Compliance monitoring held our financial services clients back from real growth. Here’s how we changed that with Fintel Check

In our search to find a better way to monitor marketing compliance for financial services, we knew there was little room for error, because not effectively monitoring our customers’ content set them up for risks. The solution needed to protect our clients’ brand reputation, public image, and good standing with regulators. 

But most banks can’t afford to hire multiple people just to monitor marketing compliance. Many will have small teams and will be looking for a tool that can both fit their budget and enhance the productivity of their existing teams through things like automation.

But as we researched tools, we saw routine pitfalls. 

Here are four of the main shortcomings we see financial services firms struggle with the most, preventing them from monitoring banking and fintech marketing compliance in a quick and effective way. 

1. Most tools flood you with data, making it difficult to identify, prioritize and fix compliance issues fast

Some tools that aren’t financial services-specific don’t allow you to tailor or prioritize what you want to monitor. They could be scraping the entire web for any mentions of your company, flooding your compliance team with pages of content to read through and check for issues. 

The reality is that the more your compliance team has to sift through, the more likely it is for them to make mistakes. And a higher volume of manual work means it takes more time and resources for them to catch and fix non-compliant content. 

Also, financial services marketing compliance does not require scrutiny of every online mention of your company, only those where there’s a commercial partnership in place. Companies in different industries may want to receive alerts every time they’re mentioned. But, with financial services, it is most critical to ensure mentions where there is a commercial relationship. For example, you’ll want to monitor pages you’re sponsoring on third-party marketing sites. 

Most monitoring tools cannot perform this kind of evaluation. This means you’ll need to hire additional resources to sift through the high number of pages and data points these tools provide.

2. Most tools are built for PR and brand monitoring, not content compliance, which limits the frequency of your checks

Brand monitoring and content compliance monitoring both track when and where your company is mentioned online. But at their core, they are two different things. If your team is using a PR or brand monitoring tool to manage content compliance, for example, they may not be able to monitor specific pages as frequently as they need to. As a financial services company, you may want to customize the frequency of your checks based on your specific needs, but most PR and brand monitoring tools lack this flexibility. 

Not monitoring your content at the right frequency for your firm can open you up to regulatory risk. If a regulator flags non-compliant content and it’s clear the error has been up for weeks or months, you may face larger fines and increased scrutiny. More frequent checks with historic records are key to avoid this. 

Marketing compliance tools should give financial services firms a more flexible frequency of checks to find, document and fix issues, not open you up to risks. And yet, most tools won’t let you run checks as often as you need to, or alternatively run too often, which means inundating a compliance team with too much data.

3. Enterprise tools require too much money and resources to be an effective solution for smaller financial services firms

Some compliance tools are a great solution for financial services, but are very expensive to run, and can come at a steep additional cost to growing an affiliate platform. This is especially true for tools that offer a wide range of marketing compliance features aimed at enterprise companies.

Another solution is outsourcing monitoring to an agency – but this can tack on expenses in excess of $10,000 a month. While enterprise companies may need or want an all-in-one solution with agency support—and are prepared to spend for it––smaller financial services companies and BaaS providers may not be able to afford that amount on affiliate monitoring solutions alone. 

But if you don’t outsource, trying to manually create a compliance team in-house requires an increase in staff once you start working with a high number of affiliates. That is not feasible for the majority of fintech, credit union or bank marketing budgets. It also takes time that your marketing team could use on optimizing their campaigns to attract more customers to your products.

Read more: Top PerformLine Competitors For Financial Services Marketing Compliance

4. Many tools are incompatible with your current affiliate compliance processes

Adding a compliance tool to your existing affiliate platform is another cost and layer of complexity. 

Even if your compliance tool can integrate with your affiliate platform, it may not be compatible with all the other software you use to manage your marketing tasks, do reporting, connect with your publishers and communicate with your compliance team. 

That means you will spend too much time and energy making sure compliance is on track and completing what should be routine tasks, like informing publishers of product feature changes (e.g., interest rates). 

As we looked into the shortcomings of the available affiliate marketing compliance options, we knew there had to be a better way. We wanted to help our clients scale their channel, but we didn’t want to increase their costs or their risks of infringements, which would damage their brand and relationship with regulators. 

We decided to build our own tool: Fintel Check. 

Fintel Check is our answer to a marketing compliance tool that solves the client friction points we had experienced firsthand. We originally designed it to run with our client’s affiliate marketing campaigns (and later expanded its capabilities to help BaaS providers police their fintech’s content).

