TL:DR - The US financial promotions landscape is highly fragmented, with multiple regulators enforcing strict standards for fairness, accuracy, and disclosure. Digital marketing, influencer endorsements, and crypto promotions face intense scrutiny, and common pitfalls include poor disclosures, inadequate oversight, and failure to archive content.
"Findings show potential violations in 70% of materials reviewed”
(FINRA 2024, crypto assets review)
The United States has one of the world’s most complex regulatory regimes for financial promotions, reflecting its federal structure and the number of agencies involved. Depending on the product, audience, and channel, financial communications may fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC, FINRA, the CFTC, or various banking regulators. Despite this fragmentation, the overarching principle is consistent. All promotional communications must be fair, not misleading, and supported by evidence.
For securities, the SEC’s anti-fraud provisions, include Rule 206(4)-1 for investment advisers, and Rule 10b-5 form the backbone of promotional regulation. The updated Investment Adviser Marketing Rule has reshaped the landscape by defining how performance, testimonials, endorsements, and third-party ratings may be used. This rule is especially relevant for digital marketing, influencer content, and social media campaigns, all of which must adhere to disclosure, substantiation, and oversight requirements.
FINRA plays a central role in regulating broker-dealer communications, offering detailed expectations on fair and balanced presentation, prohibitions on exaggerated claims, standards for risk disclosure, and rules for the use of projections, rankings and comparisons. FINRA also expects firms to supervise all communications ‘by or on behalf of’ the firm, including those produced by associated persons, affiliates, and certain third party marketers.
In the derivatives space, the CFTC oversees promotions for futures, swaps, and retail commodity transactions. It expects clear risk warnings, compliance with advertising rules for trading systems or signals, and evidence to support any claims of performance or accuracy. Enforcement actions in this sector often focus on overstated returns or insufficiently disclosed risks.
A defining feature of the US environment is the regulators’ increasing focus on digital advertising, algorithmic targeting, and influencer activity. Both the SEC and FINRA have highlighted the risks of ‘optimised persuasion’ in retail facing campaigns and stressed the need for rigorous controls, documented reviews, and strong supervision of anyone providing paid endorsements.
Figure 1: Key weaknesses
Regulators require promotions to be truthful, balanced and not omit material facts that would alter the meaning of a claim. That applies across channels (websites, apps, push notifications, social media). Firms should avoid hyperbole, promissory language and any implication of regulator endorsement.
If testimonials, endorsements or third parties ratings are used, firms must disclose material connections (such as payments or affiliate relationships), how the rating was prepared, the time period covered, and other relevant facts, and these disclosures must be prominent and easy to understand. The SEC’s Marketing Rule and the FTC’s Endorsement Guides both emphasise clear, conspicuous disclosure.
When third parties, including influencers, promoters, marketing vendors, create or post promotional content on a firm’s behalf, the firm must exercise oversight, enter into written agreements (where required), and perform due diligence on those parties. Agencies push a risk based third party oversight model for marketing relationships.
Regulators expect disclosures to be effective in the format used (eg disclosures embedded into video or visibly on-screen rather than buried in a caption). The FTC and SROs have repeatedly warned that lightweight hashtags or hidden disclosures are often insufficient.
Marketing that crosses into recommendation triggers securities or fiduciary duties, such as Reg BI for broker-dealers or adviser standards for RIAs. Firms must ensure promotional language does not create an inadvertent recommendation or omit the considerations required by those regimes.
The SEC, FINRA, and FTC have brought enforcement and supervisory actions for advertising failures. For example, SEC settlements for Marketing Rule violations, FINRA findings on crypto advertising, FTC letters over influencer non-disclosure. Regulators have signalled active examinations and civil penalties.
Regulators have repeatedly flagged recurring weaknesses in firms’ marketing practices, which often lead to enforcement actions and reputational risk. These poor practices typically involve failures in disclosure, oversight, and content accuracy, particularly in high-risk areas such as influencer marketing and crypto promotions. To strengthen compliance and reduce exposure, firms should review how well they address the following concerns:
As digital marketing evolves, firms face significant operational and compliance hurdles that go beyond traditional advertising oversight. These challenges stem from the speed and diversity of modern formats, the complexity of influencer and third-party relationships, and the heightened scrutiny of emerging products like crypto and AI. Understanding these obstacles is essential for building resilient compliance frameworks and avoiding regulatory pitfalls.
Marketing now spans short video, livestreams, stories, push notifications and influencer posts. Ensuring disclosures are clear and persistent in every format is operationally hard.
Monitoring and controlling influencers, affiliates and UGC at scale, whilst also meeting written agreement, oversight requirements is difficult, especially where influencers use informal language or branded features on platforms.
