COMPLY: The Marketing Compliance Podcast

Benefits of Automating Your Marketing Compliance Processes

• PerformLine • Season 1 • Episode 30

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This week I sat down with our SVP of Sales here at PerformLine, John Zanzarella, to discuss the Benefits of Automating your Marketing Compliance Processes. 

Listen as John and I discuss:

  • Some of the key concerns that keep marketing compliance professionals up at night
  • The specific industry trends and regulatory changes that have heightened these concerns in recent times
  • How automation can play a role in addressing these compliance challenges
  • Some real-world success stories of organizations that have benefited from automating their marketing compliance processes


Show Notes: 

Speaker 1:

Hey there, pie Podcast listeners, and welcome to this week's episode. This week I sat down with our s v P of Sales here at Perform Line John Zarella, to discuss the benefits of automating your marketing compliance processes. Listen, as John and I discussed some of the key concerns that keep marketing compliance professionals up at night, the specific industry trends and regulatory changes that have heightened these concerns in recent times, how automation can play a role in addressing these compliance challenges and some real world success stories of organizations that have benefited from automating their marketing compliance processes. As always, thanks for listening and enjoy. Welcome, John to the Comply podcast. We're so happy to have you.

Speaker 2:

Hey , a c it's so good to be here.

Speaker 1:

We've been a long time coming wanting John to come on the podcast, so I'm so excited he could join us today for our topic on benefits of automating your marketing compliance processes. So John , why don't you start just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your current role perform Line .

Speaker 2:

Cool. So yeah , um, you know, professionally, a little bit of a unique background. I started my career in the legal world. I worked in a marketing and business development capacity for a AM law 50 company, so big organization, about a thousand attorneys. And I did that for four years. I really enjoyed it gave me a , a real introduction to the professional world, but I think I always wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. I grew up in a family of small business owners, and so in , uh, 2012 I was the fifth employee at a media company. Um, ended up kind of growing my responsibility there. Um, by the end of it, I was a partner, really running the business alongside the founder, and that was really cool. Um, we had a lot of bumps in the road as I think like early entrepreneurs do. It was , uh, both of our first times running a business, but we learned a ton and, and we really enjoyed , uh, the time that we spent. Uh, the business was really focusing on social media marketing. And in 2017 through kind of a series of connections , uh, our business was acquired by Perform Line . That was really my first introduction to the SaaS world , uh, first introduction to the compliance world. And , um, I've been here coming up on six years now, and it's been a really fun journey. Um, the company has more than tripled in size since I got here, and we're, I'm as excited about the next six years that I have been about the last six. So

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be here. Um, and now you're an expert at all things marketing, compliance, <laugh>.

Speaker 2:

I'm , I'm getting there. I've definitely learned a ton. Um, you know, you don't, when you kind of study and grow up in a, in a sales and marketing space, compliance is the last thing on your mind. And in fact, a lot of the conversations we have with companies where we talk to the marketing team, they're not always thinking about compliance, but you know, now we realize it's such a pivotal part of what businesses are doing. Uh, the compliance role has evolved so much even in the six years that I've been here. It's been really fun to learn and to partner with that side of the business , uh, and and just see their impact across all organizations.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. That's a perfect segue to my first question for you. Marketing compliance can be so complex, it's so evolving. What are some of the key issues or concerns that keep these marketing compliance professionals up at night that you hear about?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I , I think there's a bunch. It's definitely one of those roles where , um, even when the workday end, there's a lot to, to be thinking about. And, and , and just to go back to when I started here, even in those six years, we've seen the role of the compliance professional evolve so much. There's so much more responsibility that they've taken on. I think historically in , in some instances it was viewed as kind of a , a back office role. And today we see chief compliance officers, chief risk officers , um, holding real leadership positions at companies , um, having a direct line to the C E o being involved in , in at least publicly traded companies, you know, in their , um, earnings calls and things like that. And that's just not something I saw when I, I got to perform line . But there is a lot that I think that's evolved that's , um, made their jobs harder during that time. Um, two of the biggest ones is just, you know, there , there's not enough time in the day to do all the things that they're required to do. Um, you think about monitoring, reporting, auditing, working across different departments. You know, historically compliance doesn't have a huge budget. And so because of that, they've gotten really good compliance teams have gotten really good at creating processes and procedures, many of which are manual that they distribute across, you know , various parts of their organization. Um, and , and really, you know , that can be challenging, especially as the regulatory landscape evolves , especially as, you know , there are more ways to communicate and market your products. Like when I got to perform Line , you know, we, we I think launched our social media monitoring tool in 2018, and it was just covering Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And that's what most compliance professionals had to worry about back then. And in the five years since then, we've seen, you know, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, most recently TikTok , and there's a whole slew of other channels that companies are starting to use to market their products that, you know, compliance professionals need to learn, learn how to monitor, learn how to, you know, create some guardrails around those things. And that in and of itself can be challenging. And then the second thing that we hear from a lot of the companies we talk to as far as what keeps them up a lot at night is just fear of the unknown. Um , and I'll give you an example of that, that we hear a bunch now. It's like when you work at a company, it's not uncommon to, you know, be on your company website, be looking at marketing materials for your company online. And because of many of the retargeting that these companies have, you then get served advertisements for for both your business and competitors. Sometimes. And we have a lot of compliance professionals who will tell us, tell us, Hey, we saw an advertisement marketing our company, marketing our products that we did not approve. We did not know the publisher of that content. We did not know how to get in touch with them when we reached out to our marketing team. They didn't have a direct relationship with them. And if we're being served those ads and we're seeing them, what about the general consumer? I'm sure there's more out there, I'm sure they're seeing them as well. And that's one of those things that just, it does make you feel a little uneasy if your job is to really monitor how your brand is being represented online, how your products are being marketed, and you don't even know all the places where that's occurring.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And we'll talk about in just a minute how maybe automating some of that monitoring is super helpful. But before we jump to that, are there any specific industry trends or regulatory changes that have heightened some of these, the , the two buckets that you talked about , um, in recent times?

