Financial institutions in the U.S. are increasingly incorporating video content as an integral element of their marketing strategies. Videos can be attention-grabbing, are easy to digest, showcase the human side of financial brands and deliver measurable results. With these benefits in mind, it’s natural that marketing departments within the financial sector continue to expand their use of video content in their promotional efforts.

But the compliance piece of this strategy often presents challenges and risks. Just like any other client communications, videos must meet all regulatory requirements. Videos, particularly short ones, have the potential for misinterpretation, overpromising, or missing context. Additionally, reviewing and approving video content can be time-consuming and slow down production cycles.

Implementing streamlined approval workflows and using specialized compliance technology powered by AI can help organizations capture the engagement and ROI benefits of video while efficiently and effectively meeting their regulatory obligations.

Video compliance obstacles

For highly regulated industries such as financial services, compliance is mission critical. Marketing often addresses compliance needs either during or after the recording of a video, but both approaches have challenges.

Some firms include compliance as the video is being created and recorded. The reviewer will sit in to make real-time suggestions for language adjustments, edits, and sometimes even full retakes. The whole process can be incredibly time-consuming and, therefore, expensive. Additionally, the potential is high for scheduling bottlenecks when trying to organize a time when both talent and compliance are available, especially since compliance teams are already stretched thin.

Post-recording reviews are another method plagued with possible pitfalls. Compliance must watch, listen, rewind, pause, etc., to ensure what’s been recorded meets all regulations. Though transcription services are available, they can take a while to come back and may contain many errors, especially when there is a lot of industry jargon. Then, there is the challenge of potentially having to rerecord sections if large issues are uncovered.

Marketing’s goal is often to produce videos about timely topics, so compliance reviews and approvals need to be strategically incorporated to avoid wasted time, effort, and resources. Compliance should ideally be included at every stage of video creation — from script writing to illustration review, through each draft, to final approval. With compliance at every step, expensive rework can be avoided. Some industry-specific tools that incorporate sophisticated AI can also help.

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AI-powered advantages for video review

Teams should consider incorporating new tools in the market that can help streamline compliance reviews of customer marketing content, including videos.  AI tools can transcribe audio into text almost instantly, cutting down on the time it takes for compliance to review. When trained on financial services data, they can “understand” industry-specific jargon and transcribe it correctly — e.g. 401(k) vs. four oh one kay.

More importantly, sophisticated AI tools can flag potential regulatory compliance risks in the transcribed text with time stamps, provide explanations for flagged content, suggest alternatives, and offer guidance on necessary disclosures. Some AI tools can identify as much as 90% of what a human reviewer would, thus dramatically improving efficiency and accuracy.

With AI-powered solutions, reviewing videos for compliance goes from a time-consuming headache to a more streamlined process. They take out the tedium while enhancing human efforts. As video content continues to grow in popularity, the smartest organizations will invest in AI tools that can level up teams’ capabilities to produce compliant content and drive future-proofed success.

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