A few years ago, a financial brand’s work with social media creators sat firmly in the marketing department. A creator would be paid to talk about an app or an investment platform, the content would go live, and success was measured in sign-ups. That model has run into a regulatory wall. Across several major markets, promoting financial products online is now treated as a regulated activity with real legal consequences, and the firms behind the promotions are increasingly in the frame alongside the creators.
From warnings to prosecutions
The first response from regulators was education. Supervisors published guidance, ran campaigns about gamified trading apps and warned influencers that giving unlicensed financial advice could break the law. That approach gave way to enforcement once the size of the audience became clear. Large numbers of younger investors say they act on tips from social media, often without doing their own research, and regulators concluded that warnings alone were not enough.
In the United Kingdom, the turning point came in 2024, when the Financial Conduct Authority brought criminal charges against a group of individuals over the promotion of an unauthorised trading scheme on Instagram, including people known from reality television. Other markets have moved in their own direction. France created a certification requirement for influencers who promote financial products, and the United Arab Emirates introduced a dedicated licence for finfluencers. A useful overview of how finfluencer regulation is hardening across major markets shows how far apart these rulebooks now sit, which is a real challenge for any firm marketing in more than one country.
Distribution is treated like manufacture
The most significant shift is in who is held responsible. Regulators no longer see the creator as a neutral messenger. Paying someone to promote a financial product can make that person part of the promotion, with legal exposure of their own. At the same time, the firm commissioning the content remains responsible for what is said on its behalf. In the UK, financial promotions must be made or approved by an authorised firm, and the regime for approving other firms’ promotions was tightened in 2024. A creator’s short video is a financial promotion in the eyes of the regulator, whatever the format.
In the United States, the self-regulatory body for broker-dealers has fined firms over influencer programmes in which content was misleading or not properly supervised. The common thread across jurisdictions is that outsourcing the voice does not outsource the responsibility.
What good control looks like
Firms that still work with creators are adapting their processes rather than abandoning the channel. The starting point is to treat every piece of sponsored content as a financial promotion that needs review before it is published, held to the same standards for balance, risk warnings and fair presentation as a conventional advert. That review needs to cover the caption, the spoken script and any links, because regulators look at the whole package the audience sees.
Contracts are being rewritten as well. Agreements increasingly set out what a creator may and may not say, require clear disclosure of the paid relationship, give the firm the right to have content taken down quickly and prohibit promotion into countries where the firm is not permitted to operate. Monitoring does not stop at publication either. Content stays online, gets reshared and is clipped into new posts, so firms need a way to track where their promotions end up and to act when something drifts out of line.
Record-keeping is often the weakest link. A regulator looking into a complaint will want to see what was approved, when, by whom and what actually went out. Firms that cannot reconstruct that trail are exposed even if their intentions were good.
Creators carry their own exposure
For influencers themselves, the message is just as direct. Talking about personal investing experiences is not the same as recommending specific products for payment, and the line between the two is narrower than many assume. Creators who accept money from financial firms need to understand the rules in every market where their audience lives, and they should be wary of offers from firms that are not authorised where they operate. Several enforcement actions have involved promotions of schemes that were never regulated in the first place.
A channel that still has a future
None of this means social media is closed to financial firms. The audience is there, and well-made educational content can help people understand products and risks better than a static advert. The firms likely to keep using the channel successfully are the ones that bring compliance into the room at the start, choose their creators carefully and accept that a smaller number of well-controlled promotions is better than a large volume of content nobody can stand behind.
