Common Challenges Marketing Face with Compliance Process

Shereen Mohammed
Shereen Mohammed/ September 4, 2019

Marketers in wealth management face many challenges in their day to day roles. We wanted to better understand these challenges and how wealth marketers go about solving some of them today. After doing some market research with prospects and clients to better understand what they are struggling with regarding compliance specifically, we were able to come to 3 three clear problems that marketers would like to overcome.

Problem 1: Lengthy and inefficient compliance process

From speaking with Marketers, we know that a key objective of theirs is the growth and scale of their teams efforts to grow the business and maintain high retention rates with advisor. We also know that lengthy and inefficient process take away time from those efforts, an impact a marketer’s ability to support the field. The lengthy and inefficient that takes away from time spent growing the marketing program. When the marketing program suffers, advisor growth suggers and so does overall business growth. Growing the marketing program is a common goal for wealth marketing teams therefore anything that gets in the way of doing that hinders the ability to deliver strong results. 

Wealth marketing teams want to continue to add value to their advisor marketing program. When the compliance process is manual taking up a lot of time, it eats into the time they can spend doing more valuable work and supporting their advisors. 

To overcome this challenge, marketing teams try to set up designated time to review compliance submissions.

Problem 2: Manual record keeping

The second problem that is very common in wealth management firms manual record keeping.  Accuracy, punctuality and completeness are fundamentals when it comes to properly responding to an auditor’s request. From speaking with marketers we know that manual process, which are often prone to mistakes, gaps and organizations problems, can consume an enormous amount of time for marketing teams, and derail their team for days or weeks on end. The manual process that many firms have in place leads to human error and long response times during the audit process. 

Many firms go through both an internal audit a few times a year and sometimes get called on for audit by regulatory bodies. Both groups request to see specific information and teams must respond promptly. With a manual record keeping process, when these requests happen it’s very stressful trying to retrieve the right information for the right advisor, for the right time period. Marketers and compliance officers want to get through an audit as painlessly and headache free as possible. To do that, they need to be able to easily store and retrieve data in a digital format. This should be something that is done automatically.

When the compliance process is manual taking up a lot of time, it eats into the time they can be spending doing more valuable work and supporting their advisors.

Problem 3: No regulatory and brand compliance

If wealth firms don’t have an efficient way for the marketing team to ensure advisors are following regulatory standards and producing brand compliant content they are spending lots of time reviewing content. bodies. With ever shifting rules and regulations for a variety of governing bodies – IIROC, MFDA, FINRA, the SEC to name a few – keeping up can be a laborious and time consuming task that may still result in gaps from human error. Our Research tells us that staying compliant is a paramount concern for wealth organizations, but the time of these teams is also valuable, leading many organizations to have to balance these needs.

Additionally. It’s important for corporate brands that each advisor represents the brand in a way that creates and maintains trust with the end client. Having two levels of approval is now mandatory for some firms in Canada. This makes it even more important for marketers to be able to easily review and ensure content is on brand. Without this level of marketing approval, brands risk the end client having a different brand experience from someone else and that is not what the corporate brand would like. A disjointed brand experience leads to distrust and loss of credibility in the brand. A client should have the same brand experience in person as they do on an advisor’s website or corporate website. Perhaps the most important aspect of compliance is just that: staying compliant. “

Ultimately, we know wealth marketers want to focus on growing their marketing program, supporting advisors and growing the business while also managing their compliance responsibilities in a scalable way. Their goal is to grow the marketing program and support advisors to help them grow their business. To help marketers overcome these issues, we place the problems of redundant manual tasks, time inefficiencies, brand representation and regulatory compliance at the heart of the problems that we solve, and we would love to show you how we do it. Talk to one of our team members today to learn how you can solve these problems in your organization with Digital Agent compliance