Here is how Fintel Check helps financial services companies with affiliate marketing compliance monitoring in a way that meets their specific needs. 

If you’re just getting started, learn more about compliance with Affiliate Marketing Compliance For Fintechs & Banks: A How-To Guide.

1. With Fintel Check, you choose the data you want to see, making it easy to identify, prioritize and fix compliance issues fast

The monitoring tools out there capture unnecessary data because they aren’t built for financial services marketing compliance. They don’t have filters and criteria that allow you to capture only what you need. This means your marketing and compliance teams could wind up with too little data or an avalanche of screenshots and webpages to sort through to find partner content you’re responsible for, wasting time and raising the possibility of human error.  

As a financial services company, your priority is being able to identify, prioritize and fix content that needs the most attention fast. Rather than seeing every instance of your company mentioned online (and overwhelming your entire team), Fintel Check allows you to monitor your affiliate campaign URLs automatically. Rather than facing a high volume of tedious work to find errors, Fintel Check lets your team focus on monitoring only the pages where you have a commercial relationship and responsibility. 

You can also narrow down the data you receive by using rules to check specific content criteria on your affiliate campaign URLs. 

We know product details like interest rates and credit card offers can change frequently, so we also designed our custom rules with flexibility, enabling you to modify them as often as you need to. 

With Fintel Check, you can lessen the hours it takes to more accurately represent your products on publishers’ sites, reducing the risk of infringements or damaging your brand reputation or customer trust. That means your marketing and compliance teams have more time, energy and resources to scale your channel and optimize campaigns. 

Read more about Why Compliance Tools Are Crucial for Financial Institutions Launching Affiliate Programs.

2. Fintel Check gives you greater flexibility in how often you monitor your compliance

One of the drawbacks to the tools we found was the monitoring rates weren’t flexible enough for financial services. Financial services companies need to control their commercial partners’ pages at a frequency that matches their processes. This enables them to catch and fix infringements when they happen and to prove they’re doing due diligence. But they can’t do this effectively with checks that happen every quarter, rather than weekly or monthly. 

Fintel Check allows you to decide how frequently you want to monitor and capture images of your affiliate marketing campaign pages via a custom, rules-based system. 

With Fintel Check, you can set a frequency that allows you to monitor pages weekly, biweekly or monthly, catching problems as they appear and not months later. This can help you stay on top of finding and fixing non-compliance issues ahead of regulators. 

With Fintel Check, you can stay on top of your compliance to avoid damaging customer confidence and brand reputation, receiving fines, and even risking business closure.

3. Fintel Check enables you to increase your marketing team’s capacity by automating many manual administrative tasks

We know how costly, highly sensitive and time-consuming compliance is for financial services teams. Manually monitoring, or even monitoring with an improper tool, can require longer work hours for an existing team or a higher headcount to adequately catch and fix compliance issues within your campaigns. 

Fintel Check automates every step of your marketing compliance monitoring so your teams can save time and effort. 

One of our key features is pushing automated updates about product information to publishers through Fintel Connect’s Product Feed. You can embed the feed in campaigns and manage content changes directly from Fintel’s platform. The feed notifies publishers the instant you change information. With Fintel Check’s Product Feed, you no longer have to email each and every publisher and then follow up to ensure they make the changes, freeing up hours of admin for your team.

Fintel Check also takes and saves screenshots to create an automatic audit trail. But rather than capturing every instance of your brand from across the web, it only snaps images of the affiliate campaign pages according to your frequency settings. This means you can stay on top of capturing the right pages without creating a pile of data, only a fraction of which you’re actually responsible for, or requiring manual work, which takes up time. 

Then, you can see potential infringement at-a-glance in Fintel Check’s dashboard. This automatic report gives you an overview of which pages fail or meet your custom rules, helping you quickly note the extent of non-compliance within your campaigns.

In Fintel Check, you’ll also see the traffic, impressions and clicks specific product pages received. This means you can measure the potential impact and be ready with the data if the regulator flags it.

Your team can then investigate and reach out to the publisher if needed, because the Fintel Check Report makes it easier to spot problems early and know exactly what’s wrong. 

The sum of our automated features is that your marketing and compliance teams have an increased capacity for more revenue-generating activities without compromising accuracy. With Fintel Checks automation, you can scale an affiliate program without the need for additional hires to run your marketing compliance monitoring more effectively. 

