Welcome to The Demo Room – your front-row seat to the future of RegTech, RiskTech, and AI innovation.
In this series, we document our research interviews with the most forward-thinking vendors tackling the industry's biggest challenges. Each blog is built around a comprehensive product demo, providing clear insights into how these innovations address industry challenges.
On this occasion, we spoke to Joe Jordan, CCO and Co-founder of Adclear.
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Financial promotions are designed to entice individuals to engage in investment activities. Ensuring these promotions are clear, fair, and not misleading is crucial for protecting consumers and maintaining market integrity.
As marketing channels evolve, so too do the decision-making behaviours of investors—particularly younger ones. In the UK, two-thirds of investors aged 18-40 make investment decisions within 24 hours, with one in seven deciding to purchase in under 60 minutes.
Such behavior increases the risk of being misled. The pursuit of financial freedom often leads individuals to make impulsive decisions, especially when influenced by authoritative figures or organisations. While buying into the hype may bring short-term satisfaction, unconsidered decisions frequently lead to regret.
As media channels proliferate and "finfluencer" marketing becomes mainstream, the reliability of financial advice is facing greater scrutiny—for good reason. Research by Social Capital Markets, which analysed over 2,470 stock-related videos across platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, found that 71% of the financial advice consumed by young people via social media is misleading.
In response to these developments, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has tightened regulations to enhance consumer protection. As of February 7, 2024, amendments to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 require authorised firms to obtain FCA permission before approving financial promotions for unauthorised firms. This measure prevents misleading financial content and holds firms accountable for the promotions they endorse. The Consumer Duty further reinforces this responsibility, requiring firms to act in consumers' best interests and ensure promotions support good outcomes rather than exposing individuals to undue risk.
In 2024, the FCA significantly ramped up its monitoring of financial promotions:
97.5% increase in interventions against authorised firms, with 19,766 promotions amended or withdrawn (up from 10,008 in 2023)
20 finfluencers interviewed under caution using criminal powers, with 38 alerts issued against potentially unlawful social media accounts
480,000 new websites screened for unauthorised financial promotions, leading to 3,700 detailed reviews and 1,600 consumer alerts
Claims Management Companies accounted for 46% of all amended/withdrawn promotions, with the FCA taking action against 46 authorised CMCs
New regulatory frameworks implemented, including the cryptoasset financial promotions regime and the financial promotions approval gateway
This surge underscores the FCA's commitment to upholding standards in financial promotions and protecting consumers from potential harm.
The Problem for Firms
Navigating the complexities of financial promotions compliance presents significant challenges for firms, encompassing compliance intricacies, operational scale, and the necessity for rapid execution.
Complexity in Financial Promotions Compliance
Unlike structured, simple regulatory tasks that can be automated, financial promotions compliance often requires subjective interpretation. The FCA requires that all promotions be “fair, clear, and not misleading,” yet applying this standard is rarely straightforward. A financial promotion can take multiple forms—text, images, videos, or even influencer-led social media content—and each must be assessed for subtle cues that could misrepresent financial products.
For example, a TikTok video promoting a trading platform may not explicitly state false claims, but does it trivialise trading by showing someone making profits effortlessly on their phone? A meme advertising crypto investments might not contain incorrect information, but does its tone encourage reckless speculation? The inherent ambiguity in these assessments means that compliance requires human expertise, and any automation should be carefully implemented and must meet a high bar.
Operational Scale
For institutions operating across multiple jurisdictions and offering diverse products, the volume of promotions requiring review can be substantial. A firm marketing investment products in the UK, US, EU and anywhere else must tailor promotions to different regulatory frameworks, each with its own nuances. Each new product, jurisdiction, or promotional medium adds to the workload. Institutions with thousands of promotional materials per year require compliance teams to review each one individually, creating a resource-heavy process that strains compliance departments.
Speed of Execution
The combination of subjectivity and scale results in significant delays. The process of taking a financial promotion from creation to final approval has been known to take months, a staggering inefficiency in an environment where digital trends move in hours.
This slow lifecycle means firms often miss crucial marketing windows. A campaign designed to capitalise on a viral trend might be irrelevant by the time it clears compliance. The result? Marketing teams are forced to play it safe, leading to potentially bland, certainly delayed, and less impactful campaigns.
The result: These challenges translate into high operational costs, reduced agility, and lost opportunities. The inability to move quickly can make a firm uncompetitive, particularly in a race against high growth fintech startups. Solving this challenge is not just about compliance—it’s about ensuring that regulatory oversight doesn’t come at the cost of business performance.
A Solution
As part of our ongoing research into the use of technology in risk and compliance, we were given a demo of Adclear’s FinProm Compliance Platform—an AI-powered solution designed to bridge the gap between regulatory requirements and marketing agility. Adclear’s platform does not merely automate compliance; it intelligently connects the people, policies, and products involved in financial promotions, offering a structured yet flexible approach to ensuring compliance at scale.
A number of aspects stood out in the demo:
Multi-Modal Comprehension
Financial promotions are no longer confined to static text-based ads. Firms now market products through image-based social media posts, video ads, influencer collaborations, and even interactive experiences. Adclear’s platform demonstrates an impressive ability to process and comprehend content from multiple forms of media, ensuring that compliance checks are not limited to simple text recognition.
