Personalization was built as scaffolding first. The implementation established the structural “bones” for personalizing specific sections as data accumulates, with experimentation and customer-journey build-out sequenced behind it — Ryan describes it as crawl, walk, run.
- Meta tagging is now written for machines as well as people. The team enhanced its meta tagging to be LLM- and personalization-friendly so content can be served to the right audience where they are.
- Content governance became a deadline problem, not a tagging problem. Global brand standards were extended into web-specific guidelines that set expiration expectations for time-sensitive material like market commentary, which stays relevant for about a week.
- In B2B asset management the site never closes the business, so success is defined before launch. KPIs — conversion, time on site, subscriptions — were set pre-launch for evaluation at three, six, nine, and twelve months, with immediate post-launch measurement being stakeholder pain-point resolution rather than performance data.
- CMS complexity front-loads into implementation and disappears afterward. The build looked overwhelming given the number of financial products modeled, but once configured the system became easy to change, easy to train others on, and that ease is what allowed the firm to democratize Optimizely access across teams.
- In a regulated firm, agents get workflows, not autonomy. Nothing gets set up and left to run; the strategic question Ryan is working on is how to allocate human capital versus agent capital and how to evaluate each.
- The 2027 conversation will be about unit economics, not capability. Ryan expects the industry to shift from “which AI use cases exist” to how to get the best value per token — whether a given task is worth a human, an agent, or a workflow.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Why a regulated approval workflow collides with personalization
- 2:28 — Melissa Ryan’s role and who Federated Hermes serves
- 3:35 — Why the replatform: a brand merger left two of every system
- 5:27 — The hardest thing to agree on internally was design
- 7:07 — Self-declaration vs. behavior: how segmentation actually works
- 10:36 — What the launch changed about creating, tagging, and retiring content
- 11:49 — Defining success when the site never closes the deal
- 13:27 — The CMS that looked overwhelming until setup was finished
- 14:47 — Where AI realistically fits inside a regulated firm
- 16:22 — A year out: human capital vs. agent capital
- 17:22 — Staying agile: certifications, peer councils, continuous learning
A migration forces the questions nobody had to answer before
Consolidating twenty-plus sites into one meant deciding who owns a page, who signs off, and what finally gets retired — including content that had been sitting untouched for years. Ryan’s account is that these governance questions, not the build, are what make a replatform hard. The technical migration has a defined end state; the ownership questions have to be negotiated across a firm that had never been forced to answer them.
Why the hardest fight was over design, and how workshops settled it
Design decisions resist consensus because they are subjective and every stakeholder has a preference. Ryan describes the familiar oscillation of pushing an agency further and then pulling back, sharpened by financial services being a conservative field where the acceptable range is narrower. The mechanism that broke the deadlock was small internal workshops that surfaced which elements were collectively working, giving the agency concrete feedback rather than competing opinions.
Self-declaration is a compliance control, not a fallback
Federated Hermes asks visitors to identify themselves as financial advisors, institutional investors, or individual investors before shaping what they see. Ryan is explicit that this is regulatory: certain content is role-restricted, and the user must attest to a role before access. Marketing automation runs alongside it, passing leads and alerts to sales, and the implementation laid additional structure for personalizing sections as data is collected — but the attestation gate is not something behavioral inference is permitted to replace.
Content operations run on deadlines, not just tags
Time-sensitive material is the specific pressure in asset management: market commentary is relevant for about a week before conditions change. The response was to extend global brand standards into web-specific guidelines that set deadlines for particular content types, and to enhance meta tagging so it serves both LLMs and personalization — making the content addressable to the right audience rather than merely findable.
How you measure a site that never closes the business
Ryan’s site had been live for roughly a week and a half at recording, so the honest answer about performance was that there wasn’t one yet. What existed was a pre-launch KPI set — conversion, time on site, subscriptions — scheduled for evaluation at three, six, nine, and twelve months, plus a near-term process of returning to project goals and confirming with stakeholders whether their pain points were resolved, in progress, or in the backlog.
The AI distinction that matters in a regulated environment
Ryan separates a tool that accelerates a human’s draft from a system that produces and ships on its own, and the second is not available to a firm in her position: nothing gets set up and left to run, and a human stays in the loop. What is realistic in the next year is agents and workflows applied deliberately, with the strategic work being how to think about human capital versus agent capital and how to evaluate the trade between them.
