Marketers must move quickly to engage customers and capitalize on key moments in the buying journey. If you’re a FinServ marketer, not only must you move quickly to engage customers with timely, personalized content, but you must also do so while adhering to stringent regulatory requirements. The need for agility often clashes with the demand for compliance, resulting in lengthy approval cycles, missed opportunities, and operational inefficiencies.
Yet, financial marketers cannot afford to sacrifice speed or compliance—both are critical to success. Fortunately, there are a few solutions that help organizations streamline workflows, reduce inefficiencies, and maintain strict governance controls.
The challenge: Balancing agility and compliance in financial services
For financial services marketers, compliance is not optional. Every marketing asset—whether an email, landing page, or ad—must undergo rigorous approval processes to ensure alignment with legal and regulatory guidelines. However, traditional review workflows often introduce significant delays:
- Multiple rounds of reviews from legal, compliance, and brand teams slow down execution.
- Minor changes, such as adjusting a disclaimer, require restarting the entire approval process.
- Lack of version control leads to confusion and duplicated efforts.
These bottlenecks result in missed market opportunities, delayed product launches, and decreased campaign effectiveness. Without a streamlined process, financial institutions risk falling behind more agile competitors.
The risks of non-compliance: Reputation and financial consequences
While slow compliance processes are frustrating, bypassing them can lead to severe repercussions. Financial services firms operate in a highly regulated environment, and any marketing misstep—such as an incorrect disclosure, misleading statement, or unauthorized promotion—can have significant consequences such as:
- Regulatory penalties: Violations of financial marketing regulations can result in hefty fines from governing bodies such as the SEC, FINRA, or CFPB.
- Brand damage: Compliance failures erode customer trust and can lead to negative press coverage.
- Legal repercussions: Inaccurate or misleading messaging can expose financial institutions to lawsuits and class-action litigation.
With so much at stake, marketers must find a way to maintain compliance without stalling campaign execution.
3 must-haves solutions for faster approvals without the risk
In the context of a marketing workflow for either emails or landing page, there are three main solutions FinServ marketers can adopt to delicately balance the speed and agility needed for campaign creation with the compliance and regulatory guardrails needed for financial services.
1. Built-in governance to ensure regulatory adherence
Governance is key for any brand. This is what ensures essentials like:
- Brand tone and voice are maintained
- Quality is assured
- Design is not compromised
- Errors are mitigated
- Compliance and regulations are upheld
Typically, governance can come from key team members acting as gatekeepers and guardians. While this can come from anyone from development all the way to legal, what’s really essential to unlocking a more agile feedback loop is adopting a workflow with built-in guardrails to act as a roadmap for teams. This ensures everything from code to content are aligned across teams.
While implementing this built-in governance tactic has previously been difficult, Stensul offers a structured yet flexible approach to marketing execution that enables speed while embedding compliance into the workflow.
Our email and landing page creation platform is designed with compliance guardrails. This ensures that all content meets regulatory standards before it reaches the compliance team. These built-in governance features include:
- Pre-approved templates with standardized legal disclaimers.
- Lockable content blocks to prevent unauthorized changes.
- Real-time validation to flag non-compliant elements before submission.
- Setting strict brand guardrails and communicating them across your marketing organization will help build the foundations you need.
When implementing these brand and style guidelines, remember to include email-specific guidelines that dictate how marketers can incorporate branding into their email campaigns.
At Stensul, we pre-configure your brand guidelines into our platform and create modules that are custom to your brand’s guidelines. This approach means it’s impossible for someone to use a color, font, or image in an email that hasn’t already been approved.
2. Role-based permissions to prevent unauthorized changes
One of the biggest risks in financial services marketing is unauthorized modifications to compliant content. While each member of a team has their own expertise and experience to bring to the table, this can oftentimes get muddled when back-and-forth feedback and changes get tossed into the picture.
Stensul mitigates this risk with role-based permissions:
- Marketers can create and edit within approved parameters.
- Compliance and legal teams have final review and sign-off authority.
- Audit trails provide full visibility into who made changes and when.
This way, teams can set brand guidelines and rules within pre-configured modules, and whoever creates an email or landing must abide by these rules—leaving no room to make unauthorized modifications.
This approach also cuts down your email or landing page generation time dramatically because teams only need to assemble the modules and add copy and images—no design or coding work required.
By structuring roles and permissions, Stensul ensures that only authorized stakeholders can approve and publish content, reducing the likelihood of compliance (or brand style guide) breaches.
3. Automated workflows to speed up approvals
By integrating compliance into a seamless workflow, financial services marketers can launch campaigns faster while maintaining full regulatory oversight. Partnered with brand-appropriate guardrails and role permission, automation is key for speed without the risk.
FinServ marketers who embrace automations can reap the benefits of speed and spend their time on campaign strategy and innovation.
Stensul eliminates the need for manual back-and-forth approvals by automating key steps in the compliance review process. Benefits include:
- Faster turnaround times by routing content to the right reviewers at the right time.
- Automated notifications to keep approvals moving forward without delays.
- Version control and tracking to avoid confusion over multiple iterations.
See it in action—Stensul success: A global payments firm implemented Stensul so that non-technical people could create emails independently. This change meant reviews and approvals occurred in real time to simplify and speed up the process. Emails created in the Stensul platform generated a 2.5x boost in CTR over the company’s prior average rate.
FinServ marketers need a modern content supply chain for speed and compliance
Marketers need to be both agile and accountable. Traditional content creation and approval processes no longer suffice.
Leading financial institutions are already leveraging Stensul to modernize their marketing production while ensuring compliance. For example, a Fortune 500 financial services company used Stensul to:
- Reduce email creation time by 90% while reducing email design production time by 25%
- Maintain full compliance while scaling campaign production.
- Improve collaboration between marketing, legal, and compliance teams.
Despite possible challenges, FinServ marketers can speed up campaign creation. With Stensul, organizations can ensure that every marketing asset is both compliant and delivered on time, empowering teams to focus on strategy and engagement rather than getting bogged down in execution.
By embracing a compliance-first approach with Stensul, financial services marketers can achieve the perfect balance between speed and control—without compromise.
Next steps
Are you ready to streamline your campaign process while staying compliant? Here’s your checklist:
- Try Stensul’s Cost of Building Emails Calculator to see where you can improve efficiency.
- Visit our financial services hub.
- Learn more about how Stensul can help financial services marketers optimize by scheduling a demo today.
