In 2024, nearly 20,000 financial promotions were amended or withdrawn following intervention by the FCA, almost double the number in 2023.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has also been explicit about crypto promotions that fail to communicate the risks of investing, and its public ad bans send a clear message - crypto marketing is being judged in public, in real time, and with consequences.
Marketing compliance failures don’t just create operational drag, they lead to wasted spend, and also risk straining the firm’s relationship with the regulator.
What makes crypto marketing uniquely challenging
Higher scrutiny: Crypto attracts regulatory attention because core concepts like “yield”, “staking”, and “rewards” sound similar to familiar financial products but often lack the same investor protections, making “fair, clear and not misleading” a much higher bar in practice.
Slower sign-off: Non-MLR firms targeting UK retail audiences currently have to route campaigns through a third-party Section 21 approver. That extra layer typically means multiple rounds of revisions that could take days, before final sign-off.
Marketing windows close quickly: Crypto moves fast. By the time approval lands, the “moment” is usually gone, price spikes fade, launches move on, and reactive campaigns hit the market too late.
Multi-channel mix: Crypto marketing rarely lives in a neat box. A single campaign can span ads, landing pages, influencers, referrals, and in-product prompts, each needing oversight.
What’s changing for crypto and why it’s going to get harder
In December 2025, HM Treasury laid draft legislation (the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2025) to bring a much broader set of cryptoasset activities into the UK’s full financial services regulatory perimeter under FSMA, with a “go-live” expected in October 2027.
In a nutshell… what does this mean for marketing compliance?
Today:
- MLR-licensed firms can market directly to UK retail audiences, but getting that license has been nearly impossible. In 2024, 87% of applications failed, primarily due to inadequate AML controls. The FCA's guidance is explicit that companies must demonstrate effective systems and controls in practice. Many firms haven’t been able to clear that bar.
- Non-MLR-licensed firms can still reach UK retail audiences by getting promotions approved under Section 21. But that means multiple rounds of revisions, days of back-and-forth, and bottlenecks that make reactive marketing functionally impossible.
From Oct 2027: As crypto moves more deeply into the FSMA regulatory framework, firms must apply through the FCA's authorisation gateway and meet FSMA-style standards. Marketing stops being something firms can outsource and starts being something they are responsible for, if they want to continue reaching UK retail audiences. That responsibility will be tested in supervision, and it requires controls that work in practice across every channel.
But here's the opportunity: With the application window opening in September 2026, firms that build compliant infrastructure now can move faster than competitors stuck in approval gridlock. The next 18 months will separate the firms that scale from the ones that stall.
What causes the underlying frictions in marketing compliance
Whether MLR or non-MLR licensed, most marketing compliance breakdowns happen because the workflow can’t keep up with the pace and complexity of modern marketing. Some common pain points that teams often point to are:
- Marketing and compliance working in silos. Marketing teams are expected to move fast and operate across multiple channels, while compliance has to keep pace with a regulatory framework that continues to evolve.
- Back and forth revisions leads to multiple versions, missed go-live dates, or worse, mistakes.
- No clear audit trail to evidence controls, with changes scattered across Slack, email, and PDFs.
- Post-publish drift where approved pages get tweaked, posts are reused, and affiliates improvise. But these surface only when a complaint or regulator intervenes.
That’s why we built Marketing Copilot for crypto
Think of it as two guardrails for your go-to-market strategy: a pre-publication reviewer and post-publication monitoring agent, both tuned for all finprom regulations relevant to the business and its jurisdictions, for example FSMA, COBS 4 and PS23 in the UK.
Pre-publication: streamline marketing campaign reviews
- AI pre-screening: Marketing assets (text, image, or video) are assessed against applicable financial promotion rules, with issues flagged in real time and grouped by regulation (for example, PS23/6 and COBS 4.5 risk warnings).
- Issue resolution: Each flag links directly to the relevant regulatory clause, so teams can see what the issue is, why it applies, and how to fix it.
- Case management: Centralised tracking of review findings, actions, ownership, and status, with version history to evidence how issues were identified and resolved.
- Governed approval flow - controlled approval workflow that records approvals, rejections, and changes, producing an end-to-end evidential audit trail.
Post-publication: continuous monitoring
- Website drift detection: Alerts if edits remove disclosures, change APRS or alter targeting cues.
- Social media monitoring: Connect LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The AI scans for unbalanced claims, missing risk qualifiers and unapproved hashtags - critical for influencer and affiliate activity under tighter FCA scrutiny.
- Multi-jurisdictional knowledge base: toggle UK/EU standards to ensure the right rules apply for different audience groups.
- Resolution workflows: with SLA, assignments, escalation paths, and resolution logging.
Recent regulatory interventions show that supervision is tightening just as responsibility shifts fully onto firms under FSMA. Compliance must be embedded into day-to-day marketing workflows and continuously monitored, and the firms that get this right will be the ones that leverage AI to operationalise marketing compliance at scale.
Learn more about Zango's Marketing Copilot by contacting our team below.
