Regtech and content marketing are a match made in heaven.
Compliance isn’t optional – companies must meet regulatory requirements, whether they like it or not. Which is why regulatory technology software is not a nice to have, it’s a necessity.
The stakes are high, the regulations are complex (and constantly updated), and compliance professionals are regularly consuming content to stay on top of new regulations.
It’s a perfect situation for content marketing: buyers and decision-makers have to consume content to help keep their company compliant.
ComplyAdvantage, a regtech company, understands the role of content and has one of the most mature content marketing programs in regtech and fintech. As we’ll see, the results speak for themselves.
Founded in 2014, ComplyAdvantage provides software to help detect and manage risks associated with AML and fraud. They’ve raised $137M across four rounds, have over 480 employees across five continents, and were, at one point, named Europe’s sixth fastest-growing fintech company.
We sat down with their Director of Content and Communications, Will Thompson, to learn more about how ComplyAdvantage creates content at the necessary technical level while staying on top of the never-ending regulatory news and reaching sales goals.
You can listen / watch my interview with Will here:
Note: Every couple of months we release a new case study on how a financial services or fintech company does content. Join our newsletter to make sure you get each issue in your inbox!
ComplyAdvantage’s backstory
ComplyAdvantage was founded by serial entrepreneur Charles Delingpole in 2014.
Delingpole started his entrepreneurial journey in his teens, founding the world’s largest student discussion forum, The Student Room. After graduating from university, he started MarketFinance, a well-known business loan company. While running that company, he experienced first-hand the inefficiency of managing and tracking money laundering processes, which led him to start ComplyAdvantage.
Today, the company does:
AML onboarding and monitoring
AML transaction monitoring
Payment screening
Politically Exposed Persons screening
Adverse media screening
And a lot more!
What makes them one of the leaders in this space is its proprietary database of Sanctions, PEPs, and Adverse Media data that is regularly updated via AI, alongside a team of experts.
ComplyAdvantage works with over 1,600 enterprise companies across 75 countries from global hubs in New York, London, Lisbon, Singapore, and Cluj-Napoca.
And as we’ll see, content plays a key role in raising awareness of the product and establishing ComplyAdvantage as a trusted source of information.
But not just any kind of content can do that. In this space, it has to be technical, timely, detailed, and relevant.
Content as a way to stand out in a saturated market
The regtech market is on a growth trajectory. To anyone in the fintech space, it’s clear that as countries introduce more laws, financial institutions are required to meet higher standards, and new types of licenses are launched, regulation and compliance are becoming a larger part of everyday life.
Hiring more people to manage those compliance laws only goes so far. Eventually you need tech to help you. Which means more companies relying on regtech to manage fraud, money laundering and generally remaining compliant.
This is great for the industry, but it also means something else: many tech entrepreneurs are setting up regtech companies, and it’s getting a bit saturated.
Which is why content has always been so central to ComplyAdvantage’s marketing strategy. Right from the beginning, content was a way for the company to stand out and establish credibility in the space while reaching their prospects and customers.
But it can’t be just any type of content.
The upside of selling and marketing a regtech solution is that you often don’t have to “convince” prospects on buying a tech solution. Some companies choose to try and build their own, but either way, they know they need one to meet compliance requirements.
The downside is that everyone else is creating content. However, as Will says, most competitors are creating very surface level, ChatGPT-like content that doesn’t go into the level of detail compliance professionals want.
So to stand out, ComplyAdvantage has to create in-depth content at the right level of knowledge for the customer.
They need to move away from writing generic statements like “screening for PEP is very important for a compliance program” and instead write in-depth articles on how elections could impact PEP data or what the FATF report means for compliance managers. As we’ll see, that involves bringing in experts, becoming experts in the topic themselves, and remaining highly aligned with sales and the rest of the team.
Content strategy: campaigns vs always-on
For ComplyAdvantage, there are two pillars to their content marketing, “always-on” content and campaigns.
1. Always-on: for a steady inflow of inbound leads
What Will calls “always-on” content includes:
SEO
Newsletters
Content for events
Content for partners
All of their steady, monthly inbound comes from always-on content. In particular, SEO and content, which, as we’ll see later, is their highest-performing channel.
Interestingly, regtech is an industry with a never-ending number of keywords, which is different from the payments industry, which is so niche that the number of keywords is limited.
