Episode Description:
This week on the COMPLY Podcast, I sat down with Gianna Barrere, PerformLine’s Content Marketing Manager, to discuss the release of our upcoming State of Marketing Compliance Report.
The second edition of this report is a comprehensive overview of the data we collected in Q4 of 2022 in a survey distributed to compliance professionals across a wide variety of industries on their marketing compliance practices, concerns, and challenges.
During today’s podcast Gianna and I discuss:
- Key insights from the report
- The most consistent and inconsistent data points year-over-year
- A few key takeaways for the mortgage, buy now, pay later (BNPL), fintech, and partner bank industries
- A sneak peek at our upcoming webinar with compliance professionals to dig into these insights
Show Notes:
- 2023 The State of Marketing Compliance Report: https://bit.ly/3JwZHKE
- Navigating Marketing Compliance Challenges in 2023 Webinar: https://bit.ly/3HqcU5c
- The State of Marketing Compliance for Partner Banks and Fintechs Infographic: https://bit.ly/3XdZy1Q
- The State of Marketing Compliance for the Mortgage Industry Infographic: https://bit.ly/3RHWcCZ
- The State of Marketing Compliance for the Buy Now, Pay Later Industry Infographic: https://bit.ly/3YtndfE
- Follow Gianna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gianna-barrere/
- Follow Ashley “AC”: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-cianci/
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The state of marketing compliance and regulation is evolving faster than ever, especially for those in the consumer finance space. 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:
Ashley:
Hey there COMPLY podcast listeners and welcome to this week’s episode. This week I sat down with our content manager here at PerformLine, Gianna Barrere to discuss the release of our upcoming State of Marketing Compliance Report. This is our second annual release of this report, which is a comprehensive overview of the data we collected in Q4 of 2022 when surveyed compliance professionals across a wide variety of industries on their marketing compliance practices, concerns, and challenges.
During today’s podcast Gianna and I discuss key insights from the report, the most consistent and inconsistent data point year over year, a few key takeaways for the mortgage, Buy Now, Pay Later, fintech, and partner bank industries, and a sneak peek at our upcoming webinar with compliance professionals to dig into these insights. Thanks for listening and enjoy!
Hey Gianna, welcome to the podcast!
Gianna:
Thanks so much for having me.
Ashley:
Awesome. Well, we’ll just get started, and we’ll jump right in. You wanna do a quick intro of who you are and the piece of content we’re gonna talk about today?
Gianna:
Sure. So I’m Gianna, the Content Marketing Manager here at PerformLine. Just a little background about me, I started here as an intern all the way back in 2017. Came back for another internship in 2018 and then I’ve been here full-time since 2019, so almost four years. It’s been really fun to kind of grow with the company. So in my role, I’m responsible for just about all of PerformLine’s content initiatives from strategy, planning, writing, optimization, you name it. So our latest content piece that we are releasing is called the 2023 State of Marketing Compliance Report. For this, we surveyed compliance professionals and our network across a wide variety of industries in Q4 of 2022 under marketing compliance practices, concerns, challenges. Then we spent the past month organizing and analyzing the data and putting it all together into one big comprehensive report. We first launched this report last year in 2022, so this is the second edition, which means that we can show trends for this year and compare it to last year, which is super exciting.
Ashley:
So lemme just back up and give Gianna a huge shout-out. All of the marketing content you see on content.performline.com or our blog, Gianna runs that strategy. She’s amazing, and I’m so happy that she finally gets to talk about one of her pieces of content on the podcast. So that’s my first point and my second point is as you just mentioned, this is the second year we’ve run this report, which is cool. So we get to see some year-over-year comparisons, and then I think we should note that the report technically isn’t live yet, but, and I’m asking Gianna live this on the podcast. If you’re listening, I think we might be able to give you a sneak peek in the show notes from today?
Gianna:
Yes, I think we could do that.
