The Expert Interview Series is a segment of the COMPLY Podcast where we shine a spotlight on the industry leaders who are truly making a difference in the marketing compliance landscape. These boots-on-the-ground professionals work tirelessly to protect consumers while navigating the complex regulatory environment.
We’ll chat with these compliance experts as they share their real-world experiences, expertise, and practical insights. By hearing from those who are actively engaged in compliance, you’ll gain valuable perspectives and actionable strategies to apply in your own work.
In this episode, I sat down with Colin Darke, CEO of CompliSun, where we talked about how his career journey took him from practicing law to serving as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Rocket Loans to becoming Founder and CEO of CompliSun, which is an AI-enhanced compliance management system.
Discussion topics include:
- The importance of compliance and legal working together to build out organized systems so that they can tell their compliance story.
- Why tech resources for compliance should be a priority and not a reactive response to a problem.
- Preventing credibility issues with regulators by proactively building strong compliance programs that are not dependent on the knowledge of only a handful of individuals.
- Colin shares his predictions for fintech and compliance in 2025 and reveals his amazing “superpower”!
Show Notes:
- COMPLY Podcast Speaker Interest Form: https://comply.performline.com/comply-content-speaker-interest
- Check Out Colin’s Superpower: https://www.youtube.com/c/ColinDarke
- Connect with Colin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colindarke/
- Connect with Rhonda: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhonda-mcgill/
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About COMPLY: The Marketing Compliance Podcast
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:
Rhonda:
Hey there COMPLY Podcast listeners, and welcome to this week’s episode, of our Expert Interview Series. This segment shines a spotlight on the industry leaders who are truly making a difference in the marketing compliance landscape. In each episode, we’ll hear directly from compliance experts as they share their real-world experiences and practical insights. Thanks for listening, and enjoy!
Rhonda:
Colin, thank you so much for joining us here for our expert interview series. This is one of our newer interview series that we have put together in hopes of connecting with experts like yourself to talk about all things compliance. So we’re so glad that you were able to join us today.
Colin:
Thank you. Glad I could make it. It’s great to talk with you.
Rhonda:
So great. Yeah. So why don’t you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and your path towards compliance?
Colin:
My path towards compliance, okay so, my name is Colin Darke. I am the CEO of CompliSun, which is an AI-enhanced compliance management system. My background is a blend of legal and compliance. For about 20 years, I’ve been practicing law, and mainly in the banking and finance world. Then about 15 years ago or a little less, I pivoted more toward the fintech and banking sector. I worked at a private law firm and then moved to a bank. That’s really when I started getting deeper into compliance.
I’m someone who loves systems and loves that you can put together processes so things are repeatable. If an issue happens, you can problem-solve by identifying the root cause and ensuring it doesn’t happen again. I was able to do that while working within a bank. That bank happened to be under a couple of consent orders, which, to many, is terrifying and a headache. But for compliance professionals, it’s an opportunity—you get to understand what regulators are looking for, solve problems in real-time, and put stronger processes in place. That’s where I started developing a real passion for legal and compliance.
After that, I took those learnings to Rocket Loans, where I helped start the company and served as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer over there.
Rhonda:
That’s where you and I got to know each other—back in the Rocket days. I’ve always admired your commitment to compliance and your ability to bridge legal with compliance in a way that people can really understand. It’s a skill I’ve always admired.
Colin:
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Rhonda:
For sure. So what compels you about the work you do? CompliSun is a fairly new company, but it feels like a passion project of yours for a long time coming. What was the drive behind that?
Colin:
The drive was headaches that I experienced, you experienced, a lot of compliance and legal professionals experience. In any regulated entity, you’re moving a mile a minute, putting out little fires day in and day out. Then, inevitably, you get a call—whether from a potential partner doing due diligence on your compliance management system or from a regulator, state or federal. At that moment, it’s not a push-button response to showcase your compliance system.
Instead, you have to stop everything, pull operational folks off the floor, and essentially cobble together a presentation to show all of the moving parts.. I hated it when it was a regulator. I have consulted with clients and it would take days, weeks, even a month to showcase all of the moving parts. Even if you’re doing everything right on the ground, and you have the processes in place and not harming consumers, because it’s taking you time to tell your story, you lose credibility and I hate that. And it’s something that you know is going to happen and you know that you should have clear insight into everything, but you can’t showcase that.
I had ideas while I was at different companies about how we could display things better and organize things better and if I only had some tech resources, I could do all of these great things. But, with anything, tech resources are always in high demand, and legal and compliance are often at the bottom—until things go wrong and until the consent order says we have to do stuff, then we will listen to you otherwise, we will just gamble. I really was passionate about creating an intuitive, visually appealing compliance management system that anyone could plug into and we could present their system right away you can see how it relates to all the moving parts—how the policies relate to the trainings, the procedures, contracts—
I eventually met up with a developer who had worked on enterprise work in the financial services with firms like McKinsey and Bloomberg and started building this out, started building a team. He’s passionate about AI, and seeing you could have a closed system with AI so that you could feel comfortable and its not totally public with your data that allows compliance and legal professionals to document everything so that you can tell your story but when you document everything its a lot of data, its a lot of checking points also quickly analyze vast amounts of data to spot risks and see around corners and see growing risks instead of just being reactive. The technology is where it needs to be to do that so it is really an exciting time to be in a place to help compliance teams.