With new laws coming up like the EU AI Act or deadlines like operational resilience, compliance managers and buyers often head to Google to try and understand the new regulation and how it may impact them. This is why SEO and content perform so well for ComplyAdvantage.
2. Campaigns: for reaching revenue goals
If “always-on” is good for a predictable, steady flow of inbound leads, campaigns are what help the sales team reach those revenue goals and reach even higher targets every year.
Typically, the goals of these campaigns are to:
Accelerate specific pipeline
Help build something new (e.g. a new product launch)
The ComplyAdvantage team produces 3 to 4 content pieces per year that act as “campaigns”. One of them, for example, is the State of Financial Crime report. Then throughout the year, those larger pieces of content will often be repurposed and published as different types of media.
How do they decide which topics to focus on? One obvious one is new regulations. New laws and deadlines are topics that are constantly on compliance managers’ minds, and creating high-quality content on that topic is a great way to position the company as an expert. For example, the EU recently published a huge playbook on AML financial crime regulation. This was a great piece of regulation to write content about, and it was reviewed by experts before being published.
But written content is just one piece of the puzzle. The team also focuses on creating newsletters, social media posts, and another activity that’s been working very well for them: webinars.
Webinars work very well for ComplyAdvantage: here’s how
Few companies have figured out webinars. Most attendees think of them as boring, and many marketers complain that they just can’t seem to get a good ROI from them.
But as Will says, the problem is that people stick too much to the typical format, which is what people find boring. When done well, he explains, people actually enjoy webinars. The potential is very much there, and so far ComplyAdvantage is doing a great job of unlocking it.
Every year, throughout the summer, ComplyAdvantage runs a series of webinars. But these aren’t your typical, 1h long webinars that seemingly go on for ever. There are a few things ComplyAdvantage does that make webinars more interesting for attendees, and also brings in good results for the team:
Having “follow up tables” where attendees can join a virtual table where speakers are sitting and are happy to have a chat.
Have an optional-to-join “demo table” where someone from the sales team can walk an attendee through how the product works.
Running polls throughout the event.
This is all done via their webinar platform, Airmeet, which allows them to make webinars that are a lot more engaging and interesting.
The results they’ve been getting from webinars are astounding:
Almost 50% of registrations watch the webinar live
This year, people spent 64,000 hours watching their webinars
The influenced revenue from webinars is the highest it's ever been
This is a theme that we’ll get back to later: producing less content and focusing on fewer attendees has actually helped ComplyAdvantage get higher-quality leads and more revenue.
SEO: how does it work as an inbound channel?
As mentioned above, SEO is a big part of their always-on marketing and consistently brings in inbound leads.
When Will joined, ComplyAdvantage already had a lot of content. However, it was mostly high level content that mainly appealed to smaller fintech companies.
Will then went on to build out the design team to help with creating graphics, and build a content team that could create content to the level of technical detail necessary. They also spent time setting up the tracking necessary so they could see the journey website visitors went on the website and design different calls to action based on that journey (for example, for a top-of-the-funnel post, they may add a pop-up to a newsletter, or encourage the reader to download a white paper).
They’ve also been investing more in Bottom of the Funnel content. In fact, inspired by a workshop I (Araminta) led in London during a dinner, Will started creating more comparison posts, such as:
As you can see, in the article, they follow a lot of the tips we share on writing competitor articles, such as:
Don’t bash competitors, keep it to only content that you can source.
Start by describing your own product, and go into the level of detail necessary
Add useful information to help the reader make a decision, such as what to consider when selecting this type of software.
Will shares that this type of content has made a strong impact with lead generation from SEO, and they plan on creating more BOFU content.
One challenge the ComplyAdvantage team faces with BOFU content is that they often use different words to industry standards to describe tools. For example, “Risk scoring” is typically only for AML. But ComplyAdvantage’s solution tackles risk scoring for financial crime more holistically. This is a challenge a lot of companies face with SEO: is it worth targeting a keyword that doesn’t quite explain what we do?
As I explain in the interview, these types of keywords are often where the goldmine is for generating leads with content because they help with generating demand amongst an audience that is already close to closing. A target keyword doesn’t necessarily have to be your positioning, it’s just the phrase a potential customer uses to search for your product.
