Sean Ryan, Social Media Compliance & LEP Specialist, started in his position at SWBC Mortgage Corporation in February 2022, around the same time that the SWBC team was scheduled for their first ActiveComply onboarding. Having utilized ActiveComply’s unified, cloud-based platform since the beginning of his mortgage industry career, Ryan heard many a tale of how their compliance management used to be conducted and was relieved to know that the days of manual reporting and monitoring were in the past.
Find Problems Before Regulators
Account discovery: the bane of many compliance officers’ existences. With manual monitoring, that means depending on loan officers to self-report their business accounts, or worse, having to find them one Google search at a time.
“We have over 300 originators, and to review everyone’s web presence in a manual fashion would be a full-time job – I'd have time for nothing else and I wouldn’t be getting it done well,” says Ryan. Though Ryan is practiced in ActiveComply’s social media monitoring platform, the manual monitoring process is familiar to compliance managers everywhere, and the consequences of not knowing about accounts and their contents can be dire.
"One of the big concerns is how many platforms are out there and how easily an LO can sign up for one, and how hard it is to keep up with all of the web presence of all of our licensed employees,” says Ryan. “It’s daunting because it’s not just Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn that we have to keep an eye on - it’s a whole bunch of little platforms, and you never know when they’re going to pop up.”
One of ActiveComply’s longest-standing and most helpful features, Discovery, makes the tedious process of Google searches and unending spreadsheets null and void.
“The Discovery Queue in ActiveComply is super helpful because it’s continuously searching by the LO’s name and NMLS number and it will pop up in my queue,” says Ryan. “Right now, ActiveComply is a fraction of my day and frees me up to do so much more.”
Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword
With how tedious monitoring can be for some lenders, other institutions wonder why they should allow their loan officers to be active on social media at all.
ActiveComply’s recent Top Producer Report indicates that on average, Scotsman Guide’s top-producing loan officers have around 5 different digital media assets, with 96% of them on LinkedIn, 69% on Zillow, and 53% of them on Facebook. While having a consistent social media presence is a tried-and-true sales strategy, it comes with risks. Of the 294 accounts utilized by Top Producers between 2020-2022, 48% of them had at least one compliance issue.
How are even the best of the best struggling to comply with state and national regulations? Ryan pointed out that many times a profile that was deemed 100% compliant at one time is subject to the platform developers making “seemingly small” changes, like the character allotment in bio sections or the dimensions of cover photos.
“We depend on those platforms to reach our customers, but we have no say in how those platforms work,” says Ryan. “We had perfectly compliant verbiage on all of our Facebook Profiles, but then Facebook (Meta) changed everything.”
In January 2021, Meta rolled out a newly redesigned Facebook Pages Experience into beta testing. Since then, more and more existing Facebook Business Pages have transitioned into this new format, where whole fields (like where an employee lists their licenses and disclosures) are either cut off or wiped completely blank. In the past, Ryan’s team would have to manually check on each loan officer’s known Facebook pages repeatedly to see if they had been changed. Luckily, the ActiveComply team was aware of these changes and the new problems they posed: through a new profile checkup alert, SWBC’s team was automatically notified when an employee’s page switched to the new problematic layout.
Translations: A Game Changer
Did you know that advertising in another language than English, while promotional of fair lending efforts, may be seen as a violation under the Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP)? If a licensed employee advertises in one language, but the lender cannot support that language in the required disclosures and loan paperwork, then a bait-and-switch deceptive practice has likely occurred.
To address this issue, ActiveComply has the Translations Collection Folder. This feature isolates post content that is made in a language other than English, then translates that post content from over 100 different languages, including Spanish, French, and Korean.
“In a large organization, you don’t always know which of your originators may be bilingual,” says Ryan. “The translations feature on ActiveComply lets you know if your LOs are posting in any languages other than English so that you can connect with them and ensure they’re reaching their communities in a compliant manner. It can also help you get a picture of which language communities your company is reaching and help you tailor your language access plan to best serve your borrowers.”
Prepare for Anything
According to the CFPB, organizations should retain advertisements for a period of at least two years, with individual states sometimes imposing longer periods. Using social media posts to promote your business qualifies as advertisements, especially if loan terms are ever stated. But with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of accounts to manage, how do you keep track of all this information come audit time?
“Once you’re all set up, you have a complete database of your whole company’s web presence,” says Ryan. “It’s an audit trail for the whole company that you can show the regulator in the case of an audit. It’s all right there – which brings tremendous peace of mind.”
A lesser-known ActiveComply offering is regulatory exam prep. Regulatory audits and when they happen are both mysterious and terrifying – one non-compliant finding could lead to a slap on the wrist or could preface a crushing financial blow. When auditors come knocking on a lender's door, the ActiveComply team offers custom social media reports, at no additional charge.
Trustworthy Support
A good compliance partner is more than the sum of automation and machine learning. With compliance being a somewhat relative in nature, a human component to support is an absolute must.
“I’ve always had a great experience with the ActiveComply team. They’re always ready to hop on a call and explain things, show me shortcuts that I wasn’t aware of, give me tips on how to make my life a little easier. But the software is super intuitive, and it takes me hardly any time to manage our compliance monitoring every day.”