Speaker 2:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm by no means a regulatory expert. Um, I subscribe to perform lines content, which I think is really good at educating me on what's going on in the regulatory landscape. But, but that's probably the first one. Um, you know, really starting with the current administration , um, the new leadership at the C F P B , just the, the energy changed when it came to , um, consumer compliance and really working with consumer finance companies to make sure they're being compliant. I don't know that the data supports that. We've seen a lot more enforcement, but there's certainly been a lot more talk about enforcement. Um, we are seeing state regulators get much more involved, so that adds an additional level of complexity. We're seeing the C F P B start to change some of the rules as they go with what's within their monitoring purview. Now they're looking at sort of non-bank fintechs. Um, they're looking at banks sometimes that are under the $10 billion in assets that historically they have been focusing on. And then there's, you know, the F T C and all of the other regulators, and even most recently this year, just seeing the government getting involved within banking with S V B and some of those other companies, that is changing quite a bit. And unfortunately, it's not coming always with the most clearest guidelines. A lot of times it's the guidelines are, are coming down the road. There's hints as to what they might be, but it's not really a clear cut for a company to look at and say, Hey, here's what we have to do to adhere to them. So I think that's one challenge. Um, from an economic standpoint, right? It's been a weird few years , uh, after kind of the pandemic and then the, the boom of 2021 , um, we've seen a lot of companies pulling back over the last 18 months to two years where they are , um, doing layoffs, unfortunately, and it's impacting some of the size of these teams. So when you look at the compliance professional, now they're being asked to do more with less, more complex regulations, more different areas they need to monitor from a marketing perspective, but less headcount than they had historically. And again, when you have manual processes, and I know we'll talk about automation becomes really challenging to do more with less. You don't have more to give. It's like you only have a certain amount of time in the day. And then the last one I'll just mention is just , um, and this again is newer over the 18 months , uh, last 18 months, but frequent rate changes. Um, we've had nearly a dozen rate changes in the last 18 months and companies who are marketing credit card products, personal loan products, we've heard these crazy stories about them having to scramble every time there's a rate change just to make sure that all of their partners and their owned and operated websites are up to date with the most recent information in a timeframe that, again, protects the consumer. So that ac you're not logging on to look at a credit card offer the day after a rate change and you're being served outdated information, and then you go to apply for it and the rates are different than what you had seen marketed. And then that's frustrating to any consumer. So then you go to the C F P B and you file a complaint, and that ends up in a pool of other complaints that then tip the C F PB off that we need to pay attention to this company because there's something wrong with their, you know, monitoring of their sales and marketing message out there. And, you know, we've heard things as crazy as companies, you know, setting alarms for teams of people in the middle of the night just to be able to start looking at those websites, making sure content's up to date so that if it's not, they can remediate on it quickly before that word spreads. And that just adds a , a layer of complexity that, and probably the eight or nine years before that wasn't really there because we didn't have a lot of significant rate changes and definitely not what the frequency of what we're seeing today.