Ashley:
Perfect. Awesome. Okay, so we wanna dig too far ’cause we want you guys to read it, and we’re gonna talk about kind of the why behind these insights. So Giannis is gonna walk through some key insights today, tease it out a little bit, and then you’ll have to read the report itself. But why don’t you start there Gianna, what are some key insights that everyone listening is gonna gain from reading this report?
Gianna:
Sure, this report I will say is very comprehensive. There are a lot of key insights. So I kind of just picked out four that I thought were most important to call out today. So first is that almost three-quarters of organizations have smaller compliance teams, so meaning five people or less. And this is across the board. So even for large enterprises, for those who have annual revenue of 1 billion or more, only 33% of those reported having a team of six or more. So meaning 66% of them still only have five or less. Second, in 2023, the top three regulatory hot topic areas of concern as we call them, are federal regulatory changes, UDAAP, and data privacy and protection. So obviously there’s a lot happening on the federal level, UDAAP is always a hot topic of conversation just every year.
Gianna:
And data privacy and protection also continues to be a hot topic. This set I thought was interesting out of the organizations that we surveyed, 58% of them said that they lack compliance monitoring on at least one channel that they’re using for marketing. So they’re using all of these channels for marketing, you know, taking advantage of the omnichannel approach, but they’re not monitoring all of those for compliance and consumer protection. And then this is the last point that I thought was super interesting. This data came from PerformLine’s platform specifically and not the survey, but 72% of all emails monitored in 2022 in PerformLine were flagged for compliance observations compared to last year where it was only 47%. So that was a pretty big increase.
Ashley:
Awesome, thank you. So just to dig into a couple of those and just thoughts they have as you went through them for the first part, I think it’s so interesting that even though the companies are getting larger in revenue, their compliance teams are not. Small compliance teams are the norm. Is that fair, safe to say?
Gianna:
Yeah, for sure.
Ashley:
So interesting. And then UDAAP as a top hot topic I think should not come as a surprise to anyone. We get feedback all the time on UDAAP, how people can be monitoring for UDAAP, what it actually means. So that’s not surprising at all. And then the emails is fascinating, the fact that it’s increased so much year-over-year of the number of emails that were flagged for compliance issue. That’s super interesting. Okay, so now that we have year-over-year data compared to our report last year, what is the most consistent fact year-over-year?
Gianna:
I would say the top marketing compliance challenges. So for this year, respondents reported that comprehensive oversight, keeping up with regulations, and then bandwidth and headcount were their top challenges. Compared to 2022, keeping up with regulations was the number one followed by comprehensive oversight and then bandwidth and headcount. So the places changed a little bit, but the top three challenges were the same year-over-year, which isn’t super surprising to me. I feel like those are just consistent challenges that organizations always have with compliance kind of no matter what, but so interesting nonetheless.
Ashley:
Yeah, absolutely. I think comprehensive oversight and keeping up with regulations, even though they’re consistent year-over-year, it does feel like compliance as a whole, and I know we’re gonna talk about industries in just a minute, but especially in some of these industries, the regulatory environment is only getting much hotter and way more intense and scrutiny.
Gianna:
Exactly. The CFPB have been super aggressive over the past year, especially under, you know, Director Chopra. Even the FTC has been super active lately, the OCC. So yeah, definitely not surprising that it’s a top concern.
Ashley:
Absolutely. And some of these are now starting to work together to come down on these folks and then also the states I think are having a lot, much larger impact as well.
Gianna:
Yeah
Ashley:
Awesome. Okay, so that’s consistent, not surprising, but what was the most surprising fact you found year-over-year?
Gianna:
So I wouldn’t say this is necessarily surprising given the state of the market, but I guess the most prevalent change year-over-year was around marketing compliance budgets. So first overall spending has slowed only 41% of respondents said that they expected their budgets to grow this year compared to 65% in 2022. So that’s a pretty big difference. Secondly, the top areas of spending for compliance budgets for this year are employee costs and compliance technology compared to 2022. Organizations increase spending on both of those areas, but decrease their spending on training and development and then consulting and legal services.
