Transforming Enterprise Marketing Compliance: How AI Is Revolutionizing Financial Services

Software Architect Mantu Singh shares how AI-powered solutions are reducing review times by 80% and changing the compliance landscape

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) drastically altered the financial marketing ecosystem in June 2024, after declaring that brokers and mutual funds must end all relationships with unregistered financial influencers by January 2025. As reported in The Hindu Business Line, the regulatory shift is causing significant compliance headaches for India's financial services agencies - from fintech startups who built a customer base because of influencer marketing campaigns, to banks that need to change their entire outreach strategy. At the centre of these regulatory transformations are real people - marketing teams that have to revise content plans, compliance officers that are working double-time to ensure compliance, and financial technology (fintech) companies that are looking for technology solutions to help meet the new compliance requirements.

The compliance challenges are not dissimilar to the challenges faced by Mantu Singh, an Indian-origin Software Architect, who is one of the pioneer leaders of compliance technology in the financial services industry. Singh's career in enterprise technology has ultimately led him to build an AI transformation which has changed the way financial services firms address marketing compliance and has reviewed more than 7 million submissions. It is trusted by four of the five largest U.S. banks and six of the top ten broker-dealers - innovations with potential relevance as Indian financial institutions adapt to their evolving regulatory landscape.

Changing the way Compliance looks at marketing

There is an inherent friction in financial institutions around marketing, with marketing teams under pressure to act quickly to take advantage of possibilities and compliance teams needing to examine all materials in detail to confirm compliance with regulations and legislation. 

"This is an area where firms really need to put in work every day to balance compliance and speed," Singh said. "For marketing departments speed is vital, while compliance departments require diligence. This tension creates friction for financial institutions."

Singh's solution addresses the aforementioned friction by pairing NLP transformer models and proprietary datasets with machine learning algorithms to develop software that intelligently reviews marketing material, identifies potential compliance issues, and speeds up the review process. 

"The biggest advantage to our technology is that it learns as it goes," explained Singh. "With every submission the system gets smarter." Singh's focus on practical results is evident as companies report that his technology reduces review times by as much as 80 percent and takes enormous amounts of time out of the compliance process.

AI Solutions for Critical Oncology Challenges

The healthcare industry also posed complicated problems for Singh. At NantHealth, a healthcare technology company focused on personalized medicine, and clinical decision support, he faced the issue of patient data stuck in unstructured medical documents.

“In oncology, patient data is most essential that is in an inaccessible PDF. Behind every document, there is a person waiting for care.”, Singh explained. 

Singh's solution was to utilize layered technologies: Tesseract, an open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine that recognizes images of text and converts them to human-readable (machine-readable) text – it is advantageous because the code is open and can be trained for the specific formats of medical documents; custom trained transformer models which are a type of AI to understand and extract specific medical information from documents; and a specialized search engine that allows a physician to actualize access to any patient information for clinical treatment.

“The hardest part was model accuracy and performance; especially since we were processing documents that were hundreds of pages of complicated medical information.” Singh said.

Building Enterprise Solutions and Driving Efficiency

Singh's skill at managing large data challenges was useful when he began on the marketing compliance solution as his cloud architecture expertise helped define the system to address such a large volume of submissions. Singh defines the process of recognizing a technical solution with respect to a business need and the extent of the associated technology. Singh worked for Fidelity Investments, one of the largest financial services companies in the world with megatrillions of assets, to lead a team of cloud architects distributed over multiple geographies in building a master data management platform to aggregate ratings and securities data. The project was worth $40 million and changed the way the firm treated financial data. 

"Technology possibilities exist, and human needs exist" Singh said. "Where they intersect is where innovation is. I took that philosophy from Healthcare to Financial services but addressed practical solutions for every day problems. 

Singh's career has solely been focused on creating efficiencies from technological innovations. His innovation in regards to designing a solution addressed a practical business need, to offer solutions to streamline a business practice and create measurable improvements.

As Singh states, "Technology is meant to solve existing problems, not create new ones." Singh thinks through any challenge as a form of finding a solution to the problem of cost and time-management with the goal of finding something easier, quicker, more powerful, and more intuitive. 

Singh has also mentored junior developers throughout his career and has been dedicated to building strong teams, as Singh mentions, "Building a team is as important as building a system and creating an atmosphere for innovation involves transferring knowledge and experiences." Singh cares as much about the people and creating valuable relationships as he does with building a technical perfect system. Singh shows that being an effective technologist involves both.

Future Vision

Having made his mark in enterprise technology, Singh is seeking new horizons beyond corporate applications. "I want AI to support marginalized communities," he said. "The same tenets that moved banks can support social concerns."

Singh remains a senior member of IEEE and a Fellow of Hackathon Raptors, honoring his promises to his community.

The clock is running out on Indian financial institutions this January 2025, when SEBI ends unregistered financial influencer partnerships. This impending deadline marks a critical transition period for Indian financial institutions. Singh's experience with designing AI solutions to support a streamlined compliance process that still supports business agility is an appropriate template. His transition from healthcare data concerns to AIs that automate compliance processes for financial institutions shows how one's technology specialist understanding can support compliance with regulation that curbs innovation. These lessons are salient for India's evolving financial services ecosystem.

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