Speaker 1:

Those are all really good points. And , uh, perfect transition to talk about how automation can help with all of the number of things you talked about. So let's talk about it. How can automation play a role in addressing these compliance challenges?

Speaker 2:

Sure, yeah. And I won't just make it about sales and marketing compliance, which is our world, but look across the, the spectrum of compliance, whether it's a M L K Y C , whether you're doing transaction monitoring, whether it's a d a compliance or cybersecurity in all of those categories, in order to scale the way that you need to, to provide the coverage that regulators expect and that you want to be, again, you know, a , a good steward of financial products to consumers, it is really hard to do that manually. Historically, you probably could have gotten away with it. Um, there was less complexity, there were less ways to market, there were less challenges when it came to fraud and , um, and, and you know, cybersecurity and things of that nature. But today, you know, automation provides the ability for scale to be able to do the monitoring that you need to do on a large scale basis without adding the headcount that most companies don't have the budget to add, at least not this year, and likely not next year as well. And I'll just give you one example. So we , um, have a bank that we were talking to , uh, probably about a year ago, and they were talking about conversations they were having with the state regulator, and the state regulator said to them, look, you are required to be able to show proof that you are monitoring in this example, all of your FinTech partners and not just the companies that you're partnering with, not just their homepage and their social media account, but all of the different ways those companies are marketing themselves. So if they're working with influencers, if they're working with affiliates and lead generation, lead generators, you need to be able to prove to us that you have optics into that marketing message. Because at the end of the day, as the bank, you are the one that is backing those products that they're offering. And so if you are a bank, in this case, they did not have just a few FinTech partners, they had many FinTech partners, it's impossible to do that manually. Mm-hmm . <affirmative> . And so then you're left with this decision, do we pull back on our FinTech program that in many cases is a great way to do customer acquisition. It's a great way to , um, you know, serve an underserved population through these different partnerships. Like there's a lot of good that can come from the, the bass model and , and , and banks partnering with fintechs, or do we find an automated solution that can provide us the coverage, the reporting, the proof that we can use to show that we have optics into these areas? And then what happens is with the team that you had sort of manually monitoring and only covering a percentage of it, now they're being queued to where the actual risk is. And so that team is still very busy. They still have a lot on their plate, but the lot on their plate is after technology's already looked at everything and told them, Hey, here's where you need to focus your attention. And then when you look at it from a data perspective, now a bank can come to their FinTech partners and maybe they have a hundred and say, Hey, here are the 10 that are consistently putting us at risk that aren't remediating effectively, that aren't following the guidelines that we're giving them. And maybe we don't want to partner with them on an ongoing basis, but it also opens up the funnel for the business development team to go out there and find more meaningful partnerships with fintechs without adding on additional risks . So in that example, you really can't do that unless you have some layer of automation in there to help you scale that monitoring program.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And and everybody can hear this, it sounds amazing, but everyone loves a good reference point, and I know that you have a couple, so could you share some real world examples or just success stories of organizations that you personally have worked with that have benefited from automating these marketing compliance processes?

Speaker 2:

