New Adclear report analyses 44,418 financial promotions to reveal where compliance review is breaking down
Risk warnings account for 39.9% of recorded rejection reasons, while firm-specific policies account for more than one in five, according to Adclear’s new State of Financial Promotions H1 2026 report.
London, 10 September 2026 - Adclear has today published The State of Financial Promotions H1 2026, a new industry report analysing 44,418 financial promotions across 28 regulated firms to examine what happens to financial marketing before it reaches the public.
The report provides a view into the pre-publication compliance process, looking at the reasons promotions are sent back for changes, differences between marketing channels, first-time approval outcomes and the time taken to move work from submission to approval.
The data shows that risk warnings are the largest recorded rejection category, accounting for 39.9% of recorded reasons. Firm-specific policies account for 22.3%, while unclear, unfair or misleading content accounts for a further 19.8%.
The prominence of firm policy is one of the report’s most significant findings. More than one in five recorded rejection reasons relate to an organisation’s own internal standards, highlighting the role that product rules, internal guidance and firm-specific expectations play alongside regulation in determining whether financial marketing is ready to go live.
The research also shows substantial variation between marketing channels. In earlier channel analysis included in the report, 63.0% of influencer promotions failed first review, compared with 60.6% of affiliate content and 52.6% of paid-search content. The findings indicate that different formats create materially different demands for marketing and compliance teams.
First-time approval provides another view of the process. The reported first-time approval rate for promotions reviewed through Adclear is 88%, compared with a pre-Adclear industry benchmark of 32%, a difference of 56 percentage points. The report treats the two figures as separate comparison populations rather than a matched before-and-after study.
Approval time also varies considerably. Across the dataset, the median time from submission to approval was 23.7 hours. Firms with one to two months on the platform recorded a median approval interval of 41.8 hours, compared with 8.1 hours for firms with 12 months or more. The report notes that these are different groups of firms, but identifies the pattern as an important area for further research into how review processes develop over time.
Doni Hoti, CEO and Co-Founder of Adclear:
“Most of the financial promotions data we see publicly tells us what happened after something went wrong. This report gives us a view of what happens before that — across tens of thousands of real promotions moving between marketing and compliance.
“The scale of repeatable issues is significant. Risk warnings and firm policy alone account for the majority of recorded rejection reasons. For firms, there is a huge opportunity to move more of that regulatory and policy context upstream, so marketers can get more right before their work ever reaches compliance.”
Joe Jordan, Co-Founder of Adclear, said:
“The firm-policy finding is particularly important. More than one in five recorded rejection reasons comes down to a firm’s own rules, rather than regulation in isolation.
“Every compliance team builds up an enormous amount of knowledge about its products, risk appetite and the way it expects things to be communicated. The challenge is making that knowledge usable by marketing before the review starts. When the same issues keep coming back at approval, that’s usually a signal that the learning needs to move earlier in the process.”
The report argues that recurring compliance feedback should become part of the preparation process, that internal standards need clearer ownership and that firms should assess the quality of compliance decisions alongside measures such as speed and first-time approval.
The State of Financial Promotions H1 2026 is available to download now.
About the research
The report’s headline dataset comprises 44,418 financial promotions across 28 regulated firms using Adclear between January and June 2026. It analyses aggregate approval outcomes, rejection reasons and approval-time data.
Channel findings are retained from an earlier 22,209-promotion analysis and are identified separately within the methodology. The report does not present the participating firms as representative of the entire financial services industry and distinguishes descriptive comparisons from causal findings.
About Adclear
Adclear is the compliance platform for financial marketing, helping regulated firms apply regulatory and firm-policy requirements to marketing content, manage approvals and maintain the evidence behind compliance decisions
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