Ashley:
Got it. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that budgets are slowing down, right? Just given the market folks trying to figure out what to do with the budgets that they have slated for this year. So that shouldn’t be a surprise at all, but it is interesting, the top areas of spending are still employees cost and compliance technology. It makes sense to me at least saying that they’re focusing on these, you know, employee costs and compliance technology versus maybe some more outsourced budget coming from training and consulting and legal services, keeping that cost in-house and trying to utilize and just really, really make it efficient as possible.
Gianna:
Yeah, exactly. I would agree.
Ashley:
So the report itself doesn’t dig into any industry specifically, but it is a question that we asked when folks filled out the survey, what industry they’re a part of. So can you talk a little bit about that industry-specific data folks can find?
Gianna:
Yeah, like Ashley said, the report is pretty comprehensive of all of the industries that we surveyed, but we will be publishing a few infographics that drill down into specific industries and verticals so that our audience can use them to kind of benchmark their compliance initiatives this year compared to what their peers are doing. I don’t wanna spoil everything, but I can call out a few quick stats and just touch on a couple industries. So first, 41% of mortgage companies said that they actually expect their compliance teams to grow in 2023, which is a positive. 53% of Buy Now, Pay Later companies said that federal and regulatory changes are a top concern for them this year, which again is no surprise just given everything that’s happened over the past year. UDAAP and fair lending are top regulatory concerns for both partner banks and fintechs this year, but fintechs are more concerned about the increased scrutiny of bank-fintech partnerships compared to the partner banks. And then on the flip side, partner banks are more concerned about dark patterns over their fintech partners are. So couple of interesting stats there. Obviously, we’ll share more per industry in those infographics, but those were the ones that I thought were worth calling out today.
Ashley:
Awesome. So if I can glean insights into what you just said, there are industry-specific topics for the mortgage industry, Buy Now, Pay Later, fintechs, and partner banks that folks can check out. So if you’re one of those industries, look out for the infographics coming your way in the next couple weeks. Cool. All right. What else, Gianna, anything else we should do about this report?
Gianna:
So I could talk about the data from this report all day. I spend many hours going through it. But to really kind of dig into more of the why behind these numbers, we will be hosting a webinar on March 22nd with regulatory and compliance experts in the space. And it’ll cover kind of a wide variety of topics. So it’ll be a comprehensive overview of the current landscape. We’ll deep dive into the different regulatory hot topics that we touched on today. So federal and state regulatory changes, UDAAP, data privacy, and then hopefully the audience will leave with some practical strategies for navigating these challenges while ensuring compliance at their organization. So registration for that event will be open soon, so definitely keep an eye out. An email will go out once it is open. And then lastly, I will just mention that we’re always open to feedback on our content and our reports. So if anybody has any questions or comments or additional insights that they would like to see, see in future additions of the report, we would love to hear from you.
Ashley:
Well, thanks Gianna, and as I mentioned, she’s being kind enough to give us an early release of this report that I will drop in today’s show notes. So if you are so inclined, feel free to check that out. So all the stats that Gianna just mentioned today and like she said, Gianna and I can talk all day about the numbers and the data and the content piece, but these industry experts will talk about the why behind them in more detail during that webinar so everyone can stay tuned and look out for that, which should be going live soon as well. Great, Gianna, thank you. I think the report is fantastic and it’s really cool that we have year-over-year numbers to talk about today and in the report and in the webinar that’ll come out. So thank you so much.
Gianna:
Awesome. Thank you. It was super fun to be on this side of content, on the kind of forefront than just at the behind-the-scenes. So thanks so much for having me. It was fun to talk about it.
Ashley:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the COMPLY podcast! As we mentioned during today’s episode, a sneak preview of the State of Marketing Compliance Report is available in the show notes. And as we release the other pieces of content mentioned today, including the industry-specific infographics and the registration page for our upcoming webinar, we will update these show notes from today with these resources. As always for the latest content on all things marketing compliance you can head to performline.com/resources. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time!
Rhonda McGill 
Gianna Kennedy