With employees spread across the country, monitoring how Primary Residential Mortgage, Inc. (PRMI) is appearing online in social media feeds and reviews could be a daunting task. For Dea Avila-Tuft, Marketing Compliance Specialist for PRMI, it’s no big deal.
Compliance Within Reach
Each day, Dea peruses the dashboard for ActiveComply, a platform that monitors and archives social media compliance for the financial industry. PRMI uses ActiveComply to oversee the social media profiles of the company, its employees, and the content shared on its behalf. At her fingertips are tweets, posts, and reviews from eight different social media and review sites. Facebook, Twitter, and Zillow, are just a few of the places Loan Officers and the customers they serve post their thoughts and experiences.
Most posts are well-meaning, but there are plenty of cautionary tales for companies who experienced unwanted publicity because of an employee went beyond the bounds of good taste on social media. For financial institutions, there is the additional burden of compliance with regulators, both state and federal. The sometimes complex rules requiring disclaimers and forbidding certain language, can be especially challenging for companies like PRMI, which operates in 49 states, each with its own regulations. The stakes are high—violations can result in hefty fines.
When there were fewer social media platforms with a much smaller reach, the task was manageable without outside assistance. Now, each employee may have a social media presence on eight or more different platforms, each with its own login and password.
The System in Action
ActiveComply helps institutions navigate this growing landscape by automating the most labor-intensive parts of monitoring. With ActiveComply, there is no need to log in to every account individually. All posts on social media, and all ratings and comments on sites like Yelp or Zillow, show up on the dashboard. ActiveComply automatically flags posts using pre-determined key words that trigger scrutiny from regulators. Even key words that are part of a info-graphic or cover photo are easily identified and flagged (including images like Equal Housing logos) and other key words determined by the company alert the team to check for required disclaimers required by state agencies.
Alerts on the dashboard direct the team to the most problematic posts. And with hundreds of employees, each present on multiple platforms, having a centralized location to view them all saves the compliance team time.
“Our team doesn’t have to search out all of the non-compliant posts,” says Avila. By addressing compliance issues quickly, the opportunity for state fines is drastically reduced.
“We also get a lot of reviews. If there is a problem, we see it quickly and can send it to our customer service team” says Avila. Having the information for all of their offices in one place, is invaluable. “It saves us a lot of time,” says Avila. With thousands of posts to monitor, ActiveComply makes sense.
Analytics You Can Use
In addition to the time saved, PRMI has also grown to depend on the data they receive through ActiveComply. Downloadable, real-time analytics help them make better decisions. “We can see trends,” says Avila. “For example, I can tell how many thousands of posts we’ve reviewed, and what percentage are from Facebook, the most popular platform for our people, or LinkedIn and other sites,” she says.
Because ActiveComply is helping to manage the digital footprint of the company, PRMI can spend its time and resources building brand value. ActiveComply is working hand in hand with the company to ensure that all accounts are adhering to corporate requirements, as well as the financial regulations.
On-Boarding in a Breeze
The compliance team for PRMI finds ActiveComply not just effective, but also user-intuitive. New employees can be quickly on-boarded to the system. It is easy to learn, thanks to extensive archives that can be sorted and filtered, and responsive customer service. Every member of the compliance team has their own login credentials to access the system so multiple people can use the platform simultaneously and work as a team.
PRMI’s digital presence is enhanced by the discovery, monitoring and protection offered by ActiveComply. The system allows them to ensure business accounts are used only for business posts and that business posts don’t end up on personal accounts. This added functionality has been especially useful recently:
“We have been able to track postings about current events, forbearance, social justice issues and other subjects we can then review for accuracy, or appropriateness with business accounts,” says Laura Zitting, Compliance Manager for PRMI.
Pinpoint Problems for Quick Resolution
The Alerts function, which the PRMI team uses extensively, lets them know which posts need closer examination. They use a feature called Collections to corral and rank the alerts. “We don’t have to waste time adding them to a folder, giving us the opportunity to prioritize “red alerts” which need immediate attention over less pressing posts,” says Avila. The Collections feature also allows them to organize and divide the workload among the team members.
Built for the Finance Industry, By the Finance Industry
How easy ActiveComply is to navigate is largely a function of input from companies like PRMI. “I had been researching platforms and I started asking around and what I loved about our first conversations with ActiveComply is that they wanted to expand on enhancements and ideas from the lender’s perspective, and their customer’s perspectives, says Zitting. “It helps when a vendor is open to enhance and learn and make kind of development ideas happen and that is what we have found with ActiveComply.” That early input from users like PRMI, and constant evolution of the platform has been invaluable to making ActiveComply a system lending institution of all sizes can benefit from.
“ActiveComply gives us peace of mind while constantly delivering results,” says Zitting.
“This is a top of the line system, that is constantly being enhanced,” says Zitting. “So far, when we describe a scope of review to ActiveComply customer service, the system can either already accommodate that scope, or they work to improve the settings for us.”