Affiliate Marketing Compliance Monitoring in Regulated Industries

For businesses operating in regulated industries that operate an affiliate program model, compliance is one of the buzz words that no doubt Affiliate Managers continue to wrack their brains about.

Certainly, this is the case in the financial services and iGaming sectors, whereby businesses have been hit with punitive fines and penalties as a result of their affiliates making poor decisions. Which in turn have been found to have been in breach of the rules and regulations governing these products that they sell.

Over the course of the past 10 years, regulation of online gambling for instance has ramped up considerably, with territories such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, proactively enforcing their rules and regulations with no quarter given.

Indeed, such penalties meted out by the United Kingdom’s Gambling Commission has seen several operators being on the receiving end of 7 figure penalty packages and fines. 

Additionally, the actions of affiliates not adhering to compliance guidelines laid out and enforced by regulators, can cause serious problems for the businesses that they promote.

This is where affiliate compliance monitoring software comes into play. The amount of work policing affiliate, even on their initial application to join a program can take a considerable amount of time. 

However, when you add this to the ongoing work to ensure that they are compliant, the number of employee hours involved can and does increase to a level which raises the question of the viability of the affiliate program.

This is where affiliate compliance monitoring software comes into its own, as it allows affiliate managers and those working within the affiliate team to free up many working hours from the laborious task of ensuring their affiliates are compliant. 

Thus, the compliance monitoring software does the hard work of ensuring affiliates are fully compliant with the current terms and conditions and regulations which are defined  and set by the regulatory authorities.

So  in the first instance, on face value the main benefit of employing and utilising affiliate compliance monitoring software is to save the time of your workforce, freeing them up to work on productive tasks, that brings in revenue to your business.

With affiliate compliance monitoring software, you can tailor reports and scans of affiliate sites you work with to your own needs and requirements.

Should you wish to identify sites that do not specify the correct wording of terms and conditions for a product, you are able to do so.

You can also monitor all and every site that works with your affiliate program on an ongoing basis, to ensure that they are and continue to remain compliant with all regulations in the territory that they market your product in.

Furthermore, affiliate compliance monitoring software also enables your affiliate management team to identify and discover those sites you may not already be aware of, that reference and market your product or products via an intermediatory site.

As regulations change and evolve in the industry you operate in, so will your ability to edit your reports accordingly.

This is very easily achievable and allows you to ensure the ongoing monitoring of all your affiliates is based on the current and present compliance in place by the regulators.

Just a quick cursory search with google will show that failure to ensure your affiliates are compliant in advertising your services and products, could have very serious repercussions for your business. In some cases, operators have even had their licence revoked as a result.

In summary, by utilising an affiliate compliance monitoring software solution, not only are you freeing up valuable time, but you are also protecting your business.