Monitoring 2,100+ merchants and increasing compliance coverage by 24x with PerformLine

About the Client

This prominent buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider offers fast, flexible, and accessible payment solutions. This company's user-friendly application process and advanced technology platform ensure quick approvals and transparent payment terms, benefiting both merchants and consumers. Committed to ethical lending, financial education, and community engagement, this lender strives to make a positive impact on its customers' lives while redefining the BNPL landscape in the U.S.

Business Challenges

This BNPL lender provides lease-to-own and installment loans through a network of over 2,100 merchants across the United States. With such a large number of merchants, it’s crucial for the lender to ensure that they all comply with regulatory guidelines, accurately disclose product terms, and avoid using deceptive or misleading language. However, the lender's oversight of its merchants' websites and social media profiles was limited, and comprehensive oversight was impossible with manual efforts alone. 

Their compliance team could only manually monitor a few of their merchants' web pages at a time and could only review social media posts that directly tagged their company. This labor-intensive approach only allowed for sporadic spot-checking, leaving significant gaps for missed compliance issues and risk.

The lender needed an automated solution that could continuously monitor its thousands of merchants across the web and social media platforms, and discover any unknown brand mentions or promotions that could cause potential compliance issues.

PerformLine Solutions

• Discovery to find previously unknown web pages where their brand was being promoted using our proprietary crawler
• Web Monitoring to automate and scale the review of their merchant pages for regulatory compliance, including required disclosures as they relate to their brand and product offering
• Social Media Monitoring to automate and scale the monitoring merchant social media profiles and posts to ensure accurate product promotion
• Industry Rulebooks that are built on years of experience with regulators and clients in the BNPL space that are ready-to-use yet customizable to the client’s specific needs

The Results

Comprehensive oversight of 2,100+merchant partners

Previously, the process of overseeing merchant partners involved manually spot-checking their web pages and monitoring social media mentions, which was both time-consuming and limited in scope. 

Now, with PerformLine, this client has complete oversight of their merchant partners' activities across the web and social media with daily monitoring and alerts for any potential compliance issues. Now,  they can now allocate their time to more strategic and high-priority projects, rather than spending hours manually sifting through content.

Significantly increased compliance coverage while saving 4,700+ hours of manual review

With PerformLine,  the lender can now monitor not only social media posts that directly mention their brand, but also all the social media profiles and posts of their merchants. 

Previously, they were only able to sporadically monitor the home pages of over 2,100 merchants, which barely scratched the surface of potential compliance risks. Now, they monitor over 52,000 web pages mentioning their brand and product offerings. 

Additionally, 45% of these pages were discovered by PerformLine’s proprietary crawler, which would have been nearly impossible to identify through manual efforts alone.

With the ability to monitor such a high volume of content with technology and automation, this client saves over 4,700 hours versus manual review each month.

Merchant compliance across different products with custom rulebooks

Managing compliance across different financial products can be complex, especially when offering both lease-to-own and installment loans, each with its own set of compliance requirements. Using PerformLine’s ready-to-use but customizable rulebooks, they have been able to adjust monitoring protocols as needed, ensuring accurate oversight of each loan option. 

This system streamlines the compliance process,  saving time and reducing the risk of human error, ultimately making compliance management more efficient and reliable.