What changes in the next year
Ryan’s forecast is a move from use-case enthusiasm to cost discipline — from “how do we get on the platforms” to how to get the best use of AI for the money, how tokens are spent, and whether a specific task warrants a person, an agent, or a workflow.
FAQ
Why did Federated Hermes replatform onto Optimizely? The merger of Federated Investors and Hermes Investment Management triggered a full rebrand, and the website consolidation followed from it. More than twenty websites were merged into one global front door for SEO and brand consistency, and two separate tech stacks — including duplicate marketing automation and analytics platforms — were streamlined into one.
What was the hardest part of the migration? Not the technology. Melissa Ryan identifies internal agreement on design and content layout as the most challenging piece, resolved through small internal workshops that established which design elements the group actually agreed on before returning feedback to the agency.
Why does Federated Hermes ask visitors to declare who they are instead of inferring it? Because it is a regulatory requirement. Certain content is role-restricted, so a user must attest to being a financial advisor, institutional investor, or individual investor before that content can be displayed. Behavioral personalization is being built alongside it, but does not replace the attestation.
How do you measure success for a website that doesn’t close the sale? Federated Hermes set KPIs before launch — conversion, time on site, subscriptions — for evaluation at three, six, nine, and twelve months. In the weeks immediately after launch, the measure is whether the stakeholder pain points identified in the project goals have been resolved, are being worked, or are in the backlog.
What kind of AI is realistically usable inside a regulated financial firm right now? Human-in-the-loop applications. Ryan is clear that nothing gets configured and left to run autonomously; the near-term work is setting up agents and workflows with human review, and deciding strategically where human capital is better than agent capital.
What did the replatform change about how content is retired? Global brand standards were extended into web-specific guidelines with deadlines attached to particular content types, which matters for time-sensitive material like market commentary. Meta tagging was also enhanced to be LLM- and personalization-friendly.
About Melissa Ryan
Melissa Ryan is Vice President and Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Federated Hermes, where she leads strategic digital initiatives that strengthen the firm’s global brand and advance key marketing objectives. She specializes in transforming business goals into scalable, data-driven solutions that improve efficiency, enhance stakeholder engagement, and drive innovation across digital channels. Melissa has extensive experience leading complex cross-functional projects and delivering executive-level insights that support strategic decision-making. She holds an MBA in Management from Point Park University and a BA in Media Communications and Social Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Melissa Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-ryan-9a446411/
———- Resources ———-
: https://www.federatedhermes.com/
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Transcript
[00:00:57] Greg Kihlström: [gentle music] Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. In a regulated industry, every word that reaches a customer has to clear a review process first. So what happens when the pressure to deliver a more relevant, more personalized experience collides with a workflow that was built to approve one version of everything? The organizations that adapt fastest usually aren’t the ones with the newest platform. They’re the ones that can change what they say and who they say it to without losing the through line that makes them recognizable. Today, we’re going to talk about the reality of enterprise digital transformation. We’re gonna explore what a large-scale platform migration actually surfaces inside a big organization, moving beyond a one-size-fits-all website
[00:01:43] Greg Kihlström: to deliver segmented relevant content experiences, and where AI and new technology genuinely earn a place in a marketing workflow, and where they only add complexity. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season, we’re going all in on expert mode MarTech, AI, and customer experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I’m your host, Greg Kihlström, and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of MarTech, AI, and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes, and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, Tek Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world adoption.
[00:02:28] Greg Kihlström: For more information, go to teksystems.com. Now, let’s dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Melissa Ryan, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Federated Hermes. Melissa, welcome to the show.
[00:02:43] Melissa Ryan: Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:45] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Federated Hermes?
[00:02:51] Melissa Ryan: Sure. I’m Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Federated Hermes. I help oversee website marketing automation, analytics, social media, and campaign ish- initiatives for the firm.
[00:03:03] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. And for those that may not be familiar with the firm, could you share a little bit about what your core focus is and who the priv- primary audience is you serve?
[00:03:13] Melissa Ryan: Sure. Federated Hermes is a global asset manager focused on meeting diverse and evolving needs of today’s investors. Our audience is mainly B2B firms, including RIAs, brokerage firms, banks, institutions, and private markets. Our solutions span equity, fixed income, and liquidity, solutions, among others.
[00:03:35] Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. So yeah. Let’s, let’s dive in here, and gonna talk about a few things, but wanna start with your new website launch, and, embarking on a new website launch, especially on a platform like Optimizely is, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not a small undertaking, right? [chuckles] So, what was the… As easy as they may make it, you know, it’s, it’s always, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a big deal. So, you know, what was the key business driver at Federated Hermes that made this transformation a strategic necessity rather than just a technical upgrade?
