VelisAds Network

Global Compliance Policy

Effective date: February 17, 2026 | Version: 2026.02-global

This Global Compliance Policy defines the cross-functional control framework for legal, privacy, ad quality, security, and financial obligations across VelisAds Network.

Compliance is an operational system, not a one-time checklist; controls must be continuously measured and improved.

Scope and Applicability

  1. Applies to all teams building, operating, and supporting platform services.
  2. Applies to policy governance, control ownership, and release approval workflows.
  3. Applies to third-party onboarding and ongoing supplier oversight.
  4. Applies to audits, regulator responses, and partner due-diligence obligations.
  5. Applies to incident escalation, risk acceptance, and remediation governance.
  6. Applies to all operational regions served by VelisAds Network.

Mandatory Requirements

Governance and Accountability

  • Each control domain must have named owners and defined escalation paths.
  • Policies, procedures, and evidence expectations must be documented and versioned.
  • Exceptions require risk rationale, compensating controls, and expiry dates.
  • Executive review should cover material risk and remediation progress.

Risk and Control Operations

  • Risk registers must track findings, impact, owner, and target closure date.
  • Control testing cadence should match legal and business risk exposure.
  • Corrective actions require measurable acceptance criteria before closure.
  • Major incidents must produce root-cause analysis and systemic improvements.

Third-Party and Audit Readiness

  • Vendors must pass due diligence before handling sensitive workloads.
  • Contracts must include audit rights, breach duties, and data controls.
  • Role-based compliance training is mandatory and completion tracked.
  • Audit evidence must be retrievable, consistent, and time-bound.

Prohibited Practices

  1. Operating high-risk controls without assigned accountable owners.
  2. Approving exceptions without risk analysis or defined expiry.
  3. Suppressing or delaying critical audit findings without justification.
  4. Onboarding vendors without mandatory compliance due diligence.
  5. Falsifying evidence, certification claims, or control status records.
  6. Deploying high-risk features without required cross-functional sign-off.
  7. Ignoring regional legal obligations in active business markets.
  8. Retaliating against good-faith compliance concern reporting.

Governance, Monitoring, and Enforcement

  1. Compliance steering reviews control health, trends, and unresolved risks.
  2. Critical findings are escalated with mandatory remediation deadlines.
  3. Whistleblower and incident channels must support confidential reporting.
  4. Release gates require legal, security, and privacy confirmation for high-risk changes.
  5. Regulatory change tracking must map directly to control updates.
  6. External audit preparation includes completeness and traceability checks.
  7. Recurring violations may trigger feature restrictions or account action.
  8. Policies are reviewed at least annually or after major regulatory change.

Global Source Links and Standards

  1. EU GDPR Regulation (EU) 2016/679
  2. NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
  3. OWASP ASVS
  4. PCI SSC Document Library
  5. FATF Recommendations
  6. FTC Advertising and Marketing Guidance
  7. Google Search Essentials
  8. ISO/IEC 27001

Operational Interpretation and Regional Mapping

These requirements should be interpreted as global baseline controls for a live ad operations platform. Teams must map each requirement to local legal obligations, contractual duties, and traffic-source constraints before enabling production delivery at scale.

When regional regulations impose stricter standards, the stricter standard applies. Where legal ambiguity exists, operations should default to least-risk handling and documented escalation to legal or compliance owners.

Policy-to-Workflow Mapping

  • Map each policy control to one concrete workflow checkpoint.
  • Define accountable owner, review cadence, and evidence source.
  • Link policy failures to clear remediation and rollback actions.
  • Track policy exceptions with expiry and approval metadata.

Evidence and Audit Quality

  • Keep verifiable logs for approvals, enforcement, and account state changes.
  • Maintain immutable records for policy acceptance and version changes.
  • Preserve incident evidence with timestamp accuracy and actor context.
  • Support regulator and partner audits with structured evidence retrieval.

Release and Change Governance

  • Run policy impact review before major workflow or billing changes.
  • Gate high-risk releases behind compliance and security readiness checks.
  • Document rollback criteria for policy or abuse regressions.
  • Communicate material policy updates with effective-date clarity.

Extended Compliance Checklist

  1. Confirm access controls for admin, publisher, advertiser, and support roles.
  2. Verify domain ownership, sitemap coverage, and install-code integrity before launch.
  3. Validate ad creatives, landing behavior, and category eligibility rules.
  4. Ensure budget, spend, and settlement paths align with billing model selection.
  5. Run fraud and abuse controls for both ad-serving and click attribution pathways.
  6. Confirm user data handling for consent, retention, and rights-response timelines.
  7. Check payout safeguards, webhook integrity, and transaction audit visibility.
  8. Review security events, incident triage flow, and postmortem documentation quality.
  9. Ensure policy pages remain reachable, indexable, and version-consistent in sitemap.
  10. Require periodic policy refresh training for operational and support teams.

Policy FAQ for Operations Teams

How often should this policy be reviewed?

Review before each major release and at recurring governance intervals, especially when billing logic, targeting controls, or verification workflows change.

What happens if live behavior conflicts with policy text?

Live enforcement should default to safer behavior immediately, then trigger incident review and documented correction to either implementation or policy wording.

How should teams handle partner-specific requirements?

Apply partner requirements as stricter overlays where needed, while preserving baseline platform controls and maintaining auditable policy-to-process mapping.