For marketers in financial services, insurance, and education, compliance with federal regulators is serious business. Since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was formed in the wake of the Great Recession, penalties enforced by regulatory agencies monitoring consumer rights and advertising have topped $6 billion. It was the formation of the CFPB in 2011 that led a business called PerformLine to create a platform to help marketers control and monitor all their branded messages.
“It starts with a rule engine that helps marketers and their partners avoid trouble,” says PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin. “It will search copy and even call center audio for words and phrases that should never be said, for instance, and ones that should always be said, depending on the circumstance.”
Today, PerformLine introduces PerformMatch Workflow 3.0, a remediation tool to augment its prevention tool. Because no cautionary system is ever perfect, the new tool is designed to catch mistakes in marketing materials that have been released and correct them as quickly as possible.
“This allows companies to see the full scope of their compliance issues, from the initial potential violation to closed and resolved issues to help them mitigate risk and protect their brands,” Baydin says. “We found that it can take marketers up to seven emails and 11 days to remediate just one compliance issue. We felt there was a better solution.”
A key feature of Workflow 3.0, Baydin adds, is that buyers of the SaaS platform are allowed to share it free of charge with all external partners to put a team effort behind addressing issues. “We have a feature we call BYOD, or bring your own discovery,” Baydin says. “Our Web crawler is good, but it’s not going to find everything. So if someone finds a compliance problem, he or she can take a screenshot and upload it into workflow and remediate their own violation.”
