Phase plan template for Fintech

The phase plan with the boundaries a regulated financial product needs: wording, markets and disclosures never inside ordinary authority, budget and bidding authority granted normally, and a record designed to answer what ran under which review.

Everything else is the general phase plan, unchanged. One row per area per phase, an explicit approval list, a reversal rule and a record of every change.

Write it before anybody other than the account owner touches the account. In this category the line between what may be delegated and what may not is sharper than anywhere else, and drawing it once in writing is far cheaper than discovering it during an incident.

Revisit it whenever the review process changes, because the approval column is derived from it.

Most categories can decide how much authority to delegate by weighing speed against risk. Here part of the answer is not a judgement call.

Wording is cleared by somebody qualified to clear it, as a specific sentence. Editing that sentence produces a new claim, and delegating the edit delegates the review. Market settings determine whether advertising reaches a place the product is authorised for, and an error there cannot be corrected retrospectively. Disclosures are part of the cleared claim rather than a design element.

Those three sit in the approval column at every phase, permanently, and saying so once in writing is much cheaper than discovering the boundary during an incident.

The reassuring half is that the changes people actually need to make quickly carry no claim risk at all.

Moving budget between campaigns for the same product in the same market. Adjusting bids. Changing schedules and pacing. Rotating between creative that has already been cleared. All of these are ordinary media work, they are reversible, and they are exactly the things an approval queue makes painfully slow.

So a well-drawn phase plan here is often more permissive than people expect in the operational areas, precisely because it is absolute in the three that matter.

The budget limit carries two boundaries rather than one.

Between campaigns for the same product in the same market is a tactical change. Between products is a commercial decision, because approval rates and funded rates differ and the economics are not comparable. Between markets is both commercial and regulatory, because the wording and the authorisation differ.

Writing both boundaries into the limit column makes the permission checkable in a second, which is what a limit is for.

The record kept in this category names one thing a general plan does not: the review the creative sits under at the time of the change.

The reason is the question that eventually arrives — what was running, where, under which review, on which date. A change log that records budget moves without the review reference answers half of it, and the half it answers is the half nobody asks about.

It costs one extra column in a log somebody is already keeping.

Automated rules are authority granted to a system, and in this category the boundary is the same one that applies to people, with one addition.

A rule may move budget and adjust bids within bounds, for one product in one market. A rule may not change creative, because it cannot know whether a variation has been reviewed. It may not alter delivery geography, because it cannot know what is authorised. And it may not turn creative on that has been off, unless every asset in the set is confirmed as currently cleared, because a rule reactivating an old ad is the neatest way to run stale wording.

That last case is worth writing explicitly. It is not obvious, and it has happened.

The entry condition worth insisting on before any authority is granted is that every live ad has been matched to a current review.

That is not really about the person receiving authority. It is that delegating authority over an account whose current state is unknown means nobody can tell afterwards which problems were inherited and which were introduced. An account matched to its reviews on the day authority changes hands is a clean baseline, and it makes the first review of the phase straightforward.

Do the same on the way out, which is what the handover is for.

Because the boundaries here are sharper, the reversal triggers can be too.

Any change touching wording, disclosure or market settings — regardless of outcome, regardless of whether it was correct — returns that area to approval. That is not a judgement about competence; it is a rule that keeps the boundary meaningful, and it works precisely because it is mechanical.

Write it in week one, with who decides, and it will be applied without an argument on the day it is needed.

One asymmetry is worth writing into every row: lowering weight is always permitted, at any phase, by anybody holding authority in that area.

The reasoning is practical. Requiring approval to reduce means that during the one week somebody needs to stop money going somewhere — a page that is wrong, a market that should not be reached, a campaign nobody can explain — the correct action is queued behind an approval. It will be worked around, and the workaround becomes the habit.

Making reductions free removes that pressure entirely and costs nothing, because the failure mode of over-reducing is visible immediately and reversible the next morning.

Funded accounts lag applications, so the evidence that authority is being used well takes longer to appear here than the weekly rhythm suggests.

Write the advance condition over a period long enough to contain funded outcomes rather than application counts. Eight weeks of recorded changes with no reversal, and a reconciliation between the account's reported results and the underwriting data, is a reasonable bar. A fortnight of quiet is not evidence of anything except a fortnight.

Seven checks. One row per area, no blanket permission. Wording, disclosures and market settings are in the approval column at every phase. Budget authority is bounded by product and by market. Every change record names the review the creative sits under. Automated rules can move money and adjust bids only, and cannot reactivate creative without a current clearance. The entry condition includes every live ad matched to a current review. And every change is recorded on the day, with its reason.