How financial promotion regimes actually work across markets

In October 2023 Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, could not lawfully advertise to UK consumers on its own account. The FCA's cryptoasset promotions regime had gone live on 8 October, and from that date every ad, landing pagelanding pageA standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.View full definition → and app-store description aimed at UK retail users had to be issued or approved by a firm the regulator permitted to do it. Binance found an approver: rebuildingsociety.com, a small peer-to-peer lending platform. In January 2024 the FCA imposed requirements on that firm that stopped it approving crypto promotions, and Binance suspended new UK customer onboarding.

Nothing about the creative changed. An exchange lost access to a market over who was allowed to sign the bottom of the page. That is the object this module is built on, and this lesson defines it: what counts as a financial promotion, who is permitted to approve one, and how the answer shifts between the UK, the EU, the US and Asia.

What counts as a financial promotion

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA, the UK regulator for financial services firms and markets) works from a definition in section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA): an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity, communicated in the course of business.

Three elements carry the weight:

• *Invitation or inducement*: the communication tries to persuade. A neutral statement of fact usually is not one; the same fact wrapped in "start earning today" is.
• *Investment activity*: the product falls inside the regulated perimeter, which now includes qualifying cryptoassets alongside deposits, insurance, credit and securities.
• *In the course of business*: a commercial purpose, whether or not money changes hands for the post.

Format is irrelevant. A push notification, an App Store description, a Reel, a founder's personal tweet about the firm's product, a paid newsletter line, an affiliate's comparison table: all of them qualify if they invite action on a regulated product. The Financial Promotion Order does exempt pure image advertising (name, logo, contact details, a bare description of what the firm does), which is why some brand campaigns run untouched while the acquisition ad beside them carries three paragraphs of warnings.

The trigger question to ask of any asset: does this invite someone to buy, invest in, apply for or hold a regulated product? If yes, it is a financial promotion, whatever its length or channel.

Who is allowed to approve one

Section 21 is a prohibition, not a disclosure rule. An unauthorised firm may not communicate a financial promotion at all unless an authorised person has approved its content or an exemption applies. The approver takes on responsibility for the promotion complying with the rules and for keeping it compliant while it runs.

Since 7 February 2024 that approval market is itself gated: an FCA-authorised firm needs a specific permission to approve promotions for unauthorised firms, granted after application. Before the gateway, any authorised firm could in principle sign off anyone's ads. The Binance case above is what the gateway looks like from the marketing side, an approver's permission is a single point of failure for a whole market's growth.

Crypto sits under a narrower version of the same logic. A cryptoasset promotion to UK consumers must be made by an authorised person, approved by one with the right permission, made by a business registered with the FCA under the money laundering rules, or otherwise exempt. It must also carry the prescribed risk warning ("Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest"), and first-time investors get a 24-hour cooling-off period before they can act on it. The FCA's live rulebook for social channels is at the FCA's guidance on financial promotions on social media.

The US: no single perimeter, four possible owners

The US has no phrase equivalent to "financial promotion" and no general pre-approval requirement. Which rules apply depends on what your entity is registered as.

Registered investment advisers fall under the SEC's Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1), with full compliance required from November 2022. It lifted the old effective ban on client testimonials and replaced it with disclosure: whether the promoter is a client, whether they were paid, and what conflicts exist, presented clearly with the endorsement itself. Broker-dealers answer to FINRA Rule 2210, which requires a registered principal to approve retail communications before use and certain categories to be filed with FINRA. Consumer credit advertising runs into Regulation Z, which forces a full cost disclosure once an ad states a specific rate or payment. Everyone else, including most neobanks and payment apps, lands with the Federal Trade Commission under the Section 5 prohibition on unfair or deceptive practices and its endorsement guides, updated in 2023.

The EU: firm responsibility rather than an approval gate

MiFID II sets the baseline in Article 24(3): information to clients, marketing included, must be fair, clear and not misleading, and marketing communications must be identifiable as such. There is no equivalent of the UK approver. Responsibility stays with the authorised firm, which passports its authorisation across member states while national regulators keep their own overlays. France, for example, prohibits electronic advertising for certain highly speculative contracts such as binary options, so a pan-European media plan can be legal in Dublin and unlawful in Paris.

For crypto, MiCA's marketing rules apply from 30 December 2024: marketing communications must be identifiable as marketing, fair and not misleading, and consistent with the white paper published for the asset. A campaign claim that outruns the white paper is a compliance problem on its own terms, regardless of whether anyone was misled.

Asia: restriction by channel, not by disclosure

Asian regimes often restrict where you may speak rather than what you must disclose. Singapore's Monetary Authority told digital payment tokentokenA token is the basic unit of text that language models process, often a word fragment, whole word, or punctuation mark rather than a single character.View full definition → providers in January 2022 not to promote their services to the general public: no advertising on public transport or public websites, no engaging third parties such as social media influencers, with marketing confined to the firm's own corporate site, app and official accounts. Hong Kong takes a licensing route, requiring SFC authorisation for advertisements inviting the public to invest unless an exemption applies. Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Act sets advertising standards on top of a registration requirement, which is why Binance entered Japan in 2022 by acquiring an already-registered local operator rather than by buying media.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How the FCA Regulates Financial Promotions" - youtube.com/@FCA - search the FCA's official YouTube channel for their explainer series on financial promotion rules and consumer duty, useful for a regulator's-eye view of what reviewers look for]

The second perimeter: platforms as gatekeepers

Google and Meta both sell the inventory a fintech buys, and both now police the regime themselves. Google has required advertisers of financial services targeting UK users to prove FCA authorisation, or fit a listed exemption, since September 2021, with a separate certification for cryptocurrency exchanges. Meta imposed comparable onboarding checks on UK financial services advertisers in the same period. The practical effect is a second gate that can be tighter than the law and slower to open: an exemption that satisfies the FCA still has to be recognised inside a platform's verification form, and no appeal to statute will publish an ad that the platform's policy layer has refused.

Cross-border: the consumer's location decides

The perimeter follows the audience, not the head office. A promotion capable of having an effect in the UK falls under FSMA even if the firm, the servers and the media buyer sit in New York. GeoGeoThe practice of making your brand and content visible and citable inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.View full definition →-targeting is what creates the exposure, and it is also the fix: the same core creative gets a different disclosure module, risk warning and sign-off route depending on where the impressionimpressionThe total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.View full definition → lands. Global fintech teams therefore hold jurisdiction-tagged asset libraries rather than one master version with a legal footnote.

Key takeaways

• A financial promotion, in the UK sense, is any invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity made in the course of business. Format, length and channel are irrelevant; persuasive intent plus a regulated product is the test.
• The UK is unusual in gating approval. Unauthorised firms need an authorised approver, and since February 2024 that approver needs its own FCA permission, which makes it a dependency worth checking before you build a market entry plan around it.
• The US has no single perimeter. The applicable rulebook follows your registration status: SEC Marketing Rule, FINRA 2210, Regulation Z or the FTC Act.
• The EU places responsibility on the authorised firm under MiFID II, with MiCA adding crypto-specific marketing rules from 30 December 2024 and national bans layered on top in some states.
• Several Asian regimes restrict channels outright rather than mandating disclosure, and Google and Meta run verification gates of their own that can bind before any regulator does.