Read more: BrandVerity Competitors: 4 Options For BaaS & Financial Services Marketing

4. Fintel Check adapts to your current compliance processes, offering greater visibility

Adding a compliance tool to your existing marketing software means more cost and complexity. Any time your marketing team wants to share information with your compliance team, run reports, or update publishers on changes, they may be going into multiple systems and exchanging data between them.

We designed Fintel Check to integrate with Fintel Connect’s affiliate network and management platform. Not only will Fintel Check run automatically on the affiliate campaigns you set up in Fintel’s platform, it will also run anywhere you want by adding any URL to Fintel Check.

We also gave publishers the same insights into compliance issues to enable greater visibility and improve the teamwork between clients and publishers, saving time and admin for all. This means publishers will receive the Product Feed notifications directly in the platform and can check and act on any compliance issues they see in their Fintel Check report. 

We like to think of Fintel Check as your marketing compliance calculator, assisting you to get your job done more efficiently. You can change your rules, update info and have an audit trail all from one piece of software as often as you like. This makes it easier to keep up with a dynamic industry, which faces frequent changes in compliance regulations and laws, interest rates, investment risks and more. 

We also made Fintel Check’s reporting compatible with your processes, enabling you to export the data to have greater oversight. 

You’ll also have the support of a dedicated account manager to help you along the way. So if you are starting a program or scaling for the first time, or just want some expert advice on the best ways to improve compliance, you have a person who understands your product and compliance needs who can help. 

With Fintel Check, your teams will have the data it needs within your existing ecosystem, not waste time and energy mastering more tools and adapting workflows. And, with our dedicated support, you won’t have to hire internally or spend on hefty agency fees just to get expert advice, meaning your affiliate budget goes further. 

As we were building Fintel Check for our banking clients running their affiliate programs through Fintel Connect, we discovered another opportunity while attending the Independent Community Bankers of America’s® ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator program. 

There, we saw how Banking as a Service (BaaS) providers had similar problems with monitoring the compliance of their multiple fintech partners. Ensuring fintech companies create and maintain compliant product information is just as challenging as affiliate marketing compliance. In addition to potential fines and increased scrutiny, BaaS providers also had concerns about their brand integrity and perception management. 

We decided to enhance Fintel Check for BaaS companies looking to ease compliance burdens. We made it so a BaaS provider could use Fintel Check directly. 

As a BaaS provider, you only need to add your specific URLs to Fintel Check once. Then it works just like our affiliate marketing monitoring: you choose the frequency and create rules, which allow our tool to scan partner pages and automatically catch potential non-compliant content. For example, you can instruct Fintel Check to look for “no fees” if you know that would be a misrepresentation of your offerings. 

Then, if Fintel Check finds potentially non-compliant copy on one of the fintech pages you monitor, your team will be able to see that right away and have a record of screenshots showing exactly when the page became non compliant and how long it took for you and your fintech partner to respond. This protects your reputation with consumers as well as proves your compliance dedication to regulators. And it’s all possible without heavy manual lifting from your team. 

We built Fintel Check because we were doing the job of marketing compliance for financial services companies and we knew there was a better way. While our own experience kickstarted the development of this product, our conversations with our clients and our network of publishers pushes us to keep making Fintel Check better. 

One upcoming feature we are working on is the ability to handle a pre-publication workflow, easing collaboration between publishers, marketing and compliance teams. We aim to reduce the back-and-forth compliance reviews and serve as a central hub for getting messaging on target with publishers. 

We also have our eye on continuing to refine our reporting to better highlight potential problems. Fintel Check will further reduce the amount of data a compliance person has to go through in order to catch non-compliant content. 

If you decide to work with us at Fintel, know that your workflow, friction points and ideas are valuable to us, and we pay attention to them as areas of opportunity for Fintel Check. Our clients are not just another company we sell software to, they are a vital part of how we understand and improve our products. 

When we set out to create Fintel Check, we were in the trenches with our clients every day, looking for the best way to monitor marketing compliance. We saw for ourselves how manual and time consuming compliance can be, and how much the fear of non compliance impacted our clients’ ability to invest in marketing-led customer growth. 

Simply put, we know Fintel Check makes compliance easier because it has improved our workflow and our ability to serve our clients. And it’s improved our clients’ workflow and how easily they can track compliance. It can do the same for you. 

If you are a financial services or BaaS company who wants an industry specific solution for marketing compliance, contact us today.