Many consider a career in marketing financial services to be both a highly challenging and highly rewarding path. Few other industries have so much impact on the individual, businesses and entire economy. With this responsibility comes a wealth of compliance requirements that creative material must adhere to, to ensure consumers are protected.
When we talk about compliance, we're referring to the regulation of messaging and imagery used to market an organisation within the financial services industry. Marketers and creatives working in financial services are subject to some of the most stringent policies of any industry which can prove a challenge for both creativity and the efficiency of getting campaigns live in market.
There are various legal, communications and brand checkpoints along the path for both national and localised material before approval is granted and the customer is exposed to material in a physical or digital scenario. The results of not adhering to these regulations can be extremely costly.
For this reason, many veterans of the industry have developed some tried and true methods and processes for ensuring i's are dotted and t's are crossed.
Create a Compliance Checklist
Whenever a new creative brief is developed, it is an important role of marketing to have a clear outline of requirements across a few different categories including:
- Brand
- Colours
- Imagery and illustration
- Tone of voice
- Styling of text
- Legal
- Content assessed against all regulatory requirements
- Terms and conditions
- Disclaimers
- Audit tracking
- Communications
- Communication distribution compliance
- Privacy compliance
- Accuracy and correct referencing of statistics and data
While this is by no means captures the whole picture when it comes to compliance in marketing financial services products, what it provides is some major categories to help build an internal checklist to assess creative material against. With the aid of material provided by industry bodies like ACCC, AFSA and APRA, this checklist can be built into everyday processes within the marketing team to increase the efficiency of the quality assurance process.
Monitor Partners and Third-Party Affiliates
In scenarios where marketing material is distributed to customers by third party vendors, it is important that there are safeguards in place to monitor the display of material and ensure it is compliant across print and digital mediums.
An example may be, some of your products may only be available to customers in certain regions, and it can be deceptive and even potentially illegal to promote them to customers in locations outside these zones.
Keep All Compliant Assets in One Place
One simple way of controlling brand assets is via a centrally managed digital asset management system (or DAM). Keeping all approved creative assets in one place makes it simpler to introduce new or retire old files and allows a brand team to maintain control user access for different types of stakeholders.
Franchisees who previously never executed local marketing are creating collateral easily within Outfit; strengthening their business, building community presence, driving sales and all whilst protecting the Bakers Delight brand.
Elise Cittadini — Local Marketing Manager, Bakers Delight
The most basic illustration of the DAM at work is rollout of a social campaign. Suddenly the marketing team can upload a range of branded campaign posts for various platforms and ensure that every stakeholder can access the right creative. This makes life easier for the creative team as well as the local team on the front lines.
How Outfit can Help
While a DAM is a great place to start, compliance has many more moving parts than simply controlling assets. That's where Outfit comes in - brand automation is about the content, the brand rules, the assets and the levels of access required to make any document completely controllable.
The primary solution that Outfit provides is the efficiency with which it enables users to put all of these pieces together instantly in order to allow scale without the impact on the marketing team's time.
