“Our review process for advisor websites takes too much time and effort.”

The creation and use of online content is becoming an increasing trend both within the advisor industry as well as the general digital marketing world today. When this happens in a regulated industry you begin to see increasing work loads for your compliance officers who need to review content to ensure content is inline with regulatory requirements before it gets publish (or goes live). Insurance and wealth management marketing departments also need to ensure that the changes advisors make do not fragment or negatively impact their brand.

Many wealth and insurance dealers have challenges keeping up with volume of content reviews coming at them from their advisors. Slower than average review cycles not only directly affects advisor satisfaction but also impacts an advisor’s ability to do business. It’s quite the dilemma when you consider the fact that the primary goal of the dealers is, in fact, to support advisor businesses. While there is no silver bullet to this solution, it’s important that your enterprise compliance team have the best possible review tools and business processes to keep review times at a minimum.

If online content review times are a concern to you, there are some key questions to think about as you assess your situation to determine how best to approach and improve the review process:

• Is your compliance team approving content through email or through an automated tool?
• Is your audit trail automatically captured or do you need to record information in a separate tool or possibly even in an Excel or other electronic spreadsheet?
• Is the process used to review content a manual process? Are you receiving website links through an email from your advisors?
• How are you notified that your content has been submitted? Is this information being transmitted to you from a third party tool or directly from the advisor in an email/telephone?
• Are you constantly struggling with identifying changes between versions of the same content?
• Does your organization have a service level agreement for content review times?
• Do the tools you are using have the ability to track your average review times? Does your technology provider help you monitor and improve these times?

Content review times are typically drawn out due to manual business processes, a lack of awareness or inability to communicate the status of the content review process or just a shortfall in terms of the technologies compliance officers are using to perform content reviews. As such, your compliance officers have countless hours of reviews to perform beyond what they are currently resourced to do.

We understand these issues and have experience speaking with compliance teams. Moreover, we’re always interested to learn more about the complexity of a compliance officer’s workflow. As mentioned earlier, there’s no silver bullet but there are a number of key changes that can be made to improve your content review times. If you’re in the process of re-thinking your current review processes or looking for a second opinion, get in touch with us.