This week’s COMPLY episode is the first part of a two-part discussion between our own Ashley Cianci, Katie Daley Infante, and Brilene Feyler, as they discuss the latest research that reveals where regulatory and brand risk is hiding across affiliate, publisher, and third-party pages, and why traditional controls miss it.
In this episode, we dive into:
- Predictable Risks: 65% of compliance issues clustered into a small number of repeatable patterns.
- Visibility Gaps: 8% of discovered pages showed potential compliance risk, often lived on affiliate and third-party sites.
- Systemic Risk for Traditional Bank Marketing Compliance: How banks are evolving their marketing compliance oversight to ensure compliance during content creation; pre-publication; and collaboration between marketing and compliance teams to prevent potential issues and maintain brand integrity.
Show Notes:
- Download the full report, The Top Marketing Compliance Risks for Leading Banks: https://content.performline.com/top-marketing-compliance-risks-for-leading-banks
- Connect with Ashley Cianci on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-cianci/
- Connect with Brilene Feyler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brilenefeyler/
- Connect with Katie Daley Infante on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daleykatherine/
- Subscribe to PerformLine to stay connected to resources and updates: https://lp.performline.com/subscribe-to-performline
Subscribe to COMPLY: The Marketing Compliance Podcast
About COMPLY: The Marketing Compliance Podcast
The state of marketing compliance and regulation is evolving faster than ever. On the COMPLY Podcast, we sit down with the biggest names in marketing, compliance, regulations, and innovation as they share their playbooks to help you take your compliance practice to the next level.
Episode Transcript:
Jessica:
Hey there, COMPLY Podcast listeners! Welcome back to the COMPLY Podcast from PerformLine where marketing meets regulation in the real world. Today, we’re unpacking brand new research on how marketing compliance risk actually behaves across the digital ecosystem for major US banks. It’s not random, and it’s rarely where you expect it. Ashley Cianci is joined by Brilene Feyler and Katie Daley Infante to explore the six riskiest issue types, why affiliates and comparison sites are such hot spots, and how a single typo can explode into a hundred page problem.
Ashley Cianci:
Hello everybody. Thank you for joining today. I’m Ashley Cianci and I lead the Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations here at PerformLine. And today we’re discussing findings from our latest research analyzing marketing compliance risks across the digital ecosystem surrounding major US banks.
One of the things that stood out in our research is that marketing compliance risk isn’t random. It tends to concentrate in predictable places, specific channels, specific issue types, and specific parts of the marketing ecosystem. Today, we’re going to talk about where risk is actually appearing, why it tends to repeat, how scale turns small issues into real exposure, and how institutions are evolving in their marketing compliance oversight in response.
Today, I’m joined by two colleagues who work closely with financial institutions on these challenges every day. Brilene Feyler, our head of Sales here at PerformLine, works directly with banks evaluating their marketing compliance programs and seeing where these issues show up in practice. And Katie Daly is our head of Partnerships who work closely with organizations thinking about marketing compliance review integrations and how institutions are evolving their approval and oversight processes.
Thank you both so much for joining me today.
Brilene Feyler and Katie Daley Infante:
So excited to be here.
Ashley Cianci:
Let’s kick it off. So to set the stage for today’s discussion, we started by looking at how marketing compliance risk actually appears across the broader digital ecosystem surrounding banks. And one of the biggest misconceptions we see is that marketing compliance risk is treated as episodic, something that only happens occasionally when a mistake slips through. But what our research suggests is that the risk is actually much more structured. It tends to cluster in certain channels and around certain types of issues.
So my first question is for you, Brilene, from your perspective and your conversations with leading banks, does marketing compliance risk feel random or does it tend to follow the patterns like we saw in the data?
Brilene Feyler:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So it’s not random, right? We work with a lot of financial institutions, and we see a lot of very consistent patterns. Typically we’re seeing kind of categories of disclosure language being incorrect, outdated promotional offers, things like claims actually losing context as they get republished across different sites. And it’s, it gets really difficult to manage this risk when we’re seeing it outside of banks owned and operated channels. And so, a lot of institutions might have really strong internal controls, but then once offers and information is out, kind of in the, in the wild of the marketing ecosystem, it can get repurposed or just be really outdated.
And so I have had some conversations recently where teams thought that they were dealing with an isolated issue. But then they realized once they started investigating that it was multiple places, sometimes even up to like a hundred different places. And so that can get really scary when things start to scale.
