ASIC engages Red Marker for Covid-19 monitoring project

During the COVID-19 pandemic, regulators were faced with an influx of COVID-related financial offers, promotions, and products. Facing the need to rapidly upscale monitoring of this new content, the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) engaged Red Marker to help supercharge their monitoring capacity and help identify misleading or manipulative campaigns.

With a particular focus on finding promotions targeting vulnerable consumers, the project aimed to keep on top of the increased volume of digital advertising, which spiked during the pandemic as people spent more time inside – and online – than ever before.

Over the course of the project, Red Marker:

• Scanned almost 1.7 million web pages

• Scanned 1,000 Google ads

• Identified 1,950 potentially risky web pages

• Identified 100 potentially risky Google ads

The project showcased the potential for Red Marker to use large-scale web scraping and analytics to increase the scale and efficiency of the content discovery process. This allowed ASIC’s legal experts to focus their attention on reviewing risky content, rather than manually searching for content to review.

As a result of the project, ASIC was able to identify potential cases of misconduct for further review by their legal experts.

The project’s focus on COVID-related promotions also shows how RegTech solutions can be rolled out with a specific focus, at a large scale, with a quick turnaround.

This project represents a big leap in the uptake of RegTech by one of Australia’s leading regulatory institutions, with Red Marker setting a new standard for the role of RegTech in online monitoring.

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