Social media as a compliance risk for financial services: Exploring emerging risks and finding solutions to mitigate harm
Robert Mason, Jennifer Clarke · Journal of financial compliance. · 2025
A recent industry report by Global Relay revealed that 55 per cent of compliance executives consider social media to be an emerging compliance risk. In this paper, Rob Mason explores the four key challenges that social media presents to financial services: market risk, marketing and advertising risk, record-keeping risk and consumer harm. This paper unpicks regulatory approaches across the globe to understand how regulatory bodies are adjusting existing guardrails to acknowledge and mitigate social media risks, as well as how regulators are enforcing new expectations — from marketing rules to warnings for ‘finfluencers’. Finally, this paper sets out the critical steps companies should consider to comply with the emerging social media regulatory landscape and prevent harm to business, the consumer and the wider economy.