A Fortune 100 financial services organization operating across 54 countries faced a familiar tension. The marketing team needed velocity. The legal and compliance teams needed control. And the technology stack sitting between them, a patchwork of disconnected systems, was serving neither well.
Consent data lived in multiple places. Preferences captured in one system did not reliably propagate to others. The demand generation team was slowing campaigns to manually verify compliance status, while the compliance team lacked confidence that customer preferences were being honored consistently across channels and geographies.
The organization had invested in OneTrust but had not yet deployed the Universal Consent module. FLLR was engaged to design and implement a consent infrastructure that could unify preference management across the enterprise, integrate with core marketing systems, and scale across multinational operations without creating new friction between business units.
The Challenge
The organization's consent management approach had evolved organically, and the gaps were becoming harder to work around.
Disconnected Consent Data
- Customer preferences were captured at various touchpoints but stored inconsistently across systems
- No single source of truth existed for consent status, making it difficult to answer basic questions about what a customer had agreed to
- Marketing, legal, and compliance teams each maintained their own view of the data, leading to conflicting information
Manual Compliance Verification
- Campaign launches required manual checks to confirm consent status, slowing time-to-market
- The demand generation team was spending hours each week on verification tasks that should have been automated
- Legal reviews became bottlenecks because the underlying data was not trustworthy enough to move quickly
Global Complexity
- Operations spanning 54 countries meant navigating a patchwork of regulatory requirements
- Opt-in and opt-out logic varied by jurisdiction, but the existing systems had no mechanism to enforce those differences
- Regional teams were interpreting requirements independently, creating inconsistency in how preferences were honored
The Bottom Line
- The friction between marketing velocity and compliance rigor was not a people problem
- It was an infrastructure problem, and solving it required a centralized consent architecture that both teams could trust
Our Approach
We approached this engagement with a clear principle: consent infrastructure should accelerate the business, not constrain it. When marketing teams trust the data, they move faster. When compliance teams trust the systems, they approve faster. The goal was to build something both sides could rely on.
Discovery workshops were conducted with stakeholders from demand generation, marketing technology, and compliance to map consent use cases across the organization. We needed to understand how preferences were being captured today, where they were stored, how they flowed (or failed to flow) to downstream systems, and what opt-in and opt-out logic needed to look like across different jurisdictions.
The design phase focused on building a preference center strategy that could accommodate the organization's global footprint while remaining manageable from an operational standpoint. Ten business purposes and ten data elements were defined, each mapped to the regulatory requirements and marketing use cases that would drive real-world behavior.
Integration architecture was central to the design. OneTrust needed to become the system of record for consent, but that only mattered if Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform received updates in real time. We designed the integration workflows before touching configuration, ensuring the technical foundation could support the business requirements.
Implementation
Discovery and Use Case Mapping
The engagement began with structured discovery sessions covering Universal Consent fundamentals, use case identification, and preference center strategy. We worked through opt-in and opt-out logic for each business scenario, documented consent touchpoints across the customer journey, and captured the technical requirements that would shape the integration architecture. This phase produced the functional and technical design documents that guided the rest of the project.
Purpose Model and Data Element Configuration
Ten business purposes were configured in OneTrust, each reflecting a distinct category of data use that required customer consent. Ten data elements were defined to capture the specific information types associated with those purposes. The taxonomy was designed to be comprehensive enough to cover current use cases while remaining extensible as the business evolved.
Branded Preference Center
A fully branded preference center was configured to provide customers with a clear, consistent interface for managing their consent choices. The design aligned with the organization's brand standards and presented opt-in and opt-out options in language that was both legally accurate and customer-friendly. The preference center became the front door for consent management across all digital touchpoints.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration
Real-time integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud was implemented so that consent updates in OneTrust immediately reflected in the marketing platform. When a customer changed their preferences, that change propagated to Salesforce without manual intervention. This closed the gap that had been forcing the demand generation team to verify consent status manually before launching campaigns.
Adobe Experience Platform Enablement
Integration with Adobe Experience Platform was enabled to support consent orchestration across digital channels. This ensured that preference data flowed consistently to the systems powering web personalization, analytics, and customer experience workflows. The integration architecture was designed to support the organization's broader digital transformation initiatives.
Consent Record Migration
250,000 existing consent records were migrated into OneTrust, establishing the historical baseline for the new system. The migration required careful mapping of legacy data structures to the new purpose model, along with validation to ensure records were accurately transferred. Post-migration, the organization had a clean, centralized consent repository for the first time.
Documentation and Knowledge Transfer
Comprehensive documentation was delivered covering configuration decisions, integration architecture, and operational procedures. Knowledge transfer sessions were conducted with the teams who would own the system going forward, ensuring they could maintain, extend, and troubleshoot the implementation independently.
Results
Consent Data
- Before: Fragmented across systems with no single source of truth
- After: Centralized in OneTrust with real-time propagation to marketing platforms
Campaign Velocity
- Before: Manual compliance verification slowing launches
- After: Automated consent status enabling faster time-to-market
Cross-Functional Alignment
- Before: Friction between marketing, legal, and compliance teams
- After: Shared infrastructure both sides trust
Global Consistency
- Before: Regional teams interpreting requirements independently
- After: Unified preference management across 54 countries
Customer Experience
- Before: Inconsistent preference interfaces across touchpoints
- After: Branded preference center providing clear, consistent consent management
Historical Data
- Before: Legacy consent records scattered across systems
- After: 250,000 records migrated into centralized repository
The 14-week engagement delivered more than technical configuration. It established a consent infrastructure that removed the friction between teams with historically competing priorities. Marketing gained the velocity they needed. Compliance gained the control they required. And both could point to the same system as the source of truth.
The Bigger Picture
Consent management becomes a bottleneck when it lives in the seams between systems rather than at the center of the architecture. Marketing teams slow down because they cannot trust the data. Compliance teams tighten controls because they cannot trust the systems. The resulting friction is felt across the organization.
By implementing Universal Consent with integrated connections to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, this organization moved from fragmented preference management to a centralized infrastructure that accelerates rather than constrains the business.
If your marketing and compliance teams are working around each other instead of with each other, and consent data is the reason why, the path forward is infrastructure that both sides can trust. If this sounds familiar, our team is ready to help.
