4 P's of Partner Management for Compliance

Programmatic Technology

First, you need some sort of “programmatic technology”—such as an automated monitoring technology—to input all the rules, regulations, and brand guidelines that you need to monitor for a compliant partnership. 

While you do spend time onboarding your partners and going over all of these expectations, there is still a risk of them not being met to their full extent—especially when there are changes or updates (like APRs, for example). 

Implementing technology to automate the ongoing monitoring of your partners will ensure that they are doing the right thing and adhering to rules and standards. Technology will also help alleviate the burden of manual review off of your compliance team, allowing you to increase the scope of review across all of your partners.

“People” refers to not just compliance teams, but anyone or any team who interacts or works with your partners on a regular cadence. This part of the process includes having the correct people in place, providing them with proper training and resources, and having ongoing communication with them. 

On the flip side, it’s essential to communicate with the people from your partner companies, because they also have their own set of standards that need to be met. To have successful partner compliance - people, education, and communication need to be one.

“Process” refers to both the vetting process before choosing a new partner and the ongoing process of working together throughout the partnership. During the vetting process, spend some time looking at that company and understand what they’re doing, what they’ve done in the past, who else they’ve partnered with, look at their existing pages, and so on.

Then, once you have partnered with them, build out a robust process and set of standards for compliance and working together going forward, including what to do for new implementations, ongoing monitoring, when escalation is necessary, etc.

Lastly, remember that it’s a working partnership. Remind your partners that you are there to help them and to move things along in a compliant manner, not to scrutinize them. 

However, your partners should understand that an escalation policy is part of the process. Things happen and nobody is 100% perfect, so mishaps can happen, but your partners should expect to hear from you if you find something and be ready to remediate it as quickly as possible.