Your compliance officer: friend or foe? You put your heart and soul into a campaign only to hear at the last minute that, 'You can't do that.' Maybe your bank needs to review and rethink the whole marketing-compliance relationship.

• Author: Bernstel, Janet Bigham
• Position: Interdepartmental Relations - Cover Story

Given free reign, there's no doubt that bank marketing departments nationwide would be creating much different-looking ads than we see in print today. In the real world, however, regulation dictating disclosure language can literally squelch the creative flow and stay the presses. So if eyes tend to roll skyward on both sides when the compliance department encounters the marketing department, it's almost understandable. Everyone's got a job to do, and sometimes the marketing and compliance departments seem to work at odds.

It doesn't have to be all animosity and naysaying, however. There is proof that the two departments can work in concert to produce effective advertising that also satisfies the regulators. Vice president and director of corporate marketing for Kansas City-based UMB Financial Corp., Jeff R. Armstrong, and former senior vice president and manager of regulatory services, Charles D. Lewis (now president of UMB Consulting Services Inc.), recently spoke to contributing writer Janet Bigham Bernstel about the successful workflow process they created.

UMB Financial, the holding company, has $7 billion in assets. Its lead bank affiliate, UMB Bank N.A., Kansas City, has 138 branches in six states.

Grounded in the principles of communication and education, the marketing-compliance communication process worked so well for UMB that Lewis is now consulting with other banks to share the ideology. In this question-and-answer discussion, they share those principles with ABA Bank Marketing readers.

What are the basic issues facing these two departments when it comes to getting along in the workplace?

Armstrong: The typical issues you'd find are that both sides have a job to do that is different from each other. Compliance's role is to make sure that the marketing department adheres to regulations and that it's not stepping beyond bounds or being misleading to the consumer.

Marketing's role is to try to sell the products and services of the bank as much as possible.

So where does the animosity between the two departments usually originate?

Lewis: From our standpoint, compliance departments generally get brought in at the end of the process. So many times we have to say. "You can't do that." It may be at the end of the campaign that they've been working on for some time, and here's the compliance people putting a stop to it.

Jeff and I would sit down and get others involved in the beginning. Knowing what the campaign was about, we could say, "We need to make sure that this and this happens." Then when it comes time for the final approval, it's already there. It was a path we walked together.

Do you think the relationship between compliance and marketing at your bank is unique?

Armstrong: We think that our departments are somewhat unique in the way we communicate. Rather than having an adversarial relationship, we wanted to communicate with compliance and make sure that when we start down a path we know what the parameters are and the laws...