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This article originally appeared in Finextra.
Anyone who follows professional sports could spot one of the most dominant players in the league - stock trading and investing apps. Seeing the biggest sports stadiums in the world flooded by fintech ads is another indicator of the billions of advertising dollars being spent by companies in the space.
As the market for innovative personal finance apps, alternative trading services, and payment solutions heats up, the competition among financial services providers grows. Companies are spending billions on marketing and advertising, paying big bucks to be center stage for public attention.
For fintechs that operate globally and under the jurisdiction of multiple government agencies and regulatory systems, designing and deploying advertising and marketing campaigns is a risky business. As a result, localization of marketing campaigns take precedence as teams navigate a maze of global regulations aimed at protecting the consumer. Firms can be heavily penalized for misleading advertising, costing millions in fines, and losing hard-earned brand equity.
To ensure compliance with regulations for governing ad content in financial services and adherence to corporate brand guidelines, leading financial services companies are adopting advanced technology platforms.
Here are three key areas where technology can help keep marketing campaigns compliant:
Omni-Channel Compliance
Monitoring and tracking advertising content across all marketing channels can be fraught with risks. With a growing number of social media channels combined with the explosion of email marketing and television and print advertising, executives responsible for these function have a difficult job of oversight. They have to spend countless hours reviewing what their team is distributing across different channels and have to ensure those activities are compliant based on their location and subsector. Manual checks can no longer address the pace and scale in which advertising content is generated and distributed. Instead, financial institutions can leverage AI-based compliance platforms to automate their marketing compliance and focus on their campaigns.
Affiliate Overview
With marketing affiliates taking an increasingly important role in fintechs’ go-to-market strategies, auditing their activity becomes critical. With affiliates being hyper sales-driven, there is a risk they can overcommit or overpromise to consumers. Yet, the full legal responsibility remains on the fintech provider selling the services, not the marketing affiliate charged with promotion. Auditing the activity of affiliates retrospectively isn’t effective when trying to avoid fines and non-compliance. New technologies and advanced AI enable real-time monitoring and identification of promotions to ensure your affiliates are operating within the rules.
Proactive Remediation
"A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new" is a famous quote from Albert Einstein. It’s a phrase that many marketers can relate to. Marketers are trying new approaches and moving quickly to embrace the next new tactic, strategy, and channel to attract and retain customers. Experimenting and launching new campaigns can lead to mistakes and errors. When disaster strikes, marketers and compliance functions need a backup plan. Technology can serve as that critical backstop. Being able to retract and suspend any marketing piece is as important as detecting a misfired tweet or non-compliant print advertisement. Marketers need a platform that can manage the full spectrum of the marketing compliance function, and keep a record of all activities for their internal compliance function and for external audits. AI can provide those suggestions and next best steps. This simplifies the remediation process and gives marketers the support they need to move fast while reducing marketing risks.
Compliance is key
Like other functions in financial services, marketing is going through a period of disruption. Multi-channel campaigns, celebrities, influencers and affiliates, bold language and gamification are all being used to increase market share. To maximize marketing investments while preserving brand value and meeting compliance, fintechs should leverage advanced technology to allow self-fix and smart monitoring of all external communications and marketing campaigns.
Sedric’s Marketing Compliance Solution Can Help
Sedric’s marketing compliance solution was designed to help fintechs protect their brands by ensuring compliance, and eliminating hidden risks, across all marketing channels.
With Sedric, fintechs can easily:
- Monitor all marketing channels (company-owned) to make sure all campaigns and messages are compliant, according to local and global regulations.
- Monitor affiliates and their activities across their websites, blogs and social media channels for non-compliant messaging.
To learn more about how Sedric can help you ensure marketing compliance, request a demo.
“Training and monitoring of consumer-facing employees will be critical to ensure that an organization is compliant. Technology will support and help the credit and collections industry meet demanding obligations with ease and efficiency, in order to produce the outcomes a regulator wants to see.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
“Our challenge going forward is to position our industry and our companies as desirable places to work. We must implement diversity, equity and inclusion in our workplaces, and get the word out that we have changed. Ask your newest employees for feedback—what would make our workplace desirable for their friends and acquaintances? In this post-pandemic world, getting people to crawl out of their comfortable cocoons may be difficult, but it can be done!”
CACi
“In the last few years, the buzz of the call centers faded away. Now that many people still have the opportunity to continue to work from home, performance directors need to pivot their focus. We need to ensure that the training is effective in this new environment. The move is from hours in a classroom setting to immediate, personalized micro-learning units that enforce the corrective behaviors.”
Resurgent Capital
“The digital collections movement continues to be in full steam and we are excited to see all of the new technologies that are coming into the ARM industry to help drive enhanced collection performance in a compliant manner. We anticipate additional M&A consolidation globally in the ARM industry, as more digital ARM companies look to accelerate market entry and obtain blue-chip clients and deploy digital-first solutions.”
“Digitization will be critically accelerated in 2023. Recovery organizations may be required to furnish consumers’ account data through consumer-selected platforms that will likely be different from organizations’ traditional payment portals. Organizations should start preparing their technology and operations for that contingency now to harness the trend to their benefit.”
Kredit
“Data is the new oil, and extracting data from all sources, especially voice, will be a must-have in 2023. We are in the age of machine learning, and ML runs on data. Getting ALL the data and getting it into one place for the ML to do what it can are the key differences between organizations that will make it and those that don't.”
Indebted
“In 2023, collectors and creditors will be required to work closer together. Reg F oversight requirements have created a new reality of shared compliance responsibility. Servicers and creditors can better collaborate by using new data-driven compliance platforms that provide all parties with critical insights and generate the transparency and trust needed to succeed in a tightening regulatory climate.”
As Gen Z enters the workforce, you’ll have up to four generations in your agency. Everyone learns differently. Young people learn from TikTok videos, and there is a professional term for this: micro-learning. Such short videos are especially efficient when sent out close to the time when the violation occurred.
Barron & Newburger
The most efficient training systems I’ve seen are those which build surgical, data-driven compliance content and provide agents the exact training they need when they most need it. This approach avoids wasting time and money on training which does not address the need. Continuous, role-based training programs that focus on the needs of each individual agent are some of the most efficient and effective I’ve seen.
Bedard Law Group
“Training is only going to be effective if it's done at or near the time the violation occurred. As agents handle hundreds of calls a week they will not have the capacity to remember particular moments of each consumer interaction. Therefore, effective monitoring will be critical to address the deficiency when it happens, in order to remediate quickly so that it does not become a systemic problem going forward.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
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