With the pandemic accelerating interest in online banking, brands in the financial services industry are spending more on digital advertising than ever. eMaketer reported that financial services advertisers nearly doubled their spend on digital channels since 2017, spending $23.56 billion in 2021.
With digital marketers re-evaluating their budgets, affiliate marketing is an optimal way to maximize return. The channel is considered a low-risk and reliable way to drive more traffic, sales, and ultimately grow customer acquisition.
However, for financial brands, CFPB regulation and compliance requirements need to be managed carefully to ensure publishers and the communication of offers are compliant. For financial brands to work effectively through the affiliate channel, tracking solutions, sharing of data, publisher recruitment, optimization of offers, the message on third party sites, and reporting requirements all need to be under the microscope to protect consumers, publishers and advertisers alike.
All too often the complexity, technology requirements and time constraints can impede an advertiser’s ability to be agile and expand partnerships beyond a narrow set of partners. The alternative can seem risky, manual and time-consuming. The result is missed opportunity to grow and develop a successful program, and of course, fewer new customers or approved applications.
The Challenge of Compliance
The ability for financial advertisers to drive growth through affiliate marketing has been hindered for years, by three key challenges:
Compliance regulations help maintain the integrity of the financial institution and provide stability for the market. With the increased need to monitor active offers and messages, brands often lack the time and resources to seek out new publishers and reach new audiences. At the same time, we’ve seen publishers responding to the increased appetite for digital financial products and promoting financial services.
A partner that can help provide both expertise in affiliate marketing and in compliance can mitigate risk and help grow the business. As a result, brands are able to expand their affiliate programs with a more diverse publisher mix to reach their audiences where they’re most active and, as a result, improve loyalty to their brand.
Stay compliant: Gain new customers and scale your business
Rakuten Advertising has a compliance team with over two decades of experience addressing financial affiliate marketing challenges. We keep efforts compliant and safely scale affiliate programs as the company grows —all without exposure to greater risk. Our unique blend of automation with hands-on approach results in a failure rate of less than 1% compared to the 8% average failure rate financial institutions see on their own.
Our platform offers comprehensive protection across all publisher types.
The key features include:
- Real-time monitoring to ensure potentially fraudulent activity is identified immediately giving brands more time to uncover new publishers and expand their marketing strategy.
- Campaign development and management that attracts and retains top publishers by tapping into a compliant, global network.
- Unparalleled industry knowledge and data from affiliate marketing innovators with 25+ years in the industry to determine optimal budget allocation across channels and publisher mix to achieve financial targets.
- Ad hoc forecasting and budgeting support to monitor real-time program performance, predict impact, and adjust performance to respond to macro-trends and monitor progress against targets.
- Rest assured that all publisher and social channels are properly monitored and ensure messaging is up-to-date across publisher sites with real-time updates to prevent issues before they occur.
These features allow financial advertisers to work with publishers more confidently and ensure activity is aligned to compliance requirements and regulatory standards.
For more insights on how consumers find and choose financial services, download our 2022 Financial Affiliate & Consumer Trends Report.