Unlike traditional compliance tools, Adclear’s AI can detect subtle human features within an advertisement. It can assess whether a video trivialises trading, for example, by analysing details including:
Body language and facial expressions—Does an influencer’s relaxed demeanor make trading seem effortless?
Background imagery—Are luxury symbols (e.g., sports cars, champagne) subtly suggesting unrealistic gains?
Audio cues—Does a voiceover imply that investing is risk-free?
By extracting these insights across different media types, Adclear ensures that firms meet compliance standards without diluting the effectiveness of their promotions.
Highly Tailored to Internal and External Factors
Financial promotions compliance is not just about following FCA’s guidelines—it requires aligning messaging with firm-specific, internal policies and the regulatory landscapes of different jurisdictions. Adclear addresses this by integrating:
Internal standards and product documentation, ensuring that promotions accurately reflect a firm’s offerings and adhere to its own standards.
External regulatory frameworks, with built-in compliance models for the FCA’s financial promotions rules, as well as rapid onboarding capabilities for other jurisdictions. For example, as per client demand, Adclear has recently ingested rules from:
European jurisdictions: France, Greece, Cyprus, Germany
Global financial centers: Australia, South Africa, the Bahamas, Seychelles
U.S. state regulations: Multiple state-specific regulatory frameworks
Campaign-specific parameters, allowing users to define key details such as distribution method, channels, asset type, product type, and target market—all of which influence the results of a compliance check.
This level of customisation ensures that each campaign is evaluated within its proper legal and business context, reducing false flags and unnecessary compliance rework.
Granular & Explainable Compliance Feedback
One of the biggest pain points in compliance automation is the black-box nature of AI-driven decisions—why was an ad flagged? Which regulation does it violate? How should it be fixed? Adclear resolves this by offering precise, transparent feedback:
Every flagged issue is linked to a specific regulation or internal policy, eliminating ambiguity.
The AI provides explanations in plain language, referencing trusted sources such as FCA guidance documents.
Actionable recommendations are given alongside the original ad, making it clear what adjustments need to be made and why.
This contextual, side-by-side presentation of compliance feedback streamlines the review process, ensuring that marketing teams and compliance officers can collaborate efficiently.
Built for Real-World Use: Practical Collaboration & Auditability
While AI can dramatically improve efficiency, human oversight remains crucial. Adclear is designed with practicality in mind, embedding collaboration tools directly into the compliance workflow:
Multi-team collaboration—Marketing, product, and compliance teams can review AI feedback in real-time, responding to flagged issues directly within the platform.
Timestamped comments—Users can annotate specific parts of an ad with feedback, making it easier to track decision-making.
Regulatory audit trails—A full, automated history of each ad’s compliance journey can be downloaded in a ready-to-submit report for regulators.
These features ensure that firms don’t just comply with regulations but can also prove their compliance efficiently when required.
Parker & Lawrence’s view
Adclear’s FinProm Compliance Platform is a timely innovation in an area undergoing rapid transformation. The emergence of new asset types (such as crypto and memecoins), the rise of fintech challengers, and the expansion of new marketing channels (including social media, private messaging platforms like Telegram, and influencer-led promotions) have made traditional compliance approaches increasingly unfit for purpose.
Financial promotions now demand a new compliance paradigm—one that is dynamic, scalable, and capable of understanding both context and nuance. Adclear meets this challenge head-on. By adopting an AI-first approach, it has developed a highly intelligent compliance system that is contextually aware, capable of interpreting multimedia assets, and able to navigate complex regulatory documentation with precision. Crucially, the system does not just flag potential issues—it provides detailed explanations and actionable recommendations, ensuring that compliance teams remain in control.
This explainability is key. Adclear does not replace human oversight but enhances it, allowing compliance professionals to quickly understand, approve, or challenge AI-generated recommendations while maintaining full accountability. The result is a dramatic efficiency gain: where financial promotions once took five days or more to move from creation to approval, firms using Adclear now achieve the same result in a single day, often in as little as 4-5 hours. Overall, users have seen an 88% decrease in marketing approval times, saving 5-7 working days per person per month.
However, this is about more than just efficiency—it’s about unlocking new opportunities. Faster compliance means firms can capitalise on viral marketing moments, ensuring that promotions remain relevant and timely. Greater efficiency also enables scale, allowing firms to significantly increase the volume of approved content. Customers who previously launched hundreds of campaigns in a six-month period are now launching thousands (some users have seen an 18x increase in marketing output)—without additional compliance overhead.
This shift has also revealed Adclear’s next major opportunity. While originally designed for financial promotions, the platform is already proving its value in broader compliance use cases. Clients are now leveraging Adclear to review not just adverts, but all customer-facing communications—including emails, website copy, and terms & conditions.
Adclear is well-positioned to streamline compliance across all marketing and customer engagement activities. As firms expand into new products, customer segments, and jurisdictions, the ability to execute compliant, high-impact promotions at scale will be crucial—not just for regulatory assurance, but for building trust and resonance with new audiences. In markets where confidence in financial services is still developing, firms that can communicate with clarity, credibility, and impact will have a significant advantage. The ability to market boldly, while remaining fully compliant, could be a defining feature of the firms that emerge as market leaders.
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