Introduction - Best Practice Guide to Managing Compliance of New Financial Promotion Materials

Dave Moore
Jun 3
3 min read

Updated: Jun 6

Introduction to the Guide - image showing different aspects of content compliance

This guide provides a definition of what “best practice” is and the types of things that can enable the best practice position to be achieved.

Please note that the focus of this guide is on how to meet the compliance requirements for financial promotion materials in the most efficient and effective way. That is, how to minimise:

Workload / effort
Cost
Overall elapsed time
Risk of non-compliant content being used

This guide does NOT provide a definition of “best practice” regarding aspects such as:

Which regulations apply
How to meet the regulations
Design of content

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Who This Guide Is For

This Guide is designed to help anyone involved in creating, approving or monitoring the use of, any financial promotion materials or content.

Typically, this will include Marketing, Sales, Communications and Compliance. It may also include Risk and Audit.

Different Definitions of Best Practice

What the ideal position is for any organisation, will vary according to factors such as:

The complexity of the regulations that their content needs to comply with
The volume of content that they produce
The number and types of products or services that they are promoting
Whether they outsource any of their content creation or approval activities

So, what is best practice for one organisation, may be different from other organisations.

To help with this, within most parts of this guide, we have defined 2 versions of best practice:

Advanced – this will typically apply to medium to large sized organisations who produce:
1. Large volumes of content and / or;
2. Medium volumes of content that needs to meet a range of relatively complex regulations
Standard – this will typically apply to any organisation who produces low to medium volumes of content and where the compliance requirements are moderately complex

It is important, to have a way of determining what version or level of “best practice” is right for your organisation. This is something that can be done using our Compliance Health Check.

How to Use the Guide

Within this guide, we will be using this generic process as a framework:

Step 1 of the end to end content creation process - Ideation

Step 2 of the end to end content creation process - Planning & Briefing

Step 3 of the end to end content creation process - Creation

Step 4 of the end to end content creation process - Approval

Step 5 of the end to end content creation process - Storage

Step 6 of the end to end content creation process - Publishing / Distribution

There is a separate guide for each of these 6 activities in which we provide information about best practice content compliance for that specific activity. This includes:

The content compliance related objectives
Key elements of best practice
Solutions that are likely to enable the best practice element to be achieved
Benefits of achieving best practice

Select any of the activities above, to open up its best practice guide.

You may also be interested in this separate guide – 7 Solutions That Help Achieve Best Practice.

A few things to note:

Within this guide:

The term “Marketing” has been used as a generic term for the people who create content. We know that is many organisations, financial promotion content can be created by Sales / Distribution, Product Management and 3rd party agencies.

The term “Compliance” has been used as a generic term for the people responsible for approving financial promotion content. We know that in some organisations, people outside of the Compliance function, also have responsibility for approving some types of content.

We use the term “content” as a generic term for any financial promotion material which is subject to regulatory compliance. We know that some organisations will use the term “material” or “asset” instead.

Our disclaimer!

The information is this guide represents Athena's views based on our experience and also based on input that we have received from a range of different people involved in both creating and approving financial promotion material.

We welcome any thoughts or suggestions regarding:

What "best practice" is or isn't
How best to achieve "best practice"
Anything that you would like to be included in the guide