Almost every fintech film we work on passes through a compliance review before anyone outside the client's offices sees it. When a project is organised well, that review takes an afternoon and comes back with two notes about wording. When it isn't, it takes three weeks and the notes reach into the storyboard, which means re-animating sequences that were signed off a month earlier.
The difference has very little to do with the animation. It comes down to whether the constraints were written into the brief or discovered somewhere around the second edit. This is how we handle it now, including the parts we used to get wrong.
Who is actually reviewing the film
Compliance review in financial services is a specific thing, and it helps to know what the person doing it is worried about. A UK firm authorised by the FCA is responsible for every financial promotion it communicates, and the regulator has been active. The FCA's published figures for 2024 record 19,766 promotions amended or withdrawn following its interventions with authorised firms, up from 10,008 the year before. Its social media work in the same period reviewed 411 promotions across 21 firms. A compliance officer who reads those numbers is going to be careful with a film that will sit on LinkedIn for three years.
Not every client is in that position. A B2B infrastructure business selling card-issuing rails to banks has different exposure from a consumer investing app, and some of the fintech companies we work with are not authorised at all. They still tend to run a legal review, often because their own customers' contracts require one. The practical point holds either way. Somebody is going to read the script as a legal document, on a timescale the studio does not control.
What the rules put on the screen
The FCA's finalised guidance on social media promotions, FG24/1, is worth half an hour of your time if you commission this kind of work. Two things in it shape the design directly.
The first is prominence. Where a prescribed risk warning applies, the guidance expects it on screen rather than tucked into a caption, and for short-form video it expects the warning displayed across the screen throughout the promotion. For longer video it should be present during the section that communicates the promotion, and an end card on its own does not meet the expectation. Carousels and stories need it on every slide that carries the promotion.
The second is standalone compliance. Each communication has to stand up by itself. You can't put the benefit in the video and the risk in the post copy, and a link to the small print doesn't do the work either.
Both of those are composition problems before they are legal problems. If a warning has to sit across the lower part of the frame for the whole duration, that area is gone, and on a 9:16 cut it competes with captions, the platform's own interface, and whatever safe area the brand guidelines already reserve. We mark it out in the storyboard now, with the real wording at the real size, instead of a grey box labelled "legal". The grey box is how you end up with a handsome frame that has nowhere to put 38 words about capital being at risk.
Claims cause more rework than warnings
Risk warnings are a known quantity. The notes that cost real time are about claims, and animation makes claims in ways a script doesn't.
A number on screen is a claim. A line going up is a claim. An interface showing a balance is a claim about that balance. We animated a sequence once where an account total counted from zero to £24,000 over about four seconds, intended to show money arriving rather than any sort of return. Compliance read it as an implied performance figure and asked for it to go, which was a fair reading. The abstract replacement took two days of work nobody had budgeted for.
The same goes for superlatives, comparisons with named competitors, the words "safe" and "secure" used loosely, and anything that resembles a testimonial. Voiceover is treated as copy, so a script still moving at animation stage is a problem. Script lock matters more on this work than on anything else we do. We've written separately about the recurring mistakes in fintech brand films, and several of them start here.
Compliance notes are cheap at script stage and expensive at render.
Four things to settle before the storyboard
Most of the delay we used to absorb came from starting design before these were answered. We ask for them at kickoff now, and we will wait.
- Who the audience is in regulatory terms: retail, professional, or existing customers only. The rules differ, and so does the tone the film can take.
- The exact risk wording, supplied as text we can set type with, rather than a paraphrase of it.
- Every platform and format the film will run on, because the on-screen requirement is different for a 15 second paid cut and a three minute YouTube edit.
- Who signs off, and whether that person can sign off alone or needs a committee that meets fortnightly.
The last one has moved more schedules than the other three put together.
One master, several versions, each reviewed on its own
Nobody commissions a single film any more. Wistia's 2026 State of Video report, based on a survey of around a thousand marketers and analysis of more than 13 million hosted videos, found LinkedIn is now the primary video channel for 81% of businesses, ahead of YouTube on 76%, with LinkedIn's share up 33 percentage points in two years. Roughly three quarters of teams resize their video for different platforms.
Under FG24/1 each of those cuts is assessed on its own. A 15 second paid version carries the same warning obligation as the three minute master, in a frame with less room and less time to give it. So we price versioning at the start, and we design the master so the warning area survives the crop. It's dull work, and it's the difference between a delivery week and a delivery month.
Sound-off viewing stacks on top of this. Captions, the risk warning, a logo and a lower third all want the same part of the frame. Something has to give, and the storyboard is a much better place to decide what than the grade.
What we stopped doing
Three changes, each of them learned the slow way.
We stopped treating compliance as a sign-off stage. It used to sit after the first edit, which meant the first time a compliance officer saw the work, it was already animated. Now they see the script, plus a single still frame showing where the warning sits and at what size. That frame has saved us more time than anything else we've changed about this process.
We stopped animating specific figures unless the client has given us a source and a date for them. If a number is in the film, it needs to be defensible in two years, when nobody involved in making it still works there.
We stopped quoting a delivery date before we know who signs off. An approval chain with three named people and a monthly committee is a different project from one with a head of marketing who can make the call on a Thursday, even when the film is identical.
There's a cost to all of this. The first fortnight runs slower, and the questions can feel pedantic to a client who came to us for a film and is being asked about regulatory audience classifications. One or two have said as much. We think the trade is worth it, and the projects where we skipped the questions are the ones we remember for the wrong reasons.
Where this leaves the budget
Rework late in a 3D project is the expensive kind. Re-animating a 20 second sequence after lighting and render is roughly a week of studio time, plus the render again, and on a fixed fee that week comes out of someone's margin. Our note on what a brand film costs in the UK covers the general shape of these budgets. The compliance-specific advice is simpler than that: treat the review as a production dependency with a lead time, in the same way you'd treat a voice artist's availability or a music licence, and build the schedule around it.
We make films. We aren't compliance consultants, and none of the above is legal advice. The firm communicating the promotion carries the responsibility, and its own compliance function will always be the authority on what that firm can say. Our part is to design inside the constraint early enough that it costs a conversation rather than a reshoot. If you have something going into review and want a second opinion on where the warning is going to sit, that's usually a short call.
Frequently asked questions
Does every fintech video need a risk warning on screen?
No. It depends on whether the video is a financial promotion and what product it covers. A brand film about a company, its people and its purpose often is not a promotion at all, while anything describing a specific regulated product usually is, and high-risk investments carry prescribed wording. The firm communicating the video is the one who decides, so the question belongs with its compliance function at the brief stage rather than with the studio.
At what point in production should compliance see the work?
Three times. At script, before any design work starts. At storyboard, with one frame showing the real risk wording at the size and position it will appear. Then at final cut, which should be a formality if the first two went well. Sending a finished animatic as the first compliance touchpoint is how storyboard-level notes arrive after the animation is already done.
Can one master film be reused across LinkedIn, YouTube and paid social?
Yes, with versioning budgeted from the start. The catch is that each cut is assessed on its own under the FCA's social media guidance, so a 15 second paid version needs the same warning treatment as the long edit in a frame with less room for it. Designing the master so the warning area survives the crop is cheaper than retrofitting every version later.
Who is responsible if a film breaches the financial promotion rules?
The authorised firm communicating the promotion. A studio cannot sign anything off on a client firm's behalf and should not pretend to be a compliance consultancy. What a studio can reasonably do is ask the right questions early, design within the wording it is given, and avoid visual claims that nobody has sourced.