Compliance and Marketing Shouldn’t be at Odds – The Goal of Both is to be Successful

In the world of Financial Marketing, compliance is often seen as the wall that stops things from getting to market quickly. It can be seen as the bureaucratic mess that can impede time sensitive content from being circulated. Although, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Regulations in financial services marketing can change fairly rapidly and result in regulators fining companies millions. Compliance keeps up with all these regulations to ensure that there is no backlash to anything that the organizing is putting out. This process can take a lot of time when there is a disconnect.

This disconnect is why compliance is sometimes regarded as the bad guy from the marketing department. Although, they’re only ensuring that there is no negative backlash – even if it’s in a slow and less engaging way. The marketing department may not know what specific regulations have been put in place or the recent developments and in the industry. There could be several gray areas that compliance can better interpret. For example, compliance can ensure that businesses do not get fined due to the ASC issuing penalties for social media endorsements. When it comes to this type of development, marketing may be too focused on their project to realize that it could be in a grey area – which is where compliance comes in and can assist.

If that’s all that compliance is doing, then why are they the “bad guys”? It’s because, in the marketer’s eyes, they stop, delay, or completely change their efforts. They stifle creativity.

In the compliance department’s eyes, they’re just protecting the firm as a whole. It’s not like they don’t want creativity, but they also don’t want backlash.

Given the tricky relationship between marketing and compliance, what’s a good solution? Some ideas to think about:

• Establish a working relationship and use the right tools to combine marketing and compliance into one automated system
• Create a platform to allow back and forth communication between compliance and marketing
• Use the right tools to automate and personalize workflow management to streamline processes and make compliance quicker
• Make it easy for compliance to approve, track, and review content
• Have built in consistent branding and messaging across all channels with one platform

At the end of the day, both departments want the company to succeed. Marketing wants to expand their consumer base and help sales increase revenue while compliance wants to ensure that the revenue isn’t taken away due to fines. Building a close-knit relationship helps marketers gain the necessary knowledge to avoid spending unnecessary time and effort for things that may not get a good ROI or incur fines. The consequences for slow compliance result in sunken marketing costs as content may no longer be timely enough to react to current news and trends. The worst thing that can happen by not building a close relationship between the two is the blemish of deceptive marketing on a businesses reputation.

There will always be disagreements. With quick communications, compromise, and the right tools, the two departments can both reach their goal of success. For more information on Compliance and Marketing automation, take a look at The Business Case for: A Digital Marketing & Compliance Platform in Financial Services. Don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us if you have any questions!