Why Partner Banks Love PerformLine for Marketing Compliance

Partner banks are faced with numerous opportunities and challenges in their relationship with fintech companies. While partnering with fintechs can bring new services, products, and revenue streams for banks, it also introduces a range of marketing compliance risks.

To navigate these challenges and maximize the benefits of fintech partnerships, partner banks turn to PerformLine as their solution for marketing compliance. PerformLine offers a comprehensive platform to manage and monitor all fintech partner marketing efforts, ensuring that they align with regulations and consumer protection laws. 

This blog outlines the specific opportunities, risks, and challenges that partner banks face in their fintech partnerships, and why PerformLine is the leading choice for partner banks for marketing compliance.

Table of Contents

Bonus content: Get the ultimate compliance checklist for bank-fintech partnerships

Opportunities for Banks Partnering with Fintechs

Once upon a time, banks were the gatekeepers of financial data and the primary provider of financial services for consumers. But then, fintechs quickly disrupted the sector by offering innovative, digital financial products with much faster speed-to-market offerings than traditional banking institutions. 

While banks initially saw fintechs as a threat, they quickly realized that partnering with them was a better option than trying to compete as new players in an increasingly crowded market. 

You know what they say—if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

By partnering with fintechs, banks are able to enhance their existing offerings and reach new customers, improve their operational efficiencies and agility, and stay competitive in a rapidly-changing environment.

Risks for Banks Partnering with Fintechs

While these partnerships offer great opportunities, they don’t come without risks.

Banks that partner with fintechs face several marketing compliance and brand protection risks, including:

• Regulatory scrutiny: Banks are already heavily regulated by both federal and state agencies, and any partnership with a fintech must comply with existing bank regulations.
• Non-compliant fintech partners: Even after due diligence, there is always a risk that a fintech partner may become non-compliant with regulations or engage in unethical or illegal activities, which can cause significant harm to the bank’s reputation and lead to legal and financial penalties.
• Reputational risks: Banks may face negative public perception if the fintech partner experiences security breaches, data breaches, or regulatory issues.

Challenges for Banks Partnering with Fintechs

Adding new fintech partners isn’t always easy.

Banks are faced with unique challenges when partnering with fintechs, including: 

• Slow and difficult content approval process: The content approval process for marketing materials can be slow and difficult, especially if the fintech partner operates in a different time zone, has different internal processes, or puts out a large volume of materials (like mailers, blogs, or ads).

• Limited visibility of partner activities: Banks may have limited visibility into the marketing activities of their fintech partners and their affiliates, making it difficult to ensure that the marketing materials produced by the fintech partner are compliant with regulations.
• Unknown regulatory requirements: Banks may have fintech partners in a wide range of industries and product offerings, making it difficult to know which regulations apply to which fintech, thus making monitoring for compliance exponentially more difficult.

How PerformLine Makes Marketing Compliance Easy for Partner Banks

Whether it be organizing your compliance program, increasing speed-to-market with your fintechs, or consolidating your tech stack in both marketing compliance reviews and monitoring, PerformLine can help.

Compliance knowledge and oversight across multiple industries and product verticals

Your fintech partners are offering a wide variety of products and services that all have unique sets of regulations and guidelines, which can make compliance oversight daunting. Taking the time to understand which regulations impact your different fintech partners based on the products and services they’re offering can be a full-time job on its own.

Your compliance team is also likely struggling with what we like to call regulatory whiplash. They’re getting pulled in so many different directions to review multiple fintech partners, across different industries and product verticals, with countless complex regulations, across multiple marketing channels… and the list goes on.

PerformLine makes it easy to consolidate compliance monitoring across your fintech partners with a single platform to make compliance oversight scalable and efficient, and ultimately take the heavy lifting off of your compliance team’s shoulders.

With PerformLine’s omni-channel compliance monitoring solution, you get one platform to monitor six marketing channels across unlimited fintech partners across various consumer finance industries.

PerformLine has over 15 years of experience working with clients across all forms of consumer finance, packaged into robust, ready-to-use rulebooks to deploy across your industry-segmented fintech network and across your marketing channels.

PerformLine also offers technical guidance on building out your company’s disclosure, TILA, and any other specific rules with custom trigger term language and requirements—all built within a simple platform alongside a PerformLine expert.

Streamlined content review and ongoing compliance monitoring

Reviewing and approving marketing materials from your fintech partners is a crucial step in your overall compliance strategy because it ensures that your marketing materials are compliant before publication, allowing you to proactively avoid compliance issues. 

