Originally posted on https://www.intelligencebank.com/blog/importance-of-marketing-compliance-in-financial-services

Where companies are trusted to manage people’s money it’s no surprise that regulatory bodies exist to protect those left vulnerable, ensuring that business conducted is transparent and above board. Compliance is therefore a word that anyone working in financial services knows well, with marketing being no exception.

In fact, the pressure on marketing to ensure that claims made in advertising aren’t misleading or false, targeted to the wrong people or missing disclaimers is only increasing.  Australia’s recent Financial Services Royal Commission should serve as a warning to marketers globally that it’s time to get your house in order. This shake down uncovered a host of compliance breaches bringing with them a flurry of negative PR and a downturn in consumer trust.  A severe blow to these companies, as where money is involved consumer’s loyalties tend to lie with trusted brands.

This increased scrutiny has caught many businesses off guard.   A lack of investment in internal technology means that processes around creative production and marketing are largely manual, creating two major problems.  By working across multiple platforms, managing processes in excel documents, sending emails for approvals and storing assets on the company share drive there is considerable room for error.  This disjointed way of working makes it difficult to manage brand and legal compliance, ensuring that content is signed off by the correct people. The second issue – there is no audit trail showing that due diligence has been taken to meet the standards of regulators such as the SEC, ASIC and the FCA.

It’s critical that financial services brands act quickly to manage these shortfalls. Adopting software for Digital Asset Management, workflows, approvals and creative project management can help provide marketing teams with greater structure and processes to ensure regulatory requirements are met.

Digital Asset Management acts as a vault for approved assets and creative, protecting you from potential breaches with version control, expiry dates, talent usage rights and download approvals.  Content can also be shared and updated from directly within the platform so that when it expires, old promotions and information is not ‘missed’, left online and visible to the public. Workflows put processes in place around all of your creative production and marketing work.  They can be used to send approval requests to the right people or for escalating content for legal review when required. These combined with creative project management capabilities such as forms, calendars and kanban mean that you have control over your creative content from start to finish.

Marketing Operations Software encompasses each of these features within one powerful platform.  While a core benefit for users in financial services is marketing compliance, the adoption of Marketing Operations Software also ensures brand governance, breaks down silos internally and gives you control over local area marketing.

Contact us to find out how we can help you transform your marketing operations with Digital Asset Management, BrandHub (Brand Management Software) and Marketing Operations Software (project management, workflows, creative approvals and more).