Adclear has teamed up with NatWest to rebuild how regulatory checks sit within the bank’s marketing and communications work, so that output can grow without approvals holding campaigns back.
Since the technology went live, NatWest has reduced the time taken to approve marketing content by 80%, meaning campaigns now reach the market far faster than under its previous process.
Adclear’s AI checks have been built into the bank’s marketing approvals flow, replacing a collection of older tools and manual sign-off with one technology-led standard applied across the organisation.
The deal arrives against a backdrop of rising regulatory scrutiny, with FCA interventions on financial promotions doubling over the past year. At the same time, firms are producing ever more marketing material that needs checking.
Reviewing these assets manually absorbs significant compliance resource and can delay launches by three to five days, a lag that grows whenever content volumes outpace human reviewers.
NatWest’s product marketing spans current accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages and savings, and over the years each line developed its own review routine and tools. As the bank shifted its marketing onto one central workflow system, those separate processes began to clash, channelling more material through fewer central compliance teams and threatening to slow the business.
Adclear brings this onto a single platform, checking website, social, marketing and advertising material in real time and highlighting copy, creative or disclosures that fail to meet regulatory requirements before publication.
Because it plugs straight into NatWest’s Workfront system, every person involved in approvals follows the same process regardless of product or channel.
The project forms part of NatWest’s five-year data and AI transformation programme with Accenture, which is helping to connect Adclear’s checks to the bank’s broader technology stack. For a lender with roughly 20 million customers, the move aims to eliminate duplicated effort, shorten reviews and give compliance staff a consistent audit trail.
Adclear’s technology helps marketers across financial services keep promotions within the rules while supplying detailed audit records for compliance teams. Its client base includes Monzo, PensionBee, IG Group, Freetrade, Yonder, Trade Nation, ActivTrades, Ocean Finance, Flagstone and Blockchain.com.
The company believes the partnership sets a benchmark for other UK financial institutions, as marketing teams face growing pressure to scale AI-generated content while keeping compliance on pace.
NatWest head of marketing and engagement platforms Matthew Harwood said, “Adclear has helped us turn compliance from something that slowed marketing down into something that actively supports how fast we can move. Cutting our approval times by 80% has let our teams focus on producing better, more relevant content rather than waiting on sign-off, and that speed is now a genuine advantage in how quickly we can get campaigns to customers. This is exactly the kind of technology-led transformation we want running across the bank.”
Adclear CEO and co-founder Doni Hoti said, “Financial promotions compliance hasn’t kept pace with how much content marketing teams now produce – output across the sector has grown roughly tenfold over the past decade, while most firms are still running the same manual, email-based approval chains they always have.
“The rules were never the bottleneck, the process around them was. NatWest recognised that early, and this partnership is what happens when a bank decides to fix the process itself rather than manage around it.”
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