Sure. Yeah. So I'll give you a couple examples and , and Perform Line does a great job of , of putting out, you know , different case studies and, and references and that sort of thing. But I am at heart a sales and marketing person. And so while I've grown , uh, really fond of compliance and how the two departments can, can work closely together, you'll hear me use this phrase a lot, which is using compliance as a catalyst for growth. And so one of the examples I'll give you is with a bank , um, that had a credit card program and they were looking to really grow in the co-brand space. Again, co-brand partnering with major brands who then are gonna be going out there and doing the customer acquisition on your behalf. And this one works with, you know, a lot of major retailers and, and airlines and, and those sorts of businesses. They were limited in how many co-brand partners that they could add because they didn't have any way to scale their compliance monitoring. They couldn't assure that all the places where, you know, and I'm just using random companies here, but Delta or American Airlines were gonna market their products, would be places that they could monitor on an ongoing basis and ensure that the terms and conditions were accurate, that the rates were accurate, that everything from a disclosure standpoint was there the way that it needed to be. And so they implemented perform line , uh, across the web and social media. And very quickly because the technology was able to automate the Monitoring Pro process for them, they were able to add three times as many co-brand partners within the first 18 months. And it became a really great revenue generator for them. Um, their card program grew exponentially because of that. It was good for the business, the story itself made it up , uh, kind of the leadership levels and it looked really good on compliance because, you know, they were really partnering with the business as opposed to, in some cases being impediment to the business's growth goals. Another example when I talked about partner banks earlier, but you know, they're , they're in the world of banking as a service. There were the companies that have been doing this for a long time, and then there are the regional banks that, you know, see this as part of their future where they wanna launch programs. And the the partner banks that that we see do this most effectively are the ones that think of compliance and advance of starting a FinTech program. And so there are , uh, one example of a regional bank that came to perform Line and said, Hey, look, we wanna start this FinTech partner program. We have a bunch of fintechs really interested in, in onboarding with us, but we won't do it until we know that we have the controls in place in certain areas. And it wasn't just Perform Line , but it was a handful of areas that they wanted to make sure they had some software, some automation in there. And so we ended up starting to work with them before they launched a single FinTech partner program. A lot of companies will say, well, we didn't , we didn't launch anything yet. There's no risk there. But again, the companies that are being proactive in this space, they're saying, we don't want to take on any unnecessary risk . We don't wanna launch a program until we have the controls in place, and then that will allow us to scale effectively. So they kind of have this pipeline of six months to a year's worth of fintechs that they were ready to onboard. They bring on Perform Line , they onboard their first one, and then within their first few months they have six onboarded. And then after that they onboarded. Now I think they're, they're close to 10 or over 10. Um, and that's within like the first year or 18 months of us working together. And you know, that's a great story because now they are, they are a player in that space. They did it with a , um, you know, compliance in mind and I imagine they were gonna avoid a lot of the headaches that some other companies have run into in that space with the O C C , with the F D I C because they launched a bunch of partners before thinking about, Hey, how can we scale the monitoring? How can we scale our reporting? How can we have the proof that we can use when we are audited by regulators to show them that, that we have controls in place to support this program?

Speaker 1:

That's a great example. Almost playing offense as opposed to defense in terms of Yeah,

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Exactly. Which again, when you think about risk and compliance, you think kind of defense, you think, Hey, this is, and we've heard this from, from customers for years, you know, we send content to legal and compliance and it takes two weeks to approve. Well , we don't have two weeks to go out there and launch this campaign. And so we think about like products like our document review tool that can turn that two weeks into two day turnaround time and all of a sudden where there was this friction between legal and compliance and marketing, there's a lot more cohesion and, and it's just about being open to, you know, not doing things the way that you've always done them. Um, being really thorough with your search for technology to see what can kind of fit in the gaps for you. And, and we'll talk about this I'm sure before we wrap, but how to kind of make that presentation internally so that you get buy-in across the board in an area, again, where compliance doesn't always have the biggest budget for technology.

Speaker 1:

So I wanna ask you one more question then we'll do kind of a final thought wrap up , but I did wanna talk about it because you mentioned it prior to in terms of what keeps these folks up at night is the, the evolving landscape of, of regulations and rate changes. So can you just talk a little bit, John, about these , uh, ever evolving <laugh> industries and how these organizations can ensure that their automated compliance processes remain agile and adaptable to these new challenges?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So, you know, I , I don't want companies listening to this to think that, hey, we're just gonna add a software provider and that's gonna solve all of our challenges. 'cause the reality is that you could bring in the best software in the world and all those categories that we talked about across risk and compliance, but if you don't have the processes and the procedures in place, it's just not going to work the way that you're expecting it to. And so, you know, constantly looking at your own policies and procedures, matching them to what's going on from a regulatory standpoint is gonna be really important. Working with other departments at your organization on an ongoing basis is going to be really important as well. How your team at a bank or at a FinTech company is marketing, I promise you they're already talking about how it's gonna be different in 2024, how they're reaching a different audience, how that audience consumes information differently than, you know, maybe our generation does or the generation before us, or the generation after us does. And so really , uh, keeping that communication open across departments is gonna be important. And then the third one is if you, if you already have automation in place, if you're already working with software providers, that relationship needs to have communication as well. You should be talking to them on an ongoing basis, ask them to get on with their product people try to get an idea of what's on the roadmap for that company going forward. That's going to give you some ideas right across kind of their customer base as to what they see as important. But also, like at Perform Line , one of the things I'm really proud of in my six years here is that most of our product or feature launches have come from feedback that we've gotten from customers where they say, Hey, we have these gaps in these areas. The landscape has changed, we need to change with it. Can your product change with it? And it's not always going to be that case, but in a lot of instances it will help inform what we are building so that we can stay ahead of the curve on behalf of our customers. And again, not be reactive. It's the same for software companies. You want ones that are going to evolve alongside you. Um, and we hope to, and , and we've been fortunate. I mean, we had companies when I got here six years ago that were already here clients for six years and, and now they've been, you know, over a decade with us. And that only happens if, if both parties are evolving together.

