About
Payward is the parent company behind Kraken and a portfolio of products spanning trading, custody, payments, lending, onchain finance, and benchmarks—built to operate across assets, geographies, and time zones.
Features Used
“Our job in compliance is to enable our business partners to move forward, responsibly and at pace. Across Payward, we’re marketing very different products in very different regulatory environments. Adclear gives us a consistent review process across Kraken and NinjaTrader, with rules tailored to each business. It picks up routine issues early, so the team can spend its time partnering with the business on the harder calls and finding compliant ways to say yes. The visibility matters just as much. I can see approval times, SLA performance, and reviewer workload across both businesses, so I can direct support to where it is needed most.”
Problem
Payward needed a consistent marketing compliance process across its DeFi and TradFi businesses with very different regulatory requirements.
Kraken markets crypto trading, derivatives, tokenized equities, cards, and earn products to customers around the world. NinjaTrader markets futures trading to US retail traders under CFTC and NFA rules. Both teams publish across owned, paid, and partner channels, including email, push notifications, social, video, in-app content, blog posts, and websites.
Payward’s expanding product lineup was driving rapid growth in content requiring compliance review. Compliance review volume had reached 2,000 to 3,000 marketing materials a quarter and was still climbing, with promotions taking three to five days to approve. As growth continued, Payward looked to build more capacity into its review process. Rules and disclaimer requirements were maintained across several documents, so Payward set out to bring them into a single, centralized resource, making it easier for marketers to know what to include and giving reviewers one reference point.
Payward needed a review framework that could accommodate each business’s products, entities, and regulatory obligations, while giving compliance leadership a clear view across both Kraken and NinjaTrader. That meant understanding how long reviews took, where work was queuing, and how decisions had been reached.
Payward faced three key challenges:
- High content volumes across products, brands, jurisdictions, and channels
- Lengthy review cycles, with approvals taking three to five days
- Fragmented rules, disclaimers, and reporting that made consistency and oversight harder
What we did
Adclear brought Kraken and NinjaTrader into a shared review framework, with tailored rules for each business and visibility across both.
Kraken and NinjaTrader each run their own Adclear workspace, configured with their products, legal entities, approved disclaimers, and regulatory rules. Kraken’s workspace covers more than 30 products, including Krak, xStocks, and spot trading. NinjaTrader’s workspace covers four legal entities and several brands, including Tradovate, NinjaTrader Live, and NinjaTrader Ecosystem. NinjaTrader also uses Adclear to review promotional material from its guaranteed introducing brokers, third-party, registered firms that introduce customers to NinjaTrader and leverage its B2B solutions.
Marketing teams can check content against these requirements before submitting it for human review. Adclear provides real-time AI feedback on issues such as missing risk disclosures and claims that need clarification or supporting evidence, helping marketers resolve routine issues earlier and reducing back-and-forth with compliance.
Payward’s global marketing compliance team follows an expert-in-the-loop model, powered by Adclear: AI flags issues early, and Payward’s compliance professionals review promotion materials and make the final approval decision. Across both workspaces, the team applies a consistent process and the requirements relevant to each promotion. Where a promotion targets a specific region or calls for local regulatory input, the team coordinates with Payward’s regional compliance officers, who provide jurisdiction-specific guidance as part of the review. Every version, comment, and decision is captured in an audit trail, and reporting gives leadership visibility into approval times, SLA performance, and reviewer workload.
That approach has delivered measurable improvements across both businesses.
At NinjaTrader, September was the busiest month of 2026 to date, with 259 new promotions. On average, promotions received first feedback and final approval on the same day they were submitted. Compared with May, review cycles per promotion halved and the first-time approval rate increased by 30%.
At Kraken, average approval time fell 73% between May and September 2026, from 3.7 days to same-day approvals, with 97% of reviews completed on the same day.
Payward now has a common framework for managing marketing compliance across Kraken and NinjaTrader, giving each team a process tailored to its business and leadership the oversight to manage performance across both
“What matters most is that faster reviews haven’t come at the expense of expert judgment. Since May, review cycles per promotion have halved and our first-time approval rate has increased by 30%. Adclear’s AI catches routine issues before a promotion reaches human review, freeing my team to focus on what needs an expert: interpreting regulatory requirements, weighing risk, and making the final approval decision. With compliance involved earlier in the process, campaigns and product launches now ship faster and more confidently. Beyond the technology, the Adclear team has been a trusted advisor and thought partner as our products and program evolve.”