Ashley Cianci:
Awesome. And we’re going to talk and dig into kind of some of the report data we found. But before we do that, Katie, I would love to ask you. You speak with a wide variety of financial institutions: Are there certain marketing channels where compliance teams consistently feel like they lack visibility that Brilene mentioned?
Katie Daley Infante:
Definitely. I mean, honing in on that third party problem when you start marketing online, whether it is websites or social media. As soon as you sign a partnership agreement to work with an affiliate, there’s a chance that affiliate has sub affiliates who might even have other sub affiliates. So you’re exponentially increasing the risk as soon as those advertisements go live. So having visibility into the unknown on the web and what those other partners and players are doing is a huge concern.
Ashley Cianci:
Oh, definitely. And then that’s kind of post-launch, right? When something’s out into the world. But from your perspective, from the Prepublication side, where do you see the pre-launch review playing the most important role in managing marketing compliance risk before things go live?
Katie Daley Infante:
I mean, it’s super important and critical to any organization. That prepublication talk track, You typically see marketing wanting to get things to market faster. They want to move quickly. They want to hit consumers at the time top of the topic, and compliance can slow things down because they need control and consistency and guardrails in place. So having a mediator between the two parties, an unbiased account to make sure things are being launched compliantly correctly at scale is very important and something that every bank talks to us about.
Brilene Feyler:
Something that’s come up a bunch is just around version management when you’re talking about disclosures or APR’s changing. Making sure that things are accurate and the most up to date. And also there’s always the ability for human error when we’re doing a lot of manual review and oversight. So someone misses their morning cup of coffee or has a bad day, maybe they miss something in their review as well. So hearing a lot of that, too in conversations.
Ashley Cianci:
Definitely. And that’s a perfect segue into our report insights and some of these things that we found kept popping up over and over again. So we’ve talked a lot about the idea that these risks actually are random at all.
What we actually found in the data is that sixty five percent of the issues we identified fell into just six categories, which abundance of things we found within just a few of these things. So misrepresented, free offers, bait and switch expenses, unsubstantiated benefit claims, deceptive promotions, incorrect or outdated APRs like you guys have mentioned, and then deceptive guarantee language.
Most of these centered around one of these, these six, which is so interesting for us to actually discover through the data. So we also saw, as you guys have mentioned, a strong concentration of issues in affiliate and comparison sites rather than on the banks owned or operated web pages. So going back to the affiliate conversation, so for Brilene do these types of issues surprise you or are they consistent with what you’re saying in practice?
Brilene Feyler:
No, these are very consistent with what we’re seeing clients and potential clients talk about. They tend to show up more. So like we were saying across marketing channels that are being repurposed or reshared. I always like to think about the reason for banks bringing on partners and affiliates. It’s because they’re trying to drive traffic, right? They want them to go out there and find consumers to come and take advantage of their offers. So therefore, they are incentivized in a lot of ways to use that language that is inherently, non-compliant. And so when we’re seeing like bait and switch or unsubstantiated benefit claims, we see a lot of times where it’s like, this is the best credit card. This is the perfect fit, really easy to get approved, guaranteed approval; these partners and third party websites are incentivized to use that type of language, which is a big challenge for compliance programs to, keep a hold on.
And one thing I will say, this is something that has come up too, is that there is the ability for just like true human error. So when we’re looking at, mistakes being made, it could just be an accident that something’s incorrect, but also like the APRs and things like that. but it could also be that it is part of like the marketing push. And then that is something that causes a lot of risks for our clients.
Ashley Cianci:
So a follow up to that question is when you speak to these banks and we found something out there, or they themselves have found something out there and we’ve discovered these issues, are they typically surprised by where or what is found?
Brilene Feyler:
So, um, they are surprised. And a lot of it is because they assume once they have approved something internally, it’s good to go. But again, it can be kind of repurposed. It can also be shared in places that they don’t even know about. it’s not so much about finding an issue. It’s that we found an issue that we didn’t even know existed. We didn’t even know to look for it there.
