Best Practice for Compliant Financial Promotions

Addressing Financial Promotions as the FCA steps up action against misleading financial adverts

Lucy Castledine, Director of Consumer Investments at the FCA, said:

“Over the past year, we have seen a growing number of misleading and illegal financial promotions. We have stepped up our efforts in response to make sure that financial promotions are clear, fair, and accurate.

We expect firms to take the necessary steps to meet standards and will continue to work with other bodies, including social media platforms, to prevent illegal promotions being pushed at consumers.” (Source: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-steps-action-against-misleading-financial-adverts )

This statement brings further emphasis to the importance of having effective systems and controls in place to monitor and report on financial promotions.

Marrying together efficient internal processes and the demands of the FCA highlights two key areas of focus for financial promotions processes: Accountability and Auditability.

Accountability is important to ensure each stage of the financial promotions creation and review process is conducted in a timely manner and by the right person(s).

Auditability is the efficient recording of steps within the financial promotions process so that should the FCA make an enquiry, a firm has the ability to show it has taken the necessary steps to ensure financial promotions are fair, clear and not misleading.

ComplyPortal’s solution provides accountability and auditability through one clear process. The Financial Promotions Approval workflow in ComplyPortal Raises the relevant considerations to each member of the approval process and records approval from each person/team. This method provides accountability with deadlines assigned to each approval stage, and the relevant considerations highlighted and addressed. This information is all stored and can be pulled into reports with one click to cover one workflow or those over a period.

Key Features:

• Details of Regulatory Expectations
• Clear workflow of assigned groups with strict deadlines
• automatic notifications
• Clear audit trails

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Find out more about how the ComplyPortal platform can help firms adapt to new regulatory expectations at: https://complyportal.uk/modules/

About ComplyPortal:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring. 

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others: 

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Approvals: authorise request and keep track of workflows
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• Training: access our LMS platform for all Compliance and Governance Training

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