A brand selling trainers can hand a creator a product and a deadline. A brand selling an investing account cannot, and the reason is not caution. It is that in the United Kingdom, a communication that invites or induces somebody to engage in investment activity is a financial promotion, and it has to be approved by an authorised firm before it goes out.
That single fact rearranges everything about how fintech buys video. It moves sign-off to before the shoot, it makes the script a controlled document, and it puts the liability on the brand rather than on the person holding the phone.
The video is the regulated thing, not the caption
Most fintech marketing teams understand the rule in the abstract and then apply it to the wrong artefact. They approve a landing page carefully and treat the creator video as social media output that a junior can schedule.
The regulator looks at the communication, whatever shape it takes. A thirty second clip that tells somebody they could be earning more on their savings is doing exactly what a press advert would do, and it is judged the same way.
What actually falls inside the perimeter
The line is not about whether money is mentioned. It is about whether the communication invites or induces action on a controlled investment or a regulated credit product.
A video that explains what a stocks and shares account is, in general terms, is educational. A video that tells the viewer to open one with a named provider is a promotion. A video that says nothing at all about returns but ends with a sign-up link is still a promotion, because the invitation is the whole point of it.
Anything about credit, buy now pay later, crypto held for investment, savings rates, pensions or investing sits inside. Everyday banking mechanics, a spending tracker, a currency card used abroad, is usually further out, but the safe assumption for a marketing team is that anything with a sign-up call to action is in.
Somebody has to approve it, and it cannot be you
Approval has to come from a firm authorised for that purpose, either the brand itself if it holds the right permission, or an approver acting for it.
This is the part that catches out fast-moving companies. A growth team can commission fifty creator videos in a month, and every one of them needs to have gone through that gate before publication, with a record kept of what was approved and when.
The consequence is practical rather than philosophical: your content calendar is limited by your approval capacity, not by your production capacity. Plan for that ratio or the videos will sit unpublished while a compliance queue clears.
What a script cannot do
| What the brief usually asks for | What the rule allows |
|---|---|
| I made X per cent last year | No past performance presented as an expectation |
| The easiest way to get rich | No implication that investing is a route to wealth |
| Risk free, guaranteed, secure returns | None of those words about an investment |
| Sign up before it disappears | Nothing that pressures a hurried decision |
| The risk warning in the caption | Prominent in the video itself, not hidden below |
| A creator giving their own advice | No personal recommendation without permission |
The right hand column is the one that decides whether a campaign survives, and none of it stops a video from being good. It stops one specific thing: a video that makes an unqualified viewer feel that a financial decision is obviously safe.
The two mistakes that come up again and again
The first is putting the risk warning in the caption. A caption can be truncated, hidden behind a more button, or stripped when the video is reshared. If the warning is not in the video, treat it as absent.
The second is the creator's personal story. Real experience is exactly what makes this category convert, and it is also where a script drifts from I use this to you should use this. The fix is not to remove the story. It is to keep it in the past and in the first person, and to keep every forward-looking statement in the approved wording.
What this changes about how you brief
Approve before the shoot, not after
The instinct is to film, then send the edit to compliance. That is the most expensive possible order, because a rejected line means a reshoot rather than a rewrite.
Write the script, approve the script, film the approved script. Give the creator the sentences that must appear verbatim and the sentences they can put in their own words, and mark which is which on the page.
The risk warning is part of the edit
Decide where it sits before filming: on screen for long enough to read at the speed people actually read, in a size that survives being watched on a phone, and not over a busy shot.
Keep the record
Store the approved script, the date, who approved it and the final file, together. The video is a communication your firm made, and the ability to show what was approved is what turns a complaint into a paragraph rather than an investigation.
Why the constraint is an advantage
Every fintech competitor faces the same rule, and most respond by making nothing, or by making corporate video that nobody watches.
The category is wide open for the brand that treats the constraint as a format. Videos that explain a mechanism honestly, that say what the product does not do, that show a real person being specific about what changed in their finances, outperform aspirational content in this category by a wide margin, because the audience is already suspicious and rewards the first brand that stops selling to them.
The tone that works is the tone of somebody explaining something to a friend who is slightly embarrassed not to know it. That is legal, it is cheap, and almost nobody in the sector is doing it.
Sources
Checked on 4 September 2026. Thresholds and rates change: where this guide and the official source disagree, the official source is right.