Regulators expect challenge, supervisory review and approval trails. Capturing fast-moving content (Eg TikTok, Instagram stories, in-app messages) for compliance and later inspection is technically and procedurally challenging.
Using marketing platforms, advertising networks or crypto-related counterparties bring outsourcing risks. Interagency guidance requires risk-based due diligence and ongoing oversight that many firms find resource-intensive.
If marketing language amounts to a recommendation, additional legal duties kick in such as Reg BI or fiduciary standards. Firms must calibrate language while still being commercially effective.
FTC, SEC, FINRA, CFPB (for consumer finance products), banking regulators and state attorney generals all have overlapping scope. A campaign that looks OK under one rule may breach another.
Messaging about nascent products draws extra scrutiny, regulators have done target sweeps and flagged high non-compliance rates in crypto marketing.
What’s the best way to address the above challenges?
To address these challenges and reduce regulatory risk, firms need to move beyond reactive compliance and adopt proactive, structured measures. Implementing clear policies, robust governance, and technology-driven solutions will help ensure marketing practices meet evolving regulatory expectations and withstand scrutiny.
Firms should be considering the following actions:
Based on feedback from the SEC, FINRA and FTC, firms must ensure accuracy, balanced risk disclosure, no misleading omissions, clear conflicts disclosure and escalation processes for ‘recommendation’ language.
Firms should require a qualified compliance or principal review of retail communications before use, and capture approval metadata.
Firms need to implement written agreements with promoters, clear disclosure scripts, compliance training for influencers, and documented due diligence. Consideration should be given to the FTC and SEC Marketing Rule mechanics for endorsements.
Invest in archiving tools that capture ephemeral and social formats (video, in-app messages, stories) and integrate with supervision workflows so content can be reviewed and audited.
Firms need to test readability and prominence. Attention should be given to designing disclosures that work in the medium (on-screen for video, spoken in audio, visible without clicks).
Regulatory expectations need to be met. Firms need to integrate marketing vendors and advertising networks into third party risk programmes. This includes due diligence, setting SLAs, and audit rights).
Firms can help by equipping marketing, product and social teams with clear playbooks. Include examples of acceptable vs prohibited language, implement clear escalation paths, and legal or compliance sign off checklists.
To provide assurance firms should run targeted monitoring. Special focus should be on high risk products such as crypto, option or margin products. There should be a clear process to take down or correct problematic content quickly. Regulators expect firms to remediate identified misstatements
Equally important is the maintenance of an audit trail to explain why language was used, and the compliance rationale. This useful for examinations and enforcement defence.
The current regulatory focus in the US centres around several critical areas. Firms must ensure compliance with the SEC’s Marketing Rule for registered investment advisers, particularly around the use of testimonials, proper disclosures, and hypothetical performance presentations. Crypto and digital asset promotions require clear and prominent risk disclosures, avoiding any implication of regulatory protections.
Additionally, influencer and endorsement practices are under scrutiny by the FTC, which has flagged hidden or insufficient on-screen disclosures as a recurring issue. Finally, regulators expect robust oversight and vendor management for third-party marketing channels, emphasising written agreements, due diligence, and ongoing monitoring to mitigate compliance risks.
Marketing teams should prioritise several key compliance actions to mitigate regulatory risk.
First, all retail communications must undergo compliance pre-approval before being published. When using testimonials or endorsements, firms should have written agreements in place, disclose any material connections, and maintain proper records. Disclosures must be clear and conspicuous within the format. Additionally, all digital marketing content, including in-app messages, should be archived along with metadata such as approval details and campaign identifiers. Finally, crypto and digital asset advertisements should be treated as high-risk, requiring additional review layers and specialist sign-off to ensure adherence to regulatory expectations.
The US regulatory environment is complex and exceptionally active. Firms need to ensure that their financial promotions are backed by robust compliance frameworks, including recordkeeping, legal sign-off, ongoing monitoring, and clear oversight of third party publishers. As regulators continue to scrutinize digital channels, ESG claims and performance marketing proactive governance and transparent communicate are critical to staying on the right side of regulatory expectations.
Ruleguard provides a GRC platform designed to help regulated firms manage the burden of evidencing and monitoring compliance. It has a range of tools to help firms fulfil their obligations across the UK, Europe, N America and APAC regions.
Ruleguard’s Financial Promotions Solution automates your review and sign‑off. Your firm can ensure only competent, qualified individuals approve promotions and that every action is captured on a solid audit trail with version control. It also provides a single source of truth for all live or in‑progress promotions, including dashboards and task ownership.
Ruleguard enables collaboration across marketing, product, and compliance teams so content is clear, fair, and not misleading. Policy‑linked workflows and qualified reviewers ensure suitability for the intended audience.
Ruleguard is a comprehensive solution that lets you protect and propel your business forward through the complex regulatory landscape.
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