I’ll tell a quick story because I think this is one that has stuck with me. I was speaking with a large bank, and they were talking about an instance where they had an intern who had posted something incorrectly. It was one of those new account offers you often see them in your mail, it’ll say: open an account with us if you switch your direct deposit and, add X amount of dollars in the first month or two, we will deposit “x” amount into your account. The amount was supposed to be $250. So if you met this criteria, the bank would deposit $250 into your account. The intern accidentally put $450, this was on their owned and operated site. An affiliate network got ahold of this and blasted it out to their whole network, which was then captured by sub affiliates. It basically went all over, wherever, consumers could find access to this offer. They [consumers] were doing the right steps and then they were surprised to see that only $250 was deposited into their account. And so as it would be, all of a sudden they [bank] started getting consumer complaints filed against them. Not only did they have no idea why, they had no idea where this was coming from, how to reel it back in, and by the time they actually got in trouble for it, or they started facing some of these consequences, it had been thirty to forty five days since it had initially gone live.
And so this is just one of those, instances of real life example of just how one minor mistake can spread so dramatically. And it can be really hard to identify those and then fix the problem.
Ashley Cianci:
Absolutely. And that sounds like a plot from a movie that I would watch, but I think it also brings up that you’re not just losing, right? So, so true–We can’t have incorrect language out there about offers and things like that, but it also is a brand reputation issue at the same time, right? So now the consumer complaints come in. So it’s a multifaceted issue once something incorrect is out in the wild.
So I’m going to switch just a little bit to Katie to get more specific about disclosure language and things like that. So disclosure language and rate information accounted for a large portion of the findings, like we’ve talked about, why do you think these types of issues recur so frequently? And what makes disclosure management so difficult to maintain at scale?
Katie Daley Infante:
Yeah, I mean, disclosure management full stop is just difficult to maintain, period. If you have an internal, disclosure library or a housing system that multiple teams are in charge of, either by campaign or product line to keep up to date every day, that is a lot of work, in it of itself. So then to take that applied against all of your assets that are either about to go live and need to get approval and then once they’re shipped, maintain that compliance at scale across your owned and operated and third party and partner sites. That is just a massive amount of work which a human and a team just cannot do. There is no way that you can hire enough bodies to be in charge of every individual URL or every individual asset. You need some sort of automation and controls in place.
So when we think about prepublication, the control is one centralized location for all of these different approved language disclosures rates. What have you. You want to be able to edit them in scale and update them on the fly as necessary. You shouldn’t have to go through a third party. You want to be able to deploy them to the correct channels at scale. So the disclosure that just got approved for something pre-publication should mirror what’s about to go on your website for that product or that campaign that you’re working on? So it’s an entangled process. It’s not surprising that those are the first things to fall out of compliance because of their inherent risky nature.
Ashley Cianci:
Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. And having that one centralized deposit for everything that everyone’s working off of and agreed upon would make it so much easier.
So, Brilene you touched upon this in your fantastic example story about affiliate ecosystems. We’ve mentioned a numerous times within the first couple minutes of this webinar, but they were one of the areas we saw the highest concentration of issues. What makes affiliates or comparison ecosystems really difficult to monitor? And is the challenge about visibility, control or just the speed at which content changes?
Brilene Feyler:
Yeah, so I mean, the main reason why this is a challenge is that it just really introduces a layer of distance between the bank/the financial institution and how the products are ultimately being represented and marketed. And once something is, and I think you said this like “out in the wild”, it’s really hard to keep track of where it is and exactly how it is being represented to consumers.
And so it’s definitely visibility. Banks don’t always have a clear view of where their products are being referenced or promoted across these affiliate networks, and where it’s multi-channel, it can be on websites, it can be on social media. accounts, it can be through email blasts. We’re seeing a lot of use of influencers now where maybe they have the ability to say some sort of approved slogan, but then they’re on some sort of live feed and it’s just how do you keep track of all of those things? So it’s definitely visibility. It’s control. Even, and I was just kind of saying this, but when marketing language is approved, there’s always the ability to kind of iterate on it. And something that someone who is not a compliance professional, thinks is not an issue maybe really is when we start looking at it from a regulatory perspective.
And then speed, which Katie had mentioned, speed to market is so important nowadays. Everybody is looking for that next best great financial product or offer. And when marketing is trying to get that pushed out the door and when these affiliate networks and partners are trying to really drive traffic, rates can change, pages can get copied inaccurately. And so something can be outdated but still being pushed live.
And so it’s really a combination of all of those things. And so it’s that consumers want access to all this information through different platforms. I think we’re going to talk about AI a little bit later. But, you know, think about all of the ways that your consumers are getting access to information. We’re all using things like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, you’d assume that your customers are as well. And so trying to figure out how you’re maintaining your brand presence and accuracy across those things. It’s becoming really difficult for institutions to do that.
