How marketers are preparing for the UN’s global eco summit
Royal Bank of Canada’s investment arm puts identity at the core of its growth strategy
HOW TO STRUCTURE A CONTENT PROGRAMME FINTECH BUDGETS IN 2023: SPLURGE OR SQUEEZE?
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Insight
Major names moved in GICS reshuffle
Investment writers have been advised of changes to the Global Industry Classification Standards (GICS) classifications which took effect in March 2023.
These changes affect the composition of key sector indices, such as the S&P 500, and have resulted in dozens of companies being reclassified in Information Technology, Industrials, Financials, Consumer Discretionary and Consumer Staples.
“While the changes are not as significant as the 2016 and 2018 GICS changes that created new sectors, they will trigger industry level changes, as industries are being both eliminated and created,” said Matthew J Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas Research at State Street Global Advisors.
“Information Technology will see the largest reduction in market capitalisation among the 11 GICS sectors as a result of the removal of Data Processing & Outsourced Services stocks, which account for
around 12% of the IT sector.”
Within this sector, Broadridge Financial Services, Mastercard, and Visa are among the major names to be reclassified.
There are also notable changes that affect listed retailers, recognising the increasingly blurred lines between legacy bricks and motor and legacy digital retailers.
Internet & Direct Marketing Retail has been discontinued as a subclassification and major names such as Amazon and eBay were moved to sub-sectors relevant to the goods they sell. Remaining Internet & Direct Marketing companies will now sit in the Broadline Retail sub-category.
The GICS classification system was developed by MSCI and S&P Dow Jones Indices in 1999 to allow the investment industry to better standardise investment reporting. Each company is assigned a class at sub-sector level, according to its primary business activity, by revenue.
Rathbones snaps up Investec unit
Rathbones has acquired the UK wealth business of Investec, creating a £100bn entity.
The newly combined business will trade under the Rathbones brand, with Investec Wealth & Investment UK's standalone branding phased out after an “appropriate transitional period,” the company said in a statement to investors. The deal excludes Investec Bank in Switzerland and Investec Wealth & Investment International.
Rathbones’ chairperson Clive Bannister will continue in the same role.
Bud looks to crack America
Bud, the UK-based fintech specialising in transaction data intelligence, is taking the brand into the US market after securing backing from HSBC, Goldman Sachs and TransUnion.
Melissa Hougie has been appointed head of marketing for North America, having previously been director of brand marketing at Ocrolus and responsible for content strategy at Popular Bank.
The company provides lenders with a trend analysis of customer behaviours based on transactional data.
AA boss to chair parliamentary group
The parliamentary debating group for marketers, journalists, and politicians has elected a new chairperson following the group’s annual general meeting.
Stephen Woodford, chief executive of the Advertising Association replaces Andrew Marsden as chair of The Debating Group. Marsden completed his five year term this year.
The group has representatives from 12 industry trade groups, including the Advertising Association, Chartered Institute of Marketing, CIPR, Independent Print Industries Association, the Market Research Society and Thinkbox.
Research reveals secrets to protecting market share
Retail banking marketers should personalise customer interactions, communicate ESG efforts and showcase their digital sales process if they are to maintain market share, research shows.
A poll among 29,805 consumers by Bain & Company found that the UK now ranks fourth highest globally for consumers with three or more banking relationships, behind only Brazil, Hong Kong, and India. This fragmented landscape means it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep hold of market share.
“Few banks have managed to refine their digital channels to the extent that virtually all consumers are able to complete a task digitally on their first attempt,” the research noted.
“For banks that excel in the digital sales process, the payoff is substantial. In the UK, Revolut, Starling and Monzo all boast digital account opening failure rates of less than 1% or 2% and they rank among the highest in the country in overall relationship net promoter scores (NPS).”
The researchers said that strong NPS makes for customers that stay longer, buy more, cost less to serve and will recommend organisations to friends and family.
It cautioned marketers who have focussed their entire ESG marketing on corporate objectives.
“It’s still early days on the consumer side. Examples of promising initiatives include a cashback programme for customers who choose paperless banking, a free carbon offset for customers who purchase an electric vehicle and cardlinked offers with rewards for behaviours that reduce carbon.
“Investing in ESG initiatives and raising awareness can benefit both banks and consumers. By promoting sustainable practices and financial incentives, banks can increase customer engagement and advocacy while also contributing to a more sustainable future.”
Researchers concluded by noting that banks have “most room for improvement” in the loyalty programmes they offer and in personalising interactions.
Banks spend on marketing as cost of living bites
Year-on-year marketing spend at the UK’s largest high street banks and building societies grew in 2022, as businesses responded to the economic downturn.
An analysis of reports and accounts by Financial Promoter found that marketing spend increased at Barclays, Cooperative Bank, Coventry Building Society, Lloyds Banking Group and Yorkshire Building Society. HSBC UK and Santander UK did not publish a specific breakdown of operating costs.
According to financial statements published for the year ending 31 December 2022, Barclays’ total marketing spend