Joe Jordan, Co-Founder & CCO, Adclear

Today we're delighted to speak with Joe, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Adclear, the AI-powered financial promotions compliance platform. With customers including Lloyds Banking Group, PensionBee, and Plum seeing dramatic reductions in review times, Joe shares insights on building compliance infrastructure for the modern age and why speed and compliance needn't be in conflict.

My questions are in bold - over to you Joe:

Who are you and what's your background?

I'm Joe Jordan, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Adclear. I studied at Loughborough University, where I co-founded StuTemp, an on-demand staffing platform connecting students with local hospitality employers. We were awarded grant funding from the Loughborough Start-Up Fund and signed up thousands of students across the midlands.

After graduating, I joined Supernode Global as a VC Analyst in London, evaluating and investing in seed-stage companies across AI, creator economy, digital health, and web3. That experience gave me a front-row seat to what separates startups that scale from those that don't.

I also became a Techstars Community Leader and ran a Substack newsletter called First Look covering startups at the intersection of technology and culture. When my close friends Doni Hoti and Cameron Ward and I spotted the massive gap in financial promotions compliance, we knew it was time to build. Adclear is the result.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I'm Co-Founder and CCO (Chief Commercial Officer) at Adclear. I lead our commercial strategy and growth - driving business development, managing key accounts (spanning everything from tier 1 banks to fast-growing fintechs), and shaping our go-to-market approach as we expand into new geographies.

I spend a lot of time with compliance and marketing leaders across financial services - this is the best way of understanding their pain points and feeding those insights back into our product roadmap.

And, naturally, as an early-stage co-founder, my role also extends into anything else that needs handling! That can include partnerships, fundraising, or hiring - whatever's needed.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

Adclear is an AI-powered compliance platform purpose-built for financial promotions. We help banks, fintechs, crypto platforms, and trading providers ensure every piece of marketing content meets regulatory standards before it goes live. Our platform analyses social media, video, emails, ads, websites, and product screens, then delivers instant feedback on what needs to change. It's completely transforming the compliance process for these companies.

What makes us unique is full lifecycle coverage. We can handle everything from pre-publication review plus post-publication monitoring of affiliates, partners, and finfluencers. We're multi-jurisdictional (UK, EU, US, APAC, MEN), ISO 27001 certified, and every review generates a full audit trail.

And the tech really works. Our customers see an 88% average reduction in review time. That's unlocking the ability to move marketing at the pace modern consumers and platforms demand, without compromising on regulatory standards or creating an unworkable burden for compliance teams.

When our client Plum onboarded with Adclear, they went from 10-day approvals to same-day and increased output 18x. Trade Nation was able to deliver 103% more marketing output. And ActivTrades cut compliance review from 9 hours per day to just 1 hour. These successes are being recognised across the market and our growth is reflecting that - our ARR has grown 10x since early 2025.

Tell us how you are funded?

We started by bootstrapping and built the product over evenings and weekends. This instilled great discipline in our founding team and helped us understand exactly when the time was right for external capital.

Our first institutional raise was a £510,000 pre-seed round backed by Haatch, Force Over Mass, and Founders Capital. We then closed an oversubscribed £2.1M seed round led by Outward VC, with AFG Partners and Tenity.

Angel investors include Dan Cobley (ClearScore founder) and Keith Grose (Coinbase UK MD), who invested via the a16z scout fund and Ventures Together. We're very lucky to have amassed such a brilliant array of investors at such an early stage.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company?

Doni, Cameron, and I are close friends from university. One of our family members spent 30+ years in financial regulation and told us roughly 40% of her work was repetitive. That was the lightbulb moment. If we could free compliance professionals from some of their mundane, repetitive tasks and create space for high-value, judgment-based work, the whole industry would benefit.

Our CEO, Doni, had also experienced the problem firsthand at Euronext, watching AI-generated marketing content create enormous compliance bottlenecks while teams still reviewed everything manually. So we knew there was both a problem and a demand for a solution.

We built a proof-of-concept product around radio advertising rules to prove the technology worked. We then expanded the application to the much larger financial promotions market. We signed Plum as our first customer and haven't looked back since.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

Our target customers are regulated financial services firms producing marketing content at scale. That spans banks, neobanks, fintechs, crypto platforms, and trading providers. Our current customers include Lloyds Banking Group, PensionBee, Plum, Yonder, InvestEngine, ActivTrades, and Trade Nation.

We operate on a SaaS subscription model with annual recurring revenue. Pricing is tailored to each organisation's size and needs, meaning it can be used by financial institutions across the spectrum.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I'd eliminate the false dichotomy between speed and compliance. Too many firms treat marketing compliance as a bottleneck rather than an enabler. Compliance teams are overwhelmed, marketing teams are frustrated, and consumers lose out because great products don't get promoted effectively. But it needn't be like that.

Every firm should have real-time, intelligent compliance infrastructure baked into their marketing workflow from day one. That's the future we're building at Adclear.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Your marketing teams are producing more content than ever, across more channels, more jurisdictions, and often powered by AI tools that make creation faster. But that's coming at the cost of compliance and introducing very real risks of regulatory action or fines. Old systems of review simply cannot keep up with the modern pace of content creation and distribution. The firms that recognise this and embrace AI-powered compliance as a strategic advantage, not a cost centre, will be those that pull ahead.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

I'm a daily reader of Sifted for European tech and fintech coverage. For regulatory developments, I go straight to the FCA's own publications. I also regularly read FinTech Profile and enjoy the Fintech Insider podcast for longer-form industry discussions.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

• Doni Hoti (CEO, Adclear) - One of the sharpest thinkers on the intersection of regulation and technology. He regularly shares genuinely useful insights on financial promotions compliance.
• Dan Cobley (Founder, ClearScore) - Dan built one of the UK's most successful fintechs and is now a thoughtful angel investor. His posts on building and scaling fintech businesses are always worth reading.
• Simon Taylor (Co-Founder, Sardine) - One of the most insightful voices in fintech. His newsletter Fintech Brain Food is essential reading, with a rare ability to connect macro trends with practical implications.

What FinTech services and apps do you personally use?

Plum for automated savings and investing. I'm a huge fan of their product and was so thrilled when they became our first-ever customer! Monzo is my primary bank. And I also use InvestEngine for low-cost ETF portfolios.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

PensionBee's rise has impressed me enormously. They've taken something historically confusing and opaque and turned it into a genuinely user-friendly experience. We work with them at Adclear, and they analysed over 1,000 promotions through our platform within two months of onboarding. That commitment to getting marketing right is what the industry needs more of.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

First, AI-powered compliance moves from nice-to-have to table stakes. Content volumes are growing exponentially and manual processes can't scale at fast - it will run into a wall without innovation. Marketing technology and compliance technology are on track to converge. The future is integrated workflows where compliance is embedded in content creation, not bolted on afterward.

I also predict that "finfluencer" regulation becomes one of the biggest compliance stories of our era. Regulators are cracking down on social media promotions, and firms will need tools to monitor everything their affiliates and partners publish much more carefully.

Thank you to Joe for sharing his insights with FinTech Profile. Find out more about AdClear at adclear.ai.