The Association of Insurance Compliance Professionals (AICP) recently concluded its Annual Meeting, appropriately themed: “Charting the Course.” The educational and engaging event for participants in a complex and highly-regulated industry during the event held September 17-21, in Miami, Florida.
In addition to reconnecting with fellow members and the AICP leadership team, it was a perfect opportunity to tune into the many focused sessions on a wide range of hot topics, from regulatory compliance to branding to innovations in platform technology to help people do their jobs. That last category is one to which I relate, and for which I was pleased to be able to share insight, along with CUNA Mutual Group’s Brandy Hoffman. Brandy had seen a presentation of mine at last year’s AICP Annual Meeting, and reached out to ask if we could co-present on an important topic: rebranding. In the spirit of ICYMI, here is a summary of what we shared in the session, “Rebranding after an Acquisition.” It could have easily been subtitled: “How to manage change and reduce risk 101 for marketing and compliance professionals.”
The goal: provide insight to insurance marketing and compliance teams whose daily work entails managing disclosures, content changes, compliance and the complexities that come along with all of those heavy duties. Here, then, guidance, observations and best practices for charting the course before, during and after company changes that impact branding, regulated content review and related compliance demands.
Regulatory Readiness 101
Creating a proactive review process is critical for marketing and compliance teams today.
It appears that awareness of, and interest in, innovative software technologies is growing. This is not only good news, but vital for those whose processes continue to increase risk and reduce efficiencies. The more you know, the more your capabilities grow, and the better equipped an insurance marketing professional is at doing the important work for which they are held accountable. Our solutions team at Naehas is laser-focused on taking an educational approach to enterprises turning the page toward platform solutions as we solve key challenges.
This is especially the case during major events and changes, but it is always the case that regulatory readiness is a critical advantage.
Today, more than ever, technology solves common challenges compliance teams continually face, making it a force multiplier for better outcomes. Preparedness is essential.
Drivers of change can include a merger, acquisition or new brand. The impacts: rate and form filing; notification of regulatory bodies; privacy; and advertising compliance. From there, four broad areas of scope emerge:
- Assets: Digital Assets, Creatives, Content, and Disclosures
- Standards: Logos, Text, Colors, Risk Rating
- Process: Content creation, Content updating, Taxonomy, Governance
- Partners: Channels, Vendors, External legal
Insurance compliance professionals are increasingly embracing solutions which deliver core benefits, while supporting their teams and enhancing their outcomes.
- Decrease errors by automating common compliance and brand
reviews so the compliance team can focus on the nuanced issues - Support product and marketing teams ability to grow revenue by
shortening time to market - Less errors and tracking changes throughout the process makes
audit reviews fast and easy
These marketing musts reinforce the importance of understanding and leveraging automation.
Ad Review: Challenges and Opportunities
Knowing what you have, and where, in the way of content and assets, is important. This includes CMS(s), DAM(s), Shared drives, Personal hard drives, Decentralized within LOB’s, and Vendors. Next, identify the ways in which approvals happen across the enterprise. Is it email, a Workflow tool, Sharepoint, or other? As is often the case, it’s usually not standardized but siloed processes throughout the organization.
We know that things are done in similar ways across the enterprise, and across the industry. Approval processes, content types, and content & asset attributes are also similar. Processes and tools throughout your organization may not be the same but they are very similar. Rationalizing these can be difficult because it involves some change but in the end it will create efficiency and help you prepare your organization for massive changes like an acquisition.
Advantages of Automation
Turning to the comparisons between manual and automated processes, a few key points.
- Manual approvals don’t hold the history easily
- Process tracking is difficult
- Manual reporting makes it hard to prove your work
- Manual processes cannot scale at a time of change
Manual processes become a bottleneck when you have the increased volume during a short period at a time of a name or brand change. Automated systems will allow you to scale quickly and show your math, and easily report on activity and progress critical to decision making in a time of change.
Establishing a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) allows you to have content as complete artifacts and/or in content blocks, easing the process, reducing risk and creating more efficient processes. An important note: proper tagging / taxonomy / categorization will make your day-to- day operation more efficient and best prepare you for a major change event.
Using a content library to manage the complete content lifecycle offers myriad benefits. How? A well managed library connected to product taxonomy is a key component of any system to ensure regulatory compliance as it is needed during the creation as well as review process.
Single Source of Truth enables shared content. It’s the “change once, serve many” concept. Content is easily leveraged across channels, and updates are made in one central place – fast and efficient. Further, using rules and tokens allow for dynamic composition using shared content and requirement specification for each version and channel. All of this combines to reinforce the value of automation, and the review of advertising and other regulated content. Platform technology allows automated reviews to provide Compliance a ‘more perfect’ document.
Best Practices
- Rationalize your approval process to as few as possible and AUTOMATE
- Develop a common naming convention
- Rationalize and consolidate where your assets are stored
- Easier to find
- Easier to update
- Improved controls
- Get your assets back from external partners – unnecessary risk
- Identify metadata tags that make sense for your organization
- Identify content elements that are subject to change, i.e. company name, logo, pricing, rates, product names and document or apply technology to tag the content and/or tokenize
A tool we offer at Naehas, Intelligent Reviews, empowers reviewers to intelligently assess content at its source by combining the power of AI and a centralized Compliance Repository, reducing risk and increasing productivity. The feature leverages automation to perform a precheck against common compliance, brand and legal rules to support the human review, ensuring consistency and accuracy across your whole compliance team. This unique content repository and AI-assisted review process, combined with workflow functionality, can be applied to any ad review process to deliver fast and accurate reviews across traditional and digital channels.
As we look to the end of the year and the increasing complexities of the marketplace, a few things seem clear. Professional associations continue to be a beacon of guidance, education and collaboration, as proven with the success of the AICP 2022 Annual Meeting. Also, knowledge is power, and the powerful impact these events have on us all, personally and professionally, should not be understated. I’m humbled at the opportunity to learn from and to teach so many in the industry in a way that continues to chart the course for success ahead.