[00:04:07] Melissa Ryan: Sure. So, we went through a rebranding at our firm, combining Federated Investors and Hermes Investment Management into, Federated Hermes. So that was, a huge undertaking, the, rebranding itself. And then basically a follow-on to that was rebranding the entire website. So we went ahead and consolidated twenty-plus websites into one global front door. So the need for that would be, you know, SEO, seamless look and feel from a brand perspective, so there, there was certainly a need to do that after rebranding. And then on the back end,
[00:04:52] Melissa Ryan: we need to– needed to evolutionize the two separate tech stacks from the two f- different firms, and then, evolutionize them into one working towards the same goals from an SEO perspective and, just combine certain technologies. You know, you might have two marketing automation platforms or, or, two analytics platforms. So streamline those into one platform that, makes sense in working towards the same goal.
[00:05:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s a, that’s a, a lot of websites to consolidate, a lot of, a lot of stuff to, to figure out. And, you know, migrations like this certainly have been a, a part of, of more, more than a few, tends to force a lot of quiet questions kind of into the open. Who, you know, who owns a page? Who has to sign off on something? What finally gets retired? We’ve got those blog posts from, like, 2003 out on the site or whatever, you know. Like, what… You know, some of those tough decisions need to get made. What was the hardest thing to get agreement on internally, and how did you actually resolve it?
[00:06:06] Melissa Ryan: I would say one of the most challengin- challenging pieces was getting agreement on the design and content layout. So design can be a very subjective thing when it comes to colors, accents, and everyone has an opinion and has a favorite design. And a lot of times you’ll go and push a design firm to go a little further, and then you’re like, “Mm, that might be too far.”
[00:06:34] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs]
[00:06:35] Melissa Ryan: [laughs] especially i- if, if you’re in a more conservative field like financial services. So, you know, g- landing in that sweet spot is sometimes a little challenging. So we would hold small internal wor- workshops to work through the pieces that were collectively… To figure out what was collectively working and what was not, and then that feedback enabled the agency to come back with a design that reflected our favorite elements.
[00:07:07] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And so let’s talk a little bit about from the, from that customer experience end as well and, and what segmentation looks like in practice. And so your, your site asks visitors to identify themselves upfront, so financial advisors, institutional investors, individual investors, before it then shapes what they see. How much of your segmentation still depends on someone self-declaring versus what you can infer about, you know, from how they behave once they’re on the site?
[00:07:40] Melissa Ryan: So we still heavily rely on self-declaring. As a financial services company, we require that certain content be role restricted, and that it ensures that a user is attesting to a role before they can see anything.
[00:07:56] Greg Kihlström: And that’s regulatory, right? So yeah.
[00:07:58] Melissa Ryan: Exactly. Exactly. However, we also leverage marketing automation in order to pass along leads and alerts to sales and other, other things like that in, in marketing automation. We’ve been able to utilize this for several years. Also, during the i- implementation, we established additional bones within the system that will allow us to begin to personalize specific sections as we collect data. And then down the line, our plan is to build out those personalized sections and then leverage these areas for experimentation and pass this information along to build out customer journeys, so sort of a crawl, walk, run approach.
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[00:10:36] Greg Kihlström: what, what might have been fragile or, or some of the, some of the seams in the content operations as well. And, you know, as, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of compliance, issues with, with financial services content in, in general, but, you know, a lot of your content is genuinely time sensitive. Market commentary that’s also, you know, it’s relevant for a week, and the market changes and, and so all of that kind of stuff. What has the launch changed about how your team creates tags and even retires content?
[00:11:10] Melissa Ryan: So we’ve tried to ensure, global guidelines across brand and brand standard, and we’ve even, from a website perspective, taken that a little bit further across a web perspective. So, you know, set certain guidelines and deadlines for certain content and, set that across the board and build that into our, our guidelines and brand standards. So that’s, that’s one thing, and then we’ve also enhanced our meta tagging to be LLM and personalization friendly, allowing us to serve our content to the right audience where they are.
[00:11:49] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So then let’s talk a- about measuring success and, and measuring the right things as well. So measuring a website is hard in asset management because the site almost never closes the business on its own, right? It’s not a… You’re not selling widgets for $9.99 or something like that. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a different kind of sale, so to speak. How is your team defining success for this launch, and what are the one or two indicators that you trust as evidence that it’s driving real business value?