Rhonda:
It truly is an exciting time in compliance. There are so many things I have seen and the tools available today weren’t around a few years ago, and they’ve made such a difference in helping compliance teams identify gaps, structure processes, and mitigate risks. That’s a huge win for any compliance team.
Colin:
Yes, absolutely.
Rhonda:
So what do you see as the biggest challenges compliance professionals face as you have been on this journey?
Colin:
So, in line with what we were just talking about, and even when you talk about gaps, we often at a bank or fintech start up or bank partnership area, you have a requirement to have annual audits. It can be annual audits on all of the regulations that you should be keeping track of. In return for that annual audit that you spend a hundred grand on, you get PDFs and Excel spreadsheets showing gaps and here is what we notice, here’s what you need to improve and those are “dead” documents. You take them in, you start a project plan and get the team together to close the gaps and so that happens. That’s a lot of manual process and tasks that falls on compliance professionals who could be providing a lot more value otherwise provide more strategic value—like participating in product development meetings and spotting issues earlier versus being reactive and so being able to use a system to digest all of that like that annual audit when you are starting out doing that initial assessment of where you stand with the regulations and making that a living document so that you can have that data as a baseline so that you can build off that. That’s a big thing we’re capturing because it was a frustration.
So often, compliance is so dependent on one or two experts on a team versus having a process in place. If one or two experts leave a company they take so much institutional knowledge especially with the compliance and how we were in compliance with the regulations its a real hindrance to the company. I can just see when someone leaves, and a company, like when we talk about someone telling the compliance story, so you have someone who leaves that understands the compliance story, but there is not a system in place for someone else to step in and tell that story. It’s going to take them a while to recreate all of the moving parts and again, that time, even if the company is mitigating risk well on the ground, that delay in communicating the story can cause credibility issues with regulators because it took you a month to recreate that because you were working on PDF’s and spreadsheets.
Rhonda:
Right. And then there’s always the question of what gaps were left behind when key people exit, because they took all of that knowledge and now, when we forget about “XYZ”, or after the exam, you are thinking “Oh, I wish I would have said…”.
Colin:
Exactly.
Rhonda:
I know you are meeting a lot of companies and you work with a lot of fintech’s, so for smaller teams just getting started, what advice would you give for building a successful compliance program? Technology is definitely a part of that, but there are so many other pieces.
Colin:
First, understand the framework of having a defensible compliance story and getting them to understand the importance. That’s the culture of compliance. A lot of CEOs and business leaders operate under the mindset of “We’re doing the right thing, so there’s no issue,” but that’s not reality. So it can still be an issue because the regulations were not created around all of these technologies and user experiences in mind. So if you’re in fintech or banking it’s super complex, so it’s hard to stay on top of everything, but bring in the right professionals early and get a skeleton of a solid compliance management system in place, I was just talking to someone on Monday and just in talking about the complaint management system, was totally new to them. Everyone understands policies and procedures, because you are operationalizing processes and compliance or underwriting, that is easy to understand because it is tied to the core, of the service or the product you are selling and compliance often isn’t, so understanding and doing courses on why these things are important, like complaint management, I love and people try to steer clear of leaning into complaint management.
We even signed up for the CFPB Portal before we even needed to because if someone is complaining about how your phrasing something or how your process is working, you want to know about that so you can fix it.. Putting your head in the sand is never a good strategy and it never works. So getting a good baseline, and a good skeleton of what you need as your building things out, you can build your system with that in mind and you can automate things and make certain things auditable, which if you are not talking to a compliance professional, you are not thinking about that you then get hit and get in trouble years down the line because you don’t know why certain things happened or you can’t quickly, like being able document everything, if you get a frivolous complaint, you can show, this is what our system looked like, this is what our processes were doing, these are the consents, versus saying I have no idea what we were doing two years ago.
Rhonda:
Also one of the things I have seen that troubles me a bit is when compliance teams get laid off because the company needs to make cuts and they start in compliance and I am like..NO, that’s where you need your people. You need the compliance folks!
Colin:
It’s so shortsighted because yes, a lot of people view it as a cost center, but it’s like insurance, you want to keep the money you make, so you need to keep the compliance team. So you don’t want to just look at this quarter, but then a year from now we have to give all of that money back because we didn’t understand what our obligations were. That’s not good business, that’s not scalable, that’s shortsighted. So a lot of this is just being responsible business citizens and really understanding what your obligations are and again, like I say, in heavily regulated spaces, you do have four obligations and thats the cost you pay for being in the industry and compliance in particular in a heavily regulated industry you know their not doing the right thing if that’t their first go to, whoever is running the shop doesn’t have a sense of the long term obligations and ignoring compliance.
