MEET THE SPEAKER: WESSEL VAN KEULEN – AI IN MARKETING COMPLIANCE: KEEPING ADS COMPLIANT AT MACHINE SPEED

Speaker Name: Wessel Van Keulen

What's one thing you hope attendees take away from your session?

That speed and safety are no longer a trade off. For years, growing teams accepted that every campaign had to wait days or weeks for compliance review. AI has removed that constraint, and the firms that realize this first will simply move faster than everyone else in their market.

In one sentence, what do you do and what is your role?

I am the Founding General Manager for EMEA at Haast, an AI platform that helps banks, insurers, and fintechs review their marketing and communications for regulatory compliance. Before joining Haast, I ran regulatory change at Zurich Insurance, where I onboarded the Haast platform into our team as a customer first.

What's the biggest challenge facing the industry in this area?

Content volume is exploding while compliance capacity stays flat. Marketing teams now produce content across more channels, in more markets, with AI generating more of it every month, yet most firms still review financial promotions manually, one by one. That gap is where regulatory risk lives, and regulators are paying closer attention to promotions than ever before.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone working in fintech today?

Treat compliance as a growth capability, not a cost center. The fintechs that scale fastest are the ones where marketing and compliance work from the same playbook and platform, because a campaign that clears review in hours instead of weeks is a real commercial advantage. Build that relationship early, not after your first letter from the regulator.

What book, podcast, newsletter, or resource would you recommend to our audience?

Fintech Brainfood, the weekly newsletter by Simon Taylor. It is the sharpest read on where fintech is actually heading, and it takes regulation seriously without ever being boring about it.

What topic will you be speaking about at FinTech Connect 2026?

AI in marketing compliance: how regulated firms keep every ad, landing page, and social post compliant when content is being produced faster than any human team can review it. I will share lessons from both sides of the table, first as a practitioner at Zurich and now working with banks, insurers, and fintechs across Europe with Haast.

What industry trend are you watching most closely?

Generative AI on the marketing side. Every fintech is about to multiply its content output, personalized, multichannel, always on, and very few have asked how any of it will be reviewed. I am also watching regulators begin to use AI themselves to scan the market, which means firms will be monitored at machine speed and will need to respond in kind.

What's one prediction you have for the next 3-5 years?

Within five years, reviewing financial promotions by hand will look as outdated as manual trade surveillance does today. Compliance teams will move from sampling a fraction of their content to checking all of it, in real time, with people focusing on judgment calls instead of checklists. And regulators will come to expect exactly that standard.