[00:12:24] Melissa Ryan: That’s a really good question ’cause it’s challenging in, B2B particularly. [laughs] since we’ve launched, which is just a week and a half ago. [laughs]
[00:12:35] Greg Kihlström: Oh, oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:38] Greg Kihlström: So not a lot of-
[00:12:39] Melissa Ryan: Not yet, no. [laughs] but since we’ve launched, we’ve been looking back at our project goals and reaching out to stakeholders to ensure pain points have been met, and either already met, working to meet them, or are in the backlog to be addressed. So that’s sort of… That will be the process over the next several weeks. And then we, pre-launch developed KPIs to evaluate three, six, nine, 12 months out, including, you know, conversion, time on site, subscriptions, things like that. And that way we’ll be able to adjust pages, you know, look at the content, move it around, depending on what’s coming back, and we can evaluate
[00:13:26] Melissa Ryan: from there.
[00:13:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. So I know it’s only been a, a week and a half, [laughs] so, you know, no, no pressure here, but, you know, any early insights, any early, you know, just indicators that might, you know… Any, any surprises so far?
[00:13:41] Melissa Ryan: I mean, I can talk a little bit more to the implementation and what we’ve learned.
[00:13:47] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:13:47] Melissa Ryan: So during the implementation, as we were building, the CMS sort of… We have a very complex website with a lot of financial products, so the CMS sort of seemed overwhelming to learn due to the options available in the build and how we could build these products in certain pieces. But now as we’ve set it up and the setup is complete, we find it very easy to use. we have all this complexity, and it’s been set up in a way that it’s easy to go in and change things and add things. So we find that really refreshing, and it’s easy to use, and it’s easy to train others, which has allowed us to broaden the democratization of Opti across the firm.
[00:14:34] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Love it. That’s great. Yeah, so there’s, so there’s lots of flexibility, but when you actually have to use it, it’s been simplified to make it easy for both your s- your- you and your team, but also others to use. That’s great.
[00:14:47] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, you know, speaking of, of Optimizely, we’re here at Opticon in, in New York City. lots of mention of AI, you know, as, as I go to a lot of these shows, lots of AI just in, in, in general, but, you know, lots, lots of talk of, of AI here. certainly AI is a broad umbrella that can cover a lot of different things from, you know, a tool that speeds up a human’s draft, with a, a human still in the authoring seat, as well as, you know, autonomous or semi-autonomous agents and things like that. Of everything that you’ve seen this, you know, at this conference so far, what’s, one specific application that you, could realistically put to work in the next year, and, how would you define that?
[00:15:35] Melissa Ryan: I mean, we always have to be mindful that we’re in a highly regulated environment, so we’re never just gonna set something up and let it run. So there’s always gonna be a human element involved, but we are definitely looking into, setting up agents, setting up workflows, applying that. I think, you know, one thing that has sort of come up a little bit is, strategically thinking about the best way to set up your agents and how to, how to use human capital versus agent capital, and the smartest way to evaluate each one.
[00:16:15] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Keep, keeping, keeping the right, the right tool for the job, you know, including-
[00:16:22] Greg Kihlström: … the human’s, y- human, judgment. Absolutely. Well, Melissa, thanks so much for, for joining today. I’ve got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:16:39] Melissa Ryan: As we just mentioned, right now everyone is talking about AI use cases and how to get on the platforms or evolve your strategy. So next year, I think we’ll be having more conversations about the most thoughtful way to use AI, whether it’s more strategic or the day-to-day chores. But I think it will be how to use, get the best use of AI for your money. it’ll be more of how do you use the tokens? How do you get, get the best use for your money? And is it something I should be going in and doing, or should I use an agent for that or a workflow? Getting the bang for your buck, essentially.
[00:17:22] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. We’ll also have to talk about your website and after you’ve had a year’s worth of, of numbers and that’s great. That’s great. And last question for you. what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:17:37] Melissa Ryan: I would say the biggest thing is just continuous learning. however, however I can possibly, whether it’s reading. Recently got the Opal certification, which I guess they will rename pretty soon and then, you know, webinars, conferences, listening to others. I’m part of the CAB, so just going and sucking in information from, from my colleagues, from my colleagues at work, from col- from others in the CAB. So just, you know, listening, learning, bouncing things off, off of others.
