The Bank of Georgia launched a Facebook page in January 2011 hoping to gain more online visibility and supplement in-branch promotions. The bank, however, wanted outside counsel on how to develop and launch an effective social media strategy that would comply with all regulatory mandates. The Bank of Georgia uses Gladiator's security expertise to organize its informational security policies, so it was confident in relying on Gladiator to provide similar guidance on social media compliance. Gladiator's SMC Services include strategic planning, risk management, employee and customer education, incident response, audits and testing, and more.

Kim Higgins, vice president and compliance officer for The Bank of Georgia, explained, "Regulatory feedback on financial institutions' social media activity has not been entirely clear. We wanted to do this right, and we found a great resource in the Gladiator SMC Services from ProfitStars. The result has been a solid understanding of our limitations; precise execution of social media employee training, recordkeeping, and site administration; and successful audit completion."

Gladiator's trusted IT regulatory compliance experts provide SMC clients, like The Bank of Georgia, with custom policies, a risk assessment matrix, and supporting documents that comply with regulatory guidance, best practices, and industry standards for social media communication. Gladiator's Social Media Compliance Policies help define risk assessment management and control, employee and customer training, and incident response. The Social Media Compliance Risk Assessment Matrix helps identify threats and vulnerabilities, risk rankings, risk mitigation controls, and residual risk. The Social Media Supporting Documents range from employee procedure and acknowledgement forms, annual board report objectives, and a quarterly review checklist.

David Foss, president of ProfitStars, added, "While banks have guidance from FINRA that they should supervise social media activity, and from the FFIEC's IT Handbook InfoBase on new technology implementation strategies, there is no definitive standard for regulating these platforms. ProfitStars has modeled the Social Media Compliance Services after Gladiator's other industry-leading regulatory compliance guides to provide financial institutions with a sound social media strategy that will help protect their integrity."