In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Alexandre Tomic of Alea explains why affiliates need to have compliance managers on their team.
They say that an efficient and effective compliance program keeps regulators and lawsuits away. Companies, including affiliates, consider compliance programs to be one of the best lines of defense against civil and criminal prosecution.
But these programs mean nothing if the company doesn’t have a competent compliance manager, according to Alexandre Tomic of Alea.
Tomic stressed that it’s a must for many affiliates to invest in finding the right compliance guy, especially now that they face lots of pressure from operators and regulators, who have started to impose tighter limits on advertising. There are affiliates, he said, that have folded after committing a minor mistake.
“I understand the UK regulator is putting the pressure on the operator and the operator is putting it back on the affiliates. I think at the moment we need some fine tuning because we are seeing some operators that are closing, shutting down affiliates’ accounts for just a little mistake,” Tomic told CalvinAyre.com. “And it has been an affiliate that is working with – I don’t know – five years with tens of thousands in commissions monthly and the account has been shut because they didn’t want this one mistake. So this is something we have to look into.”
Tomic also underscored the importance of competent compliance officers in managing the challenges of having licenses in different territories.
He said affiliates need to have separate compliance officers that understand new markets and will make sure that the platform and support team inside the company are compliant with each of the licenses they have.
“You really need compliance. We’ve seen during this last year, the compliance manager being the guy to hire. Everybody wants the compliance manager,” Tomic said. “It requires you to have guys that are going to go for this new market and to have guys inside the company that are going to make sure that your platform, your support team, is compliant with each of these licenses. It is a huge work.”
