How AI Is Transforming Affiliate Marketing Compliance in the Credit Card Industry

Artificial intelligence tools are helping credit card issuers monitor affiliate marketers for compliance more effectively and efficiently.

Affiliate marketing in the credit card arena can be a lucrative business, but people who’ve worked in that capacity know it’s not without its challenges. And keeping your content compliant with industry standards, regulations, and partner-specific rules can be a tough task even for seasoned affiliate marketers.

We recently had a conversation with John Ta, CEO of Affil.ai, to get his take on how AI can provide a big assist to credit card compliance programs.

Staying ahead of compliance requirements can feel a bit like chasing your own tail. Ta told us one problem in credit card affiliate marketing is that the more content you create, the more content you have available to audit.

And credit card affiliate marketers shouldn’t take compliance matters lightly. Ta said one compliance error with a bank can lead to the end of an affiliate program.

“It’s a very high-risk, high-reward game,” Ta told us. “The risk can be mitigated in several ways, but it’s just very hard to do manually. But AI seems to do a very good job of resolving some of these compliance issues that marketers commonly face.”

Credit card issuers may be concerned about how affiliate marketers represent their brand online. As marketers increasingly use short-form videos to connect with audiences, banks will need to monitor both spoken and written content.

But analyzing an affiliate marketer’s online videos for compliance doesn’t have to be time-consuming.

“On the web, AI is very good at basically looking at complex sentences and trying to figure out if they are actually compliant or not,” Ta said. 

“Prior to AI, the only way you could really know if a piece of content was compliant was by using tools to scrape sites and trying to find the presence of certain keywords,” he added. “That’s not very effective when you have multiple credit cards.”

Affil.ai uses AI to help companies stay up to date on affiliate content and campaigns that third-party partners oversee. He told us the platform takes a combination of publicly available information on credit cards and bank guidelines and feeds it into Affil.ai’s AI programs.

The AI system will then scan the affiliate content to make sure it’s meeting necessary guidelines. Although he had a good sense of the problems Affil.ai set out to solve when it started, Ta told us he learned a great deal about specific issues by simply listening to customers.

“Because there’s only so much I can predict and know,” Ta said. “But every single person we’ve talked to has helped guide the product to where it is today. It’s extremely important to listen to your customers so you can make sure you’re building something that people actually need.”

A recent report on Nasdaq’s site says that time is “the most valuable asset anyone can have.” We can’t create time in our business or personal lives, but we can use technology to spend less time on tasks.

The solutions Affil.ai offers can save companies that work with credit card affiliate marketers a significant amount of time. Ta told us the company has helped its clients reduce their time spent identifying issues by 90%. 

And when Affil.ai’s tools can help its clients identify issues, then they can spend less time searching for problems and more time resolving them. 

Artificial intelligence serves as a time-saver for people tasked with reviewing affiliate content, but AI can also increase the accuracy of content reviews.

“If it takes a person three minutes to fully audit an article, and you have a thousand articles to audit, then that means you have 3,000 minutes of auditing ahead of you,” Ta told us. “But that’s assuming that whoever is doing the auditing is not missing things 100% of the time.”

The existence of AI-driven compliance programs may motivate affiliate marketers who work with card issuers to take more care to play by the rules when crafting their content. Ta said that compliance violations can lead to fines and, in some cases, program removal.

Compliance systems powered by artificial intelligence don’t just allow banks to review spoken and written words faster and more accurately than they had before they used the technology. Ta told us that AI can also help compliance departments review images.

Many issuers allow people to use a photo or custom artwork of their own choosing to personalize their credit cards. And compliance officers tasked with reviewing card art to make sure it doesn’t contain non-compliant imagery can have a time-intensive task on their hands.

But AI can review card art as well as aspects of a website that previously required human review.

“Another problem that used to always come up was when things were hidden behind dropdowns or accordions,” Ta explained. “Those were traditionally very difficult to check manually. Imagine you’re reviewing an article and you have hundreds of others to review. There’s a finite amount of time you want to spend clicking on a single page.”

Artificial intelligence can review content contained in drop-down and accordion menus.

In pre-AI days, compliance officers interested in doing their job thoroughly had to open everything on a webpage to review its contents. But AI has made that a problem of the past, Ta said.

Reviewing affiliate marketing sites for compliance may seem complex, but onboarding with a company like Affil.ai is surprisingly straightforward.

“We come into an engagement focused on the easiest way for us to get involved with the client without having to be too intrusive,” Ta said. “All the information about credit cards is publicly available, so why make it so that you have to give us details we already have? We actually make onboarding very painless.”