Ashley Cianci:
Yeah. I mean, we would be remiss in spring of 2026 if we didn’t talk about AI. So we will get there. That has a whole, talk track in of itself.
And I think, I mean, this goes without saying, but even if it’s an influencer and affiliate, somebody’s publishing on your behalf, you’re still responsible for it, right? And what you don’t know can hurt you. So getting visibility into it and just the speed of go to market, especially with how fast things get out there today is so critical.
So Katie, we’ll wrap up this section with one last question. many of the issues we found might appear small individually, like Brilene’s example of the two switch to a four, right? Missing disclosure and outdated rate a wording that could be interpreted differently, but they appear across a large number of pages. So how do organizations prioritize risk when issues are widespread through affiliates, etc. but individually minor?
Katie Daley Infante:
Yeah. You have to find that metaphorical needle in the haystack, right? How do you find these seemingly minor issues in a way that you can retrieve every single place that’s located quickly, accurately at scale. So obviously, that’s where something like PerformLine comes in. You need an automated system to find those individual issues.
A recent example, working with a larger bank who signed on a new partner that is not in the banking realm. So they’re working with a cell phone carrier who doesn’t, you know, necessarily know all of the relevant banking roles. They went live with a new promotion where I’m just going to make up a rate for making up sake for 4% is what you get when you open up this new cell phone carrier with this bank and some cash back reward to us, 4% is 4% to the bank, four percent needs to be 4.00%, which might be a minor issue to someone on the marketing team who is not in banking, who only knows cell phone plans, who does not necessarily care about the two decimal places are where the bank does need to. Know immediately. Where is this located? How do I find it? More importantly, how do I fix it? Tell people at scale and then save that evidence against a screenshot to show. We saw it and fixed it. We need some sort of automation in the mix to do these things at scale.
Ashley Cianci:
Yeah, absolutely. Did you want to add anything , Brilene?
Brilene Feyler:
Well, I was going to say and then Katie brings up a really good point. Having the audit trail available, having that documentation of yes, we are aware we fixed it. Here’s the proof, because regulators really want to see that you are taking action, that not only did you find it, but you have a process for doing this in the future, that you really have some sort of a system, especially when you are marketing across all of these different channels and through different avenues to be able to say, hey, this is what we’re doing and this is how we have this repeatable process going forward.
Katie Daley Infante:
Yeah. No one wants to be in a regulatory exam or a sweep and say, let me check my emails to figure out when we sent this off, to get it taken down, to get it fixed. You should just easily be able to pull up the evidence no matter what they’re looking for.
Ashley Cianci:
Yeah, absolutely. So with that, I’m going to transition. We’ve touched upon scale, but I really want to hone in on it because I think that really is the crux of the research and the data that we found is the scale issue. And these things take place.
So from our research,8% of pages analyzed contained potential issues, which seems like a small percentage. But when you think about the hundreds of thousands of URLs that were surfaced. 8% becomes a lot quite quickly. So at the enterprise scale, when you’re talking about all of these pages, that becomes much bigger exposure.
So, Brilene, I want to start by asking you, at what point does volume turn into material risk? When do compliance teams start thinking about this issue differently than, just putting it on one person to manually review?
Brilene Feyler:
Yeah, sure. So I think it really becomes a material risk when it stops being an isolated issue and starts appearing more systematically, right?
Like it is popping up in places where there is very little oversight. So one incorrect disclosure, an isolated incident, is not going to cause that much concern because a person can go and fix it. But when we start seeing this replicated across hundreds or thousands of potential places, how do you have a person or people be able to identify and fix it?
So it really is truly at that tipping point where you find that your compliance teams or whoever the people are that are supposed to be managing the oversight and ultimately making the changes. They can’t do it, directly. And this is particularly when you start incorporating third party sites and we see people really being concerned about risk and even holding off from taking on new partnerships or kind of allowing their marketing to scale because of this concern.
And so something that we’ve really been focusing on is how do you allow marketing compliance to be that catalyst for growth? Don’t make decisions based out of fear. but it’s not a problem that you can solve just by hiring more people because it can exponentially increase. And typically, or, I mean, I don’t know if this is across the board, but something that we hear very often is just that, like budgets are being cut in a lot of ways. Head count is one of them. How do we do more with less? And, embracing technology is really the best way to harness scale and volume. People just ultimately can’t do all of this at the degree in which they need to.
Ashley Cianci:
Yeah, absolutely. The goal is not for compliance to stop growth. It’s just to do so in a way that is safe and will allow them to grow safely.
