FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-14, published July 9, would swap the current blanket pre-approval requirement for a risk-based supervisory model – the same approach FINRA already trusts for correspondence and institutional communications. Public comments on the proposed change close September 11, 2026, and while nothing is decided yet, the direction is clear enough that compliance, legal, and marketing teams should treat this as a preview of what’s to come rather than a hypothetical future state.
The real change: Approval becomes a judgment call, not a rule
Currently, Rule 2210 isn’t concerned with the size of your firm or how low-risk the content is – a principal reviewer signs off before anything goes out. FINRA’s proposal drops that in favor of written procedures built around your business. It lets you decide what needs a principal’s eyes before it’s published, and what can be checked after the fact under a documented surveillance program.
The catch: If you’re not reviewing everything up front, you have to prove that the alternative actually works. That means training the people who produce content, documenting that training, running real surveillance, and being able to show FINRA the evidence on request. In other words, less review before publication, but considerably more evidence to back it up.
The eight factors that determine what gets pre-approval
FINRA does not call out a risk-scoring model in its proposal; instead, it lists eight factors firms should weigh when deciding what needs pre-use review:
Complexity of the product or service
Qualifications of whoever prepared the content
Whether the content makes a recommendation or promotes something
Whether it promotes an affiliate or a third-party product
Whether it’s made for a specific audience
Whether it includes performance data or rankings
Medium and distribution method
The firm’s history of communication problems in that area
What’s not changing?
The proposed change still requires principal review of research reports before they go out, and anything filed with FINRA’s Advertising Regulation Department needs sign-off first. New members retain their first-year filing window, though it now starts on their first filing rather than their membership date, quietly fixing a rule that punished firms for a late filing. The actual content standards – fair and balanced, no exaggerated or misleading claims – remain the same.
Why is FINRA proposing changes now?
Two forces – social media and generative AI – converged to move the needle:
Social media platforms blurred boundaries between “static” and “interactive” as outlined in Rule 2210.
Generative AI can produce more content in one day than most review teams used to see in a month.
We’ve written before that FINRA compliance at scale is really a volume problem disguised as a legal one. This proposal is FINRA arriving at the same conclusion from the regulator’s side of the table.
Where compliance teams stand to gain
With the right compliance review workflow, reviewers’ time goes to the most productive areas: recommendations, complex products, and performance claims, rather than to every single routine social post. FINRA’s own numbers show that pre-use review time was already dropping – from a median of 34 business days in 2023 to 13 in 2025 – so evidence of strain on the old model has been clear for some time.
The standard for referencing past recommendations is simpler, too: A single fair-and-balanced principle instead of a disclosure checklist, closer to what investment advisors already follow. For teams running marketing compliance for financial services, in which every extra day of review is a day a campaign doesn’t launch, that’s a measurable improvement.
Possible risks
In the proposal, the phrase “reasonably designed” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. FINRA doesn’t define a clear boundary, and you won’t know if your program clears the bar until an examiner tells you. The hours your team previously spent pre-approving content will need to go toward building training, documentation, and a surveillance system that can produce a record on demand.
Liability won’t shrink, either. Choosing to review something after it’s published doesn’t protect you if it turns out to be misleading, and FINRA can still ask for proof the program actually ran, not just that it exists in documentation.
There’s another point raised in the FINRA notice, which suggests that while AI tools can be part of a firm’s supervisory system for reviewing communications with the public, they should be “vetted, tested, and monitored.” The notice goes on to say that firms may consider establishing governance frameworks and risk management practices to address concerns like hallucinations, data protection, and ongoing monitoring. A model doing supervisory work isn’t a productivity tool; it’s part of the firm’s control environment, and it likely needs the same validation and monitoring you’d apply to any other model making important decisions.
What to do next
As of now, nothing has changed, and no action is specifically required. However, it’s a good opportunity to be proactive – here are a few steps your team can take now to be more prepared in the near future.
Map your content against the eight deciding factors. How does it rate?
Consider your risk position – what policies might be missing? What decision-making factors exist in the minds of reviewers, but not in documentation?
Understand where marketing is positioned on the change – do they have concerns about the speed or depth of review?
How are you currently documenting training and surveillance? What could improve?
Does AI you use or may use to review content need its own governance? What does that look like?
Overall, compliance teams may view this proposed change less as deregulation and more as a move toward better regulation – something an AI compliance platform is already built to support in your marketing compliance workflow.
Where Haast fits
Whichever way Notice 26-14 lands, compliance teams will still own the ultimate outcome of review; but pre-approval moves the proof burden from “reviewed” to “fully explained.” This is the work Haast already helps compliance teams run today:
Review at scale. Each piece of content is checked against your rules, not just the content that reaches a principal before publishing.
Risk tolerance tuned to your business. Thresholds are set issue-by-issue, so complex products, performance claims, and recommendations – all called out in the FINRA notice’s eight factors – get the scrutiny routine social posts don’t require.
A complete audit trail. Every decision is traceable back to the rule that triggered it, ready to produce when an examiner asks.
To prepare your compliance team for a more efficient, risk-aware workflow, book a demo.
Team Haast