But, reviewing a large volume of marketing materials can be a time-consuming and challenging task, especially if your team is doing this manually.

PerformLine’s Document Review allows you to streamline and expedite the review process and get approvals or feedback to your fintech partners in just a fraction of the time. 

With PerformLine, it takes less than 2 minutes from the time a document is submitted for review to the time your fintech partner receives an automated compliance verdict with feedback, saving your team hours in a day reviewing multiple fintech partner pieces. 

“When I started to learn more about PerformLine, the wheels really started to turn about all the ways we could apply it to our business. Just the marketing review function…in our case, we are talking about thousands and thousands of pieces that are coming in. The review process is very expensive. You typically need a pretty seasoned compliance professional looking at piece after piece after piece, so I immediately thought about the cost savings aspect of it.”

– Trent Sorbe, Founder & CEO, Central Payments
    PerformLine Client

Approving your fintech partner’s marketing materials prior to publication is an important step—but, it shouldn’t end there. The next step is verifying that published content hasn’t been modified post-approval across the web, social media, or marketing emails.

With manual review, that could take hours—and this doesn’t account for any unknown places where your brand or product(s) are being promoted across the web. 

With PerformLine, compliance monitoring is ongoing and your visibility is increased drastically. In fact, one of our clients was able to comprehensively monitor over 200 fintech partners, 700+ web pages, and 62k social posts within just 6 months of using PerformLine.

Any instances of noncompliance are flagged in real-time and sent to you for review and remediation directly in the platform. 

Easy communication with fast-moving fintech partners

Your fintech partners are nimble and move quickly (that’s why you partnered with them, right?). But, it can be challenging to keep up and communicate with all of your fintech partners while they’re moving so fast, which can slow innovations and ultimately hinder the success of the partnership. 

PerformLine offers a centralized, streamlined platform for compliance communication with your fintech partners, including:

• A simple process for fintechs to submit marketing materials for compliance review before publication via email, within your workflow process, or directly through the PerformLine platform
• An automated and comprehensive system for ongoing monitoring of fintech partners across marketing channels
• Full workflow capabilities to communicate compliance violations with fintechs for remediation
• Complete audit trail of fintech communications from discovery to remediation

Now all of a sudden (with PerformLine’s Document Review), you are bringing an element of consistency to something that was inherently subjective. It got very exciting for us right away as we started to share it with partners who are sending in their marketing pieces, and now all of a sudden I can provide valuations. We have partners all the time saying, ‘hey, how come you are taking this many days to review a marketing piece?’ Now, we can go back and tell them that the quality of the piece could be better and that will speed up our review. We now have the data and analytics to say this piece averages X, and the rest of the population are averaging Y, that’s probably to explain why the review process might be taking longer than you would expect. It brings data into it for us.

– Trent Sorbe, Founder & CEO, Central Payments
    PerformLine Client

Discovery of unknown places where content is being published

On top of monitoring all your fintech partners for compliance, you also have to monitor all of their affiliate partners and third-party marketers, too. For each additional fintech you work with, the number of third-parties marketing products on your behalf increases exponentially.

It’s impossible to find all of the places where your brand appears across the web, social, and email with just manual review—your compliance team shouldn’t be tasked with trying to keep up.

PerformLine’s proprietary technology makes brand monitoring easy through the discovery of unknown places across the web where your brand is being promoted, whether it be across fintech partners, their affiliates, or other third-party sites.

Benchmark your performance against other partner banks

Do you ever wish you had more visibility into what compliance efforts look like for other banks that are partnering with fintechs? 

With PerformLine, you can access benchmarking reports to see how your compliance data compares to your peers while navigating this new arena, providing best practice guidance on compliance workflows for fintech communication that is both fast and auditable.

Significant cost savings through increased compliance coverage without additional headcount

Cost savings is important for every organization—how can you scale your business and partner program while decreasing costs and still ensuring compliance?

Partner banks can leverage PerformLine’s technology to consolidate multiple compliance monitoring platforms into a single unified solution, resulting in significant cost savings. By eliminating the need for multiple platforms, partner banks can streamline their operations, reduce maintenance costs, and improve operational efficiency.

PerformLine’s advanced technology allows partner banks to do more with less by increasing their coverage without requiring additional headcount. This helps partner banks save money on hiring, training, and retaining additional staff, while still ensuring that their compliance operations are robust and effective.

Get started with PerformLine

PerformLine makes marketing compliance easy—which is why leading partner banks choose PerformLine for their compliance needs. 

Want to learn more about how PerformLine can help you with compliance oversight of your fintech partners? Schedule a demo here.