Rhonda:
So, looking ahead as we are going into the new year, what challenges or trends do you anticipate for compliance over the next six months, especially with the changing political landscape? Will less federal regulation mean more state regulation, what are your thoughts or predictions?
Colin:
My thoughts are that even when you do see people that are enforcement agents at the federal level are going to states where they can continue their work, in a democratic state. So you will see some of that and we did see that in the first Trump administration the first go round. I think we will see states like California and New York will likely step up with consumer protection regulations and enforcement actions. This new administration will likely have more of an appetite for AI and other more novel technologies, so you are going to see more opportunity with people starting or growing businesses then you need the risk function in there to make sure that they are not getting over their skis and growing too quickly into new industries, so kind of a tug-n-pull between state and federal, more than usual and there will be in my opinion, because you will see aggressive deregulation, just to deregulate. There are areas where it can be done, but it’s not something you do with a hammer and you’ll see consumers getting taken advantage of like an industry growing quickly and everyone jumping on board, but consumers being harmed. This is like an 18 month period before congress shifts again, because then it will be a shift and cleaning up because people will be upset because people took their hands off the wheel and that’s not how to do smart policy making. So again, yes that’s often like, compliance professionals, you’re thinking ahead and you see these things that are about to happen so you want to put a good base in and people are like, “oh no, there’s no rules now”. We’ve got to move quicker, so one, there are rules and they will pop up again and you want to be in a good place to meet them, but two it’s just good business because if you don’t have these processes in place, a lot of them are to protect consumers, you’re gonna harm consumers, harm your reputation and then harm your company, so you’re making money to just give it back, or making money and you’re not going to have anything long term because you just hurt a bunch of consumers. It will be negative press and you are going to lose the core function of how you make money.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, there may be deregulation efforts, but overly aggressive deregulation tends to create problems—consumers get harmed, reputations get damaged, and eventually, the pendulum swings back.
Rhonda:
Absolutely. There has to be a balance and business has to use common sense enough to know that there is a need to protect the consumer regardless of what is happening politically. Leave the politics out and take care of the people.
Colin:
Exactly. Leave politics out of it and focus on taking care of people. Pretty simple!
Rhonda:
So let’s talk about other stuff! We always like to ask our folks about their superpowers. Now I think I know what you are going to share because I have known of your superpower for a long time, but you can talk about your work superpower, but I hope that you will talk about your real superpower because I think it’s amazing!
Colin:
That’s awesome .. My work superpower is being able to simplify complex concepts and processes. My non-work superpower is that I am exceptionally ambidextrous. Where I can draw, my background is fine arts, before going into law and compliance, so I have always been able to draw and paint and have been passionate about it. A few years ago I started posting videos of me drawing either mirrored images with both hands or drawing one thing with my left hand and another thing with my right hand, thinking that it was so un-normal, not normal but not as rare and weird as it is.
Rhonda:
First time I saw it, it freaked me out! I was thinking, “No way!”
Colin:
I would do it in meetings and if I was just in a meeting, I would take notes with my left hand and watch the meeting thinking it’s efficient. See, it goes back to me making things efficient! A lot of the videos have gone viral, I had videos with over 10 million views and tons of followers on social media channels and I have been interviewed on Good Morning America and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I was in their annual book. A few months ago, I was in Florida and we have family down there and my wife’s cousin’s kid (second cousin) was just at the Ripley’s Believe it or not museum and there was a video of me doing my drawings, and he was like I know him. It’s just fun and it’s often just my hands so someone might not know its me. I have alot of these cute stories. My sister is an art teacher and she has students that show her videos of the guy that draws with both hands and she is like ‘that’s my brother” she facetimes me and I’m like, yep that’s me, look at the last name, she still has the last name. Yeah, so that’s my weird superpower that helps me have an interesting story to tell and creating arts help me de-stress so it helps with that too.
Rhonda:
That is awesome and we will be sure to share your information. As we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?
Colin:
At the beginning of the year, we’re launching a customizable AI-enhanced risk assessment tool that feeds into a regulatory report card. I am very excited about that because I knew that it was something that we wanted just because when I am consulting I do a quick risk assessment and they’re always done with these excel sheets but then as we have been fact gathering and talking to banks, fintechs and consultants about certain headaches, the risk assessment process kept coming up including other industries, not having any uniformity, not being able to do a lot with the data and not being able to quickly visualize where you stand at a given point is like looking backwards in time. So creating that tool has been our focus for this whole month. What we created is easy to use, fun to use and it’s giving real easily to visualize data,that I can see that there is a growing risk or this gap that they can quickly close and that’s huge, that’s going to just be fun for compliance professionals to be able to say “here is where our company stands and here is where we need to focus” excited to launch that.
Rhonda:
That sounds fantastic. Thank you so much, Colin, for joining us today. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, and we’ll be sure to share your contact information with our audience.
Colin:
Thank you! I really appreciate it.
Rhonda:
Take care!
Rhonda:
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of the COMPLY Podcast! If you or someone you know is interested in being featured on a future episode, let us know by filling out the interest form linked in today’s show notes, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
As always you can find the latest content on all things marketing compliance by heading over 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!
Gianna Kennedy 