Calculating What Your Bank Spends on Marketing Compliance Reviews

By Taylor Mahoney, VP of Solutions Consulting

Picture this. The Federal Reserve has just dropped interest rates. So, your marketing team has raced to prepare copy for a timely mortgage product campaign designed for likely first-time home buyers. The messaging is compelling and you’re excited to get it out the door. Fast. 

Your competitors are likely to do something similar, so time is of the essence. However, the back-and-forth process between marketing and legal to get compliance sign-off will take at least a week, even with expedited reviews. And, once legal is finished with cautionary editing, the message’s brand fit and likelihood of high performance could be diluted. 

This scenario is real, and the time spent and lost marketing performance are costly for retail banks, credit unions, community banks, and fintechs alike.

Financial services marketers and legal teams are challenged by differing imperatives. Marketing seeks business growth and compliance seeks safety. With today’s ever-growing volume of content, this friction translates to massive slowdowns and sub-optimal tradeoffs that can sacrifice business performance and customer experiences. These tradeoffs are exacerbated amid economic shifts that warrant quick pivots in content tone, offers, and messaging, all while complying with regulatory guidelines. 

Pricing out the real cost of lengthy legal approval cycles

Getting green lights from compliance teams costs banks hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars depending on the volume of materials needing review. 

Here are the primary factors in calculating the time and dollars your bank spends on legal time amid inefficient review processes:

• Volume – Persado’s decade of experience working with banks and fintechs shows that each U.S. retail bank or fintech reviews anywhere from 300 to 3,000 customer marketing submissions (pieces of marketing content) each year, depending on the size of the bank and its channels, such as emails, website copy, blogs, advertising, videos, newsletters, social posts, and SMS.
• Review cycles – Each message requires approx. 6 exchanges between marketing and compliance
• Time – Legal teams take an average of a half hour to review each piece of content (3 hours)
• Hourly rate – The median salary for counsel working in Banking and Finance is $410,000, making 1,920 working hours in a year average $213/hour (Legal Dive)

To take a look at this in practice, the key variable to identify is the volume of submissions for your organization on a monthly or annual basis.

Let’s say marketing produces 1,500 submissions (pieces of content/messages) a year that require compliance reviews. Using the averages above, you can arrive at close to $960k in legal resources.

• 1,500 x 3 hours = 4,500 hours in legal time annually
• 4,500 x $213 hourly legal rate = $958,500 per year

That figure becomes even more daunting in the age of generative AI and skyrocketing volumes of content—with quantities that far outpace the human legal resources currently available.

The legal cost is also massive at the industry level. With 5,000 retail banks and 1,000 fintechs in the U.S., and each organization producing an average of 1,500 submissions annually, the industry’s legal resources are reviewing 7.5 million submissions annually. That’s 22.5 BILLION hours (3 hours x 7.5M submissions), which equates to $4.8 BILLION per year.

Factoring in marketing performance sacrifices

While calculating the cost of inefficiencies amid weeks of back-and-forth legal reviews is important, today’s banks are also sacrificing marketing speed, scale, and performance. The lost time to market amid weeks-long manual review cycles, as well as trade offs from using less-performant language, are equally painful for banking business growth. For example, banks are sacrificing:

• Ability to generate or optimize fresh, on-brand content fresh, as they are forced to defer to pre-approved, “stale” messaging in the interest of time
• Marketing content performance by accepting compliant language for compliance sake—without the ability to improve the CX with timely, relevant experiences, as well as clicks & conversions

• Having an audit trail of past edits that is accessible to a large, dispersed team of copywriters
• And of course, the transformative ability to scale at the speed of AI

Agentic AI trims the back-and-forth, speeds time to market

What if purpose-built agentic AI innovations could break down siloed marketing and legal functions and work with existing workflows to identify risk and serve up more compliant marketing copy options for consideration in the moment, while ALSO maintaining performance? 

Imagine how powerful this could be for nicking risk at the source, such as within Figma or newsletter copy, even before sending it to legal for a first review.

What if these AI innovations could not only analyze content for compliance and guide in real-time risk resolution, but also provide performance prediction and brand alignment scores to guide both marketing and legal functions in selecting alternative wording that will perform well in-market (clicks, downloads, conversions, etc.). And, what if the technology captured an audit trail of edits and continuously learned?

Marketing campaign compliance and performance do not need to be mutually exclusive in the era of advanced AI. The solution is here. 

We launched Persado Marketing Compliance AI in May 2025—the first agentic AI platform purpose-built for financial services marketing and legal teams to maintain performance of customer communications, while speeding time to market.

Persado helps ensure the highest accuracy for compliance and growth in the marketplace by optimizing the data gleaned from one million in-market language A/B tests. Marketing Compliance AI applies multi-agent AI that continuously learns from consent orders, public comments, and evolving regulations—refining analysis with every interaction and providing institutions with smarter, more precise insights over time. The solution deploys an army of AI agents, including: 

• Regulation agents — Determine which regulations are relevant to the communication, then assess whether the content adheres to that regulation (FTC Act Section 5 & Endorsement, UDAAP, ECOA, FISRA, C.A.R.D., TCPA, and more)
• Marketing agents — Analyze content for performance likelihood, as well as brand alignment
• Library and oversight agents — Validate content, rapidly resolve issues flagged by the other AI agents, and capture market and company precedents for the future.

A CASE IN POINT: Persado enables retail banks of all sizes to greatly reduce legal compliance and marketing review cycle times. In one customer example, a large U.S. fintech company was able to cut time to market to less than half, while driving over 80% higher engagement rates and achieving more than 20% increase in application submissions.

To learn more about how Persado can identify and rapidly resolve compliance risk in your marketing content while providing world-class performance recommendations, visit our analyze & resolve capabilities page. Contact us here to start a conversation.

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