UDAAP violations often start small, but can quickly escalate into costly compliance failures, regulatory penalties, and lost consumer trust.
What begins as a minor red flag—like a single complaint or unclear policy—can spiral into significant UDAAP compliance issues if left unresolved.
In December 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released Version 1.1 of its Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices and Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAP/UDAAP) handbook, introducing enhanced guidance to help banks identify these risks early and take action before it’s too late.
In this blog, we’ll explore some of the critical marketing compliance red flags identified by the OCC and how PerformLine’s robust compliance monitoring solutions help banks uncover, address, and resolve these risks.
Consumer complaints—even just one
Consumer complaints serve as an early warning system for potential UDAAP compliance issues.
Complaints often highlight weaknesses in a bank’s products or services, especially when similar issues are reported repeatedly or in high volumes. They can also identify consumers’ dissatisfaction or confusion around bank products or services, including those provided by third parties
Even a single complaint can be an early warning sign of a problem.
– The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
For example, repeated confusion about loan repayment terms or credit card fees often points to inadequate or unclear disclosures, which would be a UDAAP issue.
The OCC expects banks to have an adequate complaint resolution process:
- Across all lines of businesses, including those handled by third parties
- From various channels, like letters, phone calls, in person, regulators, third-party service providers, emails, and social media
But, manually identifying and tracking complaints across channels like social media, emails, and calls is resource-intensive and prone to errors, leaving banks vulnerable to overlooked compliance issues.
Especially across channels like social media, where content is created and shared at an astonishing rate, it’s impossible to identify all potential consumer complaints with manual efforts alone.
PerformLine provides a powerful, automated solution to these challenges, enabling banks to achieve comprehensive monitoring and identification of consumer complaints across marketing and service channels.
PerformLine’s advanced discovery capabilities uncover consumer complaints that might otherwise be missed, especially on hard-to-monitor channels like social media and phone calls.
Our technology searches for terms that could signal dissatisfaction or confusion to identify complaints, including OCC-recommended keywords like “unfair,” “misleading,” “deceptive,” “abusive,” or “cheat.”
Once consumer complaints are identified by the PerformLine platform, they’re then sent for review so that they can be addressed and resolved.
How a partner bank uses PerformLine to monitor 33,000+ calls a month to identify complaints 99% faster
This leading bank works with multiple fintech partners who, collectively, send an average of 33,000 calls to the bank per month for review.
The bank’s small compliance team was responsible for manually reviewing as many calls as possible, identifying consumer complaints, cross-checking partner reports, and analyzing complaint details—all of which was time-consuming and inefficient.
So, this bank partnered with PerformLine to automate the monitoring and and review all calls sent by their fintech partners and quickly identify the 1% of monthly call minutes that actually contained complaints.
Now, they only need to review the relevant segments of each call that need their attention, which are flagged by PerformLine to the second, making their call review process 99% more efficient and saving 4.9k+ manual hours per month.
Marketing materials aren’t reviewed by legal or compliance
When pre-production or unpublished marketing materials and related disclosures are not reviewed by legal, compliance, or audit teams, banks risk UDAAP issues.
This oversight gap is a critical red flag because it increases the likelihood that consumers receive misleading or incomplete details about a product or service. It can also lead to inconsistencies between marketing communications, official disclosures, and the actual functionality of the product or service.
Reviewing materials prior to publication ensures these risks are mitigated before reaching consumers.
PerformLine helps banks address this challenge with our Document Review solution, enabling automated and thorough review of marketing materials and disclosure documents.
Each document is scored against regulatory requirements and specified brand guidelines, delivering fast pass/fail verdicts. Potential violations are highlighted directly in the document and sent as a compliance alert to the submitter for prompt remediation.
With an easy submission process, materials can be uploaded directly to the platform, sent via email, or integrated into workflow platforms through APIs. This allows internal teams, external partners, or agents to participate in compliance reviews seamlessly, reducing operational burdens while ensuring all materials meet regulatory and brand standards.
How Stride Bank uses PerformLine to reduce document review time by 90%
Stride Bank reviews hundreds of assets each month for compliance. Previously, reviewing marketing documents was a manual, tedious process and was not sustainable.
After partnering with PerformLine, the same document that used to take multiple days of review and conversation can be reviewed, scored, and sent back to the partner as approved or with noted issues almost immediately.
Using Document Review, Stride Bank made its compliance review and approval process 90% more efficient.Our company has to remain compliant across a wide range of financial services, all of which present their own challenges. PerformLine allows us be proactive about compliance with our fintech partners, without the heavy lift of analyzing each piece of marketing individually.
– Walid Shaker, VP Enterprise Risk Manager & Privacy Officer
Lack of oversight of marketing and communications
A lack of oversight and ongoing monitoring of advertisements, marketing materials, scripts, and sales practices can significantly increase UDAAP risks.
Even if materials have been approved prior to going live, even one minor edit to the approved content can lead to significant issues if not quickly identified.
Without proper monitoring, misleading or confusing information communicated to consumers may go unnoticed, as well as discrepancies between what is marketed and the actual disclosures or functionality of a product or service.
PerformLine’s omni-channel compliance solution equips banks with the tools needed to mitigate these risks by automating the oversight and review of marketing materials across all channels, ensuring that every piece of communication with consumers aligns with compliance standards and accurately reflects the bank’s products and services.
PerformLine’s platform uses advanced technology to discover, monitor, and review a wide range of consumer-facing materials, including websites, social media posts, emails, and sales call recordings.
How this top 10 U.S. bank achieved 60x more compliance oversight with PerformLine
This bank’s internal QA team was manually reviewing both owned and operated web pages, as well as those of their extensive partner network. This process was time-consuming and provided coverage for only a small fraction of their overall web presence.
With PerformLine, the bank scaled compliance oversight from only 400 web pages per quarter to over 24,000 daily, including pages from 3,200+ partners.
Additionally, 95% of the web pages monitored were previously unknown to the bank and were discovered using PerformLine’s proprietary web crawler, the Kraken. All of these would have been impossible to find manually and would have resulted in significant risk gaps
Gianna Kennedy 
