A supervisor asks a broker for every promotion it ran in a given quarter, the approval record for each one, and the evidence that the claims in them were substantiated at the time. Most firms can produce the adverts. Fewer can produce the approvals. Almost none can produce the substantiation for a performance claim an affiliate wrote eighteen months ago on a page the marketing team never saw.
That gap is the whole subject. Financial promotion rules are not mainly about what an advert says. They are about who took responsibility for it saying that.
What counts as a promotion
The definition is deliberately wide. An invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity is a promotion regardless of the medium, which means a Meta ad, a landing page, a push notification, an email subject line, a Telegram message, a webinar slide, a YouTube description and a sponsored post all sit inside the same regime. Nothing about a channel being informal takes it outside.
Two consequences follow. Content created by third parties on the firm's behalf is still the firm's promotion, which is what makes affiliate compliance a supervisory matter rather than a commercial one. And content aimed at a jurisdiction where the firm is not authorised is a promotion in that jurisdiction, however the traffic was bought, which is the trap covered in offshore marketing into the EU.
The standard every promotion has to meet
The consistent requirement across major regimes is that a communication must be fair, clear and not misleading, and that it must be balanced. Balance is the part that gets tested. If an advert describes a potential benefit, it has to give the corresponding risk equal prominence. Prominence has a physical meaning here: same screen, comparable type size, not a grey line under the fold and not behind a link labelled more information.
Restrictions on CFD and leveraged product advertising add further layers in most European jurisdictions: standardised risk warnings, bans on bonuses and incentives to trade, and limits on how past performance may be shown. Those are set out in CFD marketing restrictions and in the conduct rules that sit alongside MiFID II.
Any performance figure needs a substantiation file created before publication, not assembled afterwards when someone asks. Screenshots of a profitable account are performance claims, and they carry the same evidential burden as a printed table.
What a sign-off record actually contains
An approval is not an email saying looks fine. A defensible record has a fixed shape:
- The exact asset as published, stored as a file, not as a link to a page that can be edited afterwards.
- The approver, named, with their compliance role and the date and time of approval.
- The target audience and jurisdictions the promotion is approved for, plus the channels it may run on.
- The substantiation for every factual and performance claim inside it, attached rather than referenced.
- The review date, because approval is not permanent. A promotion that was accurate when spreads or leverage terms were different has become misleading without anyone editing it.
The last point is where most firms fail quietly. Adverts outlive the facts they were built on. A withdrawal process, meaning the ability to pull a live promotion across every channel it is running on within a defined time, is part of the obligation and needs an owner.
Influencers, affiliates and the liability question
Paying someone to promote a trading account does not transfer the promotion rules to them. If the firm induced the communication, the firm carries it. That makes three controls non negotiable: a written contract that requires pre approval of every asset, a monitoring routine that samples what partners actually publish rather than what they submitted, and a takedown mechanism with a contractual deadline.
Sampling matters because the gap between the approved asset and the published one is where the problems live. A partner approved for a neutral educational post who adds an earnings claim in the caption has created an unapproved promotion attributed to the firm, and the firm finds out when a complaint arrives.
Making the trail survive an audit
The operational version of all this is boring and works. One register, one identifier per promotion, the asset stored immutably, approvals recorded against the identifier, expiry dates that trigger a review task, and a log of every takedown. When a supervisor asks for the quarter, the answer is an export rather than an archaeology project. The same principle applies to any regulated record, as set out in compliance audit trails.
Retention of the record matters as much as its creation. Most conduct regimes expect promotional material and its approval evidence to be kept for a defined minimum period after the promotion stops running, often several years, and to be retrievable in a readable form for that whole time. A register that points at a marketing platform the firm has since stopped paying for is not a register. Storing the rendered asset itself, with a hash and a timestamp, removes the argument about whether the version a complainant saw is the version that was approved.
SINGUARD's Executive Directors, Alex Onta & Roman Onta, built the marketing and approval workflow inside our platforms around that register, because a promotion the firm cannot locate is a promotion it cannot withdraw. This is a description of how the process usually works and not legal advice; requirements differ by jurisdiction and by licence, and your own compliance counsel sets the standard you must meet.
"Marketing teams think approval is a delay. It is the only thing standing between the firm and owning a claim it never made."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- A promotion is any inducement to trade, including social posts, push notifications and affiliate captions.
- Benefits and risks must have equal prominence on the same screen, not a warning hidden below the fold.
- An approval record needs the stored asset, the named approver, the approved jurisdictions, the substantiation and an expiry date.
- The firm carries liability for partner content, so pre approval, sampling and a contractual takedown deadline are all required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can approve a financial promotion?
A person with the relevant compliance responsibility inside the authorised firm, acting before publication. The approval must be recorded against the specific asset with a name and a date, and unapproved firms generally need an authorised firm to approve their promotions.
Is an affiliate's post the broker's responsibility?
Where the firm induced or paid for the communication, it is generally treated as the firm's promotion. That is why contracts require pre approval of assets and why firms monitor what partners actually publish rather than only what they submitted.
How long does a promotion approval last?
It lasts only while the underlying facts remain accurate. Approvals should carry a review date, and any promotion whose claims have been overtaken by changed terms or pricing needs to be withdrawn across every channel it is running on.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.