Financial services marketers and legal teams are challenged by competing imperatives. AI can streamline these processes, improving efficiency and performance while safeguarding compliance.
What the Industry is Spending, and What’s At Stake
It’s estimated that the U.S. banking industry spends roughly 22.5 billion hours and $5.75 billion per year on compliance reviews. While compliance is necessary, speed is critical to remain competitive and profitable, and lengthy review cycles are holding banks back.
Until recently, there hasn’t been a suitable alternative to the traditional review cycle, but AI is emerging as a powerful copilot to marketers, helping them shorten review cycles to drive stronger performance without sacrificing compliance. With specialized AI, banks, fintechs, and credit unions can streamline content reviews, bridge gaps between marketing and compliance teams, and save billions in the process. It’s time for the industry to upend the status quo of compliance reviews, and consider using AI to save both time and money.
The real cost of lengthy legal approval cycles
Getting marketing content approved isn’t only time-intensive: it can also cost a bank close to a million dollars annually, if not more. Based on Persado’s decade of experience working with banks and card issuers, here are the primary factors in calculating the time and dollars your institution spends on back-and-forth legal time with traditional, inefficient review processes:
Volume – Each U.S. retail bank or fintech reviews anywhere from 300 to 3,000 customer marketing submissions (pieces of marketing content) each year, depending on the size of the bank and its channels, such as emails, website copy, blogs, advertising, videos, newsletters, social posts, and SMS.
Review cycles – On average, each message requires approximately 6 exchanges between marketing and compliance.
Time – Legal teams typically spend about 30 minutes per exchange, totaling 3 hours per piece of content.
Hourly rate – According to BarkerGilmore LLC, the median salary for counsel working in banking and finance is $410,000, making 1,920 working hours in a year average $213/hour.
With 5,000 federally insured retail banks and 1,000 fintechs in the U.S., and each organization producing an average of 1,500 submissions annually, the industry’s legal resources are reviewing 9 million submissions annually. At three hours of legal time for each (totaling 27 million hours), at $213 per hour, this equates to more than $5.75 BILLION per year.
Much of the time lost during the content review cycle could instead be spent to fuel innovation and growth, rather than back-and-forth reviews that sacrifice speed to market and time.
What’s lost when banks send content to legal for review
In addition to the quantifiable financial costs, banks sacrifice critical speed-to-market due to weeks-long manual review cycles — meaning that however timely or relevant a message may have been, it can be stale or dated by the time it reaches the consumer.
There are major disadvantages to the traditional, often siloed approach to reviews of customer content. Marketers seek fast approvals, and customers expect timely personalization. However, memorizing hundreds of pages of regulations isn’t realistic for marketers, copywriters, or regulatory compliance professionals themselves, making manual fixes both inefficient and error-prone. It’s clear that there’s a strong need for marketing and legal to work hand-in-hand in the creation of content, starting earlier in the process.
To expedite reviews, marketers often resort to pre-approved content, but this can mean lower performing, less relevant campaigns. This is the cost of playing it safe. There are ways, however, to strike a balance. The advent of Agentic AI offers a new level of automation that can help financial brands build content that will be both compliant and fresh.
Agentic AI: compliance and performance in tandem
Marketing campaign compliance and performance do not need to be mutually exclusive in the era of advanced AI. Specialized tools can help break down the siloes between marketing and legal and minimize compliance risk, improving workflow efficiencies and marketing-legal collaboration overall.
For instance, AI could flag high-risk phrasing to marketers early during the drafting process, note the relevant regulations at play, and automatically propose alternative, more compliant wording that limits potential flags from legal. This would enable marketing to launch campaigns days (or even weeks) earlier and help banks launch engaging content far faster.
Trained not only on regulations (such as FISRA, C.A.R.D, TCPA, or ECOA), as well as the company’s brand guidelines, solutions that are grounded in AI trained on real customer interactions can also provide predictive performance and brand alignment scores. Such insights guide both marketing and legal functions in generating copy that is compliant, on-brand, and will perform well (driving clicks, increasing application completions, cross-selling new products, etc.)
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Taylor Mahoney , Global VP, Solutions Consulting at marketing AI company Persado
Taylor Mahoney is Global Vice President of Solutions Consulting of Persado, a marketing AI company trusted by many institutions, including Ally and 8 of the 10 top U.S. banks to generate high-performing, compliant marketing language. At Persado, she draws from a decade of career experience in strategic sales, technical consulting, creative development, project management, and business analytics to identify ways brands can use technology to engage and retain customers. Before joining Persado, Taylor served as marketing project manager at Gap Inc. She received her Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, Economics, and Spanish from the University of San Francisco.