So I have a follow up question to that has to do more with laddering up or kind of raising these issues to leadership. So how do organizations communicate this type of scaled risk to executive leadership or even the board? What tends to resonate most with leadership when explaining marketing compliance exposure?
Brilene Feyler:
I think that’s a really great question. It’s something that is really helpful when people are trying to present some sort of a solution or bring on technology. It’s really moving the conversation away from specific instances into more systemic exposure, right?
Executives don’t think about: How do we solve this one problem? They’re looking at: What’s the consumer impact? What is the regulatory exposure? What’s the overall brand risk? And how can we solve those problems from an enterprise level? So what resources do we need in order to solve these problems? Protect ourselves.
Being able to show executives that this is a repeatable risk that this is something that has the ability to really kind of get out of control. I think that when leadership sees marketing issues as more of a part of an ecosystem and needing to maintain consumer experiences and really protect the brand, that’s a great way for our potential clients to be able to present something like this internally and say, hey, you know, this has gotten, you don’t want to say out of control, to executives, but like this has gone from being isolated incidents to truly like a systemic issue, something that is bigger than us.
And executives want to know how do we reduce risk while still allowing the business to grow, right? They’re thinking from that strategic growth standpoint. And so any way you can loop your conversations into that angle is really going to be more successful than just kind of like the one off issues.
Ashley Cianci:
I was just going to say, because you talked about, an avenue for growth is controlling, or getting your marketing compliance into a place where you feel like it is safe to then use, like you mentioned, several things like affiliates, influencers, publishers, etc.. And I do feel like oftentimes leadership will respond better to that growth factor, like we could grow safely if we can get this under wraps first. And sometimes that’s not what people jump to. I think of compliance in general, but that really is the kind of the “AHA” moment I feel like for, for some of our conversations.
Brilene Feyler:
And generally speaking, when we’re going to executives, they don’t want to hear about problems. We’re just presenting a lot of problems. That is not a good look probably for the business teams, bring up the challenges and then present solutions like these are things that we were seeing.
These are the trends, but these are our goals. And this is how we see that we can help accomplish those with the right guardrails in place.
Ashley Cianci:
Absolutely. So this is a good segue for my next question for Katie, which is kind of this growth compliance. But Katie, as these programs scale, do you start to see more friction between the marketing teams and the compliance teams? And where does that tension usually show up?
Katie Daley Infante:
Yeah, the friction shows up in, I’d say two main different areas. The first is just that speed to market and that scale. If you are coming out with a new product or you’re launching a new campaign, or you’re going to start working with new lead affiliate in aggregate sites where you want this acquisition to go up, you need to get to market faster. So marketing teams are looking for a way to actually take some of the compliance work off of that team.
Let’s do it ourselves. How can we get this asset as compliant as possible in line with our standards without getting any human involvement? So the idea and the theory there is, if you can create it compliantly in that first line of defense, you’re actually getting things to market faster because there’s not as many iterations that need to happen, not as much back and forth. So we typically see that kind of push start happening from marketing and then legal and compliance feel it where, oh, all of a sudden we’re going from one hundred assets a month to two hundred; and now with all these new AI iteration, personalization, generative studios, we’re seeing five hundred to one thousand at scale. You cannot keep hiring compliance bodies to keep up with the amount of content coming out of these marketing teams.
So you need now that kind of middle player. So we’ll see some from both sides, you know.
And the other point when I talk to content creators and marketers is just having standardization. They didn’t go to law school. They don’t have, you know, their licensing. You don’t understand, as a content creator, why the disclosure was approved last week, but now this week, I need a different one because I mentioned this. It’s really mystified.
So by having something in the middle to bridge that gap between both of those teams, you’re fixing all of those problems. You’re standardizing feedback, you’re taking a consistent approach to compliance, and you’re actually enabling them to grow and get to market faster.
Ashley Cianci:
Absolutely. And you said this like when you’re going from one hundred a week to a thousand to like, and as you’re adding on partners, issuers, right? Because when you do want to grow, that scale becomes unmanageable at a certain point. And that’s the whole goal, right? We want to get bigger and grow but do so safely.
Jessica:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the COMPLY Podcast. Stay tuned for part two!
As always for the latest content on all things marketing compliance you can head to performline.com/resources. And for the most up-to-date pieces of industry news, events, and content be sure to follow PerformLine on LinkedIn.
Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time!