We call this “Damming demand,” and it entails essentially interrupting a user’s search – who may be looking for something that isn’t quite your product – to tell them more about your product. For example, targeting someone who is looking for risk scoring, and explaining why this is also useful for financial crime. It’s a strategy that can get you in front of very high-intent buyers, while also allowing you to share your perspective that maybe no one else shares.
You can learn more about how to implement the strategy here: How to Create a New Fintech Category with Content by DAMming Demand
Another key benefit of creating BOFU content, Will shares, is that it’s a lot easier to measure the impact of content on influenced revenue (because the sales cycle is a lot shorter). Even though the search volume for these keywords may be low, the value of the lead is a lot higher, and it makes a big contribution to their inbound revenue from SEO and content.
How they track results and the difference it makes to the team
But all that is only possible with the right tracking in place. So how does ComplyAdvantage know how much influenced revenue content brings in?
Their tracking is mainly done via Dreamdata, an analytics tool that allows companies to aggregate information from Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Hubspot.
Since sales cycles are very long, they mainly track influenced revenue from content, which is then broken down into two stages:
A business development meeting
A business opportunity
One of the biggest advantages of tracking results from content is that everyone immediately sees the value of content.
Whenever a new meeting is booked, a company-wide Slack channel gets a notification which includes the lead details and lead source. The sales and leadership team are notified when new leads come in from content and organic, and as Will explains, it really helps improve visibility of the contribution of content to the company.
Via Dreamdata, the content team can also see how people bounce around the homepage, a product page, download a white paper, may disappear for a few months, and then book a demo. This is instrumental to getting a good understanding of how prospects interact with their content, and it’s also a great way to show leadership the role of content in a sales journey.
This visibility on the customer journey and leads from content has enabled a strong relationship between marketing and sales. Both teams understand that it’s more complex than simply “inbound and outbound”. Some outbound deals will be influenced by content, and some inbound will be influenced by sales. Both are essential to customer acquisition. This really goes to show how powerful visibility can be to keeping various teams on the same page.
Another tool that is essential for marketing and sales teams to work together is Flockjay. The tool allows the content team to upload content to a shared platform, which the sales team can then use to quickly find a white paper, report, or article on a specific topic. This makes it easy for the sales team to access and use content as needed, and avoids any situation where the marketing team feels they are creating assets that no one is using.
How are they incorporating AI into their content creation process?
With such a mature content program, we wanted to know whether the ComplyAdvantage team has succeeded in making use of AI to optimize their content. We touched on two topics:
Whether AI search features have affected their content results so far
How they’re using AI in their marketing activities
Have AI Overviews affected their traffic?
AI Overviews (AIO) are AI generated results to certain searches. Because they answer the user’s query directly, fewer people are likely to click on the links and arrive on a website, potentially decreasing traffic.
Since a large proportion of ComplyAdvantage’s inbound leads come from SEO and content, we were curious if they’d seen an impact on their traffic from AI Overviews. According to Will, they haven’t seen an impact. In fact, he’s quite optimistic about the impact of AIO and believes it will actually help with the quality of traffic and conversions.
In his words:
“Someone who’s been watching Ozark and has just been Googling Anti Money Laundering is just going to read the overview and will be happy with that explanation. But someone who is a compliance officer and looking for an AML solution will scroll past that and do a lot more in-depth traffic. Which means AIO may help filter out less valid traffic.”
We recently wrote an article on how to prepare for changes in search here: Is SEO Still Relevant in 2025? How to Adapt to AI Trends in Search
How are they implementing AI into the content creation process?
So far, there are two tools that they’ve found seriously help with their content production process:
Grammarly: Many people may not see it as an AI tool, but Grammarly does use AI for suggestions and correcting grammar.
Oktopost: With this social media scheduling and advocacy tool, you add pieces of content and the tool will use GenAI to rewrite the posts in a different ways, which is very useful for salespeople that need content but don’t want to repeat the same words every time. Since the input comes from Comply, there is less risk of factual inaccuracies.
Although they have played around with tools like Writer.ai and Jasper to help with creating outlines, these tools aren’t (yet) helpful enough for creating content at the level of depth they need to justify the investment.
In 2025, their plan is to test other AI tools. Since they operate in regtech, ComplyAdvantage has to be very careful when it comes to content creation to ensure they don’t say something incorrect, as producing something that is factually inaccurate could have serious repercussions.
How do they stay on top of all the regtech news?