Speaker 1:

Definitely. And I think a piece of that too is just being aware of what's happening in the regulatory space and perform that I'm proud to say is pretty on top of what's happening there. So I will also drop us in the show notes, but uh, we have a regulatory roundup that goes out biweekly. I'll drop a subscription for that in our , um, show notes for today. So if you wanna stay on top of it with us , uh, you can do that as well. All right , John , this has been so informative and wonderful, but do you have any final thoughts or recommendations for our listeners before we wrap up?

Speaker 2:

Sure, yeah. I mean, you , you took one of them , um, just making sure you're subscribing the perform lines content. When, when I got to perform Line , um, and we hosted our Comply event, which is kind of morphed into the Comply ecosystem with the podcast and some of our regional events and webinars and that sort of stuff. The whole energy behind it was, Hey, there are these great events and content for sales professionals. There are these great events and contents for marketing professionals and I think of like Salesforce and HubSpot who are kind of the leaders in those areas. We want to be the leaders in empowering compliance professionals to be that rockstar at your organization, to build your skillset so that if you do change companies or if you do get caught in a layoff, you bounce back and end up in the next place right away. And if you follow our content, you'll see that that's really the energy that we are, are trying to create. Um, if you join our round tables, we love when people participate because that's how the entire ecosystem gets better. If you follow our newsletter, you'll see open job roles for compliance roles as we try to help people who have been affected by layoffs in the last year land their next great role. And, and we're not the only ones to put out really good content. I know personally , um, you know, Venable, which is a law firm, I follow a lot of their content around advertising compliance, the claros group productivity, who are two consultancies kind of focused on risk and compliance. They also put out a lot of great work and we try to collaborate with them as a , as best we can, but there's a lot more out there than there was when I started here. And , and just making sure you're dialed into that stuff, it's gonna be really helpful. And then for companies that are looking to add automation but don't really know how to do it, the one thing that I would say, and , and we've seen companies do this really effectively from kind of small series a vtechs all the way to the top 10 banks in the world, is start to build your business case internally. It does seem like senior leadership and budget holders are more receptive than ever to not running into risk and compliance challenges going forward and , and seeing how that can slow down their business from a regulatory fine standpoint, from a , um, brand reputation standpoint. And , and just from some of the challenges that companies are dealing with after receiving a consent order, how can we best avoid that? And the way to do that is take inventory of the manual processes today, really get detailed with the time it takes you to do the task that it does with how much coverage that effort is providing. And then do really thorough research with companies like Perform Line to see, hey, what could the world look like? Um, not six months from now, but a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. I think that's one of the biggest change that we've seen this year in 2023, is a lot of companies are now adding risk and compliance to part of an overall digital transformation. And so because of that, they're, they're really taking the time to make these business cases to say, Hey, yes, we are going to incur more costs upfront by adding software, but over the course of time, this is how it's gonna reduce our risk profile. This is how it's going to enable us to launch more products and market more effectively. And this is how actually it's gonna save us money long-term because, you know, we're not gonna need the amount of headcount that we once may have to provide the coverage that we need. And we love partnering with companies on, on making that that case available and , and on how to present it. But, but that's really the best thing. And when you're talking to software providers, I always recommend, you know, talking for, you know, to references. Um, that's the best way to figure out how other companies like you have implemented and are using tools. And you're gonna get great information from the sales team, but at the end of the day, they're the sales team and , and they're there to develop business. Um, but the best ones are talking to you about real life customer examples and , and real wins that they're putting on the board for their teams. And we have a lot of those to talk about, which is something we're really proud of. So thank you for , uh, including me since episode one. I was hoping I would get the call to come on the podcast <laugh> and participate and , uh, I'm glad that we could be part of the 30th episode together.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. So momentous, so thank you, John . This has been awesome.

Speaker 2:

You got it. Thanks ac

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Comply podcast. I'll drop the resources mentioned during today's podcast in our show notes, including instructions on how to subscribe to our regulatory roundup so you can stay up to date with us on the latest regulatory updates and a few other success stories of organizations who automated their marketing compliance processes. As always, for the latest content on all things marketing compliance, you can head to content.formline.com and for the most up-to-date pieces of industry news events and content, be sure to follow perform line on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.

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