Investment firms risk losing momentum around new product launches as lengthy marketing approval processes delay the distribution of promotional material, according to Red Oak, a RegTech provider focused on compliance review and content distribution.
The company spoke with sales and marketing teams at the Money Management Institute (MMI) Conference in Boston, where slow content approvals emerged as a recurring frustration. Teams reported that getting marketing material approved for a new product can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week, leaving firms unable to promote products promptly after launch.
In some cases, a product may already have been available for a week before the promotional material needed to support it is ready to send to partners. By that point, the launch may have lost its initial momentum, limiting sales teams’ ability to capitalise on the product’s arrival.
Sales teams want approved content to reach their distribution partners on the day a product launches. However, achieving this depends on how firms organise their compliance review processes, with approaches varying across the investment industry.
Some firms manage approvals through email, Outlook and SharePoint. While these tools may be practical for everyday communication, keeping materials and decisions across multiple channels can make it difficult to maintain a single source of truth. This can create challenges for teams trying to track decisions and ensure content has passed the appropriate checks.
Other firms rely on external reviewers to assess marketing materials, with some reporting waits of a week or longer. When content sits in a review queue, sales and marketing teams have limited ability to accelerate its release, even when a product is already available.
To manage these delays, some firms are adopting workarounds, including distributing compliant “coming soon” material before a launch or aligning product release dates with the availability of marketing content.
Although these approaches can help maintain communication with partners, they do not address the underlying delays between content creation, approval and distribution. Red Oak argues that reducing friction across these stages could help firms get promotional material into the hands of the people who need it sooner.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is adding another consideration for compliance teams. Discussions at the MMI Conference highlighted growing interest in how firms are using AI in their daily workflows, including whether the technology can accelerate content reviews and how businesses can verify the accuracy of AI-generated material.
AI tools can help marketing teams produce content more quickly, but increased output also means more material must pass through compliance checks. If review processes cannot handle the additional volume, the time saved during content creation can be lost while submissions wait for approval.
This creates a challenge for investment firms looking to use AI to improve productivity without compromising their compliance obligations. Faster content production alone may not deliver the expected benefits if the processes responsible for checking and distributing that material remain slow.
Red Oak is seeking to address this issue through its AI review technology, which checks marketing content against a firm’s own policies and explains how it reaches its findings. The approach is designed to make reviews quicker while providing a clearer rationale for approval decisions.
Rather than treating content review as a separate step from delivery, Red Oak also uses its 4U platform to distribute approved material to partners and advisers. Connecting the two capabilities allows approval and distribution to operate as part of the same process.
The aim is to reduce the manual handoffs and delays that can occur after content has been written and reviewed, helping firms move approved material to their intended recipients more efficiently.
For investment firms, the challenge is increasingly about ensuring compliance workflows can keep pace with the speed of content production. As AI makes it easier to generate marketing material, the ability to review, approve and distribute it promptly could become just as important as the technology used to create it.
Red Oak’s discussions at the MMI Conference suggest that closing the gap between content creation and distribution is a key consideration for firms seeking to maintain product launch momentum while meeting internal compliance requirements.
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