ComplyAdvantage creates a lot of content. Not only do they have their blog, reports, white papers and webinars, they also run a weekly newsletter called The Briefing, which goes out via email and LinkedIn. This newsletter includes all the latest news that week in the fincrime space – how do they do it?
Will shares that there are a few places where they get their information:
They subscribe to newsletters that collate news every week on financial crime
They’ll head to regulatory websites and gather information directly from the source
They subscribe to news aggregators that share updates on a daily basis
They have a Slack channel where people throughout the company are sharing news and information about the industry
The Briefing includes three stories shared per week, with a small paragraph going into more depth of each story. The newsletter previously linked to three long-form blogs hosted on the company’s website. But by streamlining the design and including all the content in the e-mail itself, open rates have increased from 20% to 35%, and the CTR has risen from 1.5-2% to 2.5%.
But what’s interesting is how successful they’ve been when they started syndicating the newsletter to LinkedIn. In a matter of months, they have acquired 18,000 subscribers on LinkedIn alone - simply by reposting content that was already being shared via e-mail.
Does it make an impact on sales? Absolutely. Well over $1M of closed won deals have been influenced by the newsletter, and Will shares that the total number is likely a lot higher.
What’s working: doing more with less
A lot of what you’ll hear from the digital and content marketing gurus is to do more. Publish more content, open more social media accounts, repurpose into video, audio, reports, etc.
But ComplyAdvantage has seen success with doing less. And this is the main takeaway of this case study: it’s ok to do less.
In 2024, the ComplyAdvantage content team focused on quality over quantity, and the results have been pretty incredible. Will kindly shared some key metrics to demonstrate how it’s worked.
Webinars: This year, the team did 4 webinars rather than 7, and yet the results are a lot higher:
Overall registrations increased by 60%
Registrations per webinar increased by 190%
Total viewing time went from 23,000 hours to 64,000 hours
Almost 50% of registrations watched webinars live (last year it was 34%).
How did they achieve this massive uptick in numbers? In a few ways:
The team worked hard on improving the quality of the content, optimizing the topics and the messaging.
They focused on the quality of their database to ensure the invites were going out to the right people.
They spent more time on sales promotions, and used influencers to get the word out.
They got very good speakers to speak at these events.
What topics did best? Will shares that a few key topics tend to do best:
Topics around “roadmap” which is a word that seems to work well
Topics around sanctions, corruption, and bribery
Topics where the ComplyAdvantage product is strong and well-known
Current topics around all the elections, so around politically exposed persons
Topics that are not controversial but where ComplyAdvantagedo has a strong point of view
Reports: Their “State of Financial Crime” report also did a lot better this year. This year the report hit 8,500 downloads, and generated double the number of stage 2 business opportunities and influenced revenue. As Will explains, the report wasn’t 2x better. What changed was distributing the report to a higher quality database and spending more time on promoting the article.
It’s likely that ComplyAdvantage had to spend that first year “doing more”, just to know what did and didn’t resonate. Now, better equipped, the team can focus a lot more on what’s working well and on improving the quality.
What pieces of content are ComplyAdvantage proud of?
There are a couple of pieces that Will shares he is proudest of:
State of Financial Crime
It’s the fourth year ComplyAdvantage put together this report, and is one of the pillar pieces of content for the year.
As we’ve just seen, the focus on better promotion and distributing to a higher quality database has propelled the report to new heights.
Webinars
Most people are dropping webinars because they can’t get them to work. But ComplyAdvantage has spent the time experimenting with different approaches, and show that there is potential in virtual events.
The huge uplift in numbers in 2024 go to show that ComplyAdvantage knows what they are doing when it comes to webinars, and they should be proud.
ComplyAdvantage’s content: do more with less
In a digital world where everyone gets bombarded with videos, podcasts and LinkedIn posts, you’d think the best approach would be to be everywhere as much as possible.
ComplyAdvantage’s approach is proof that you can be smarter about your marketing without constantly feeling like you “have to do more.” By having a quality database, a clear promotional plan, and really focusing on the key topics that you know your best customers care about, you can try to do more with less.
Thanks to Will for sharing the ins and outs of how ComplyAdvantage does content, the amazing jump in results this year and his experience with webinars. ComplyAdvantage is a content leader in the regtech space and a prime example of how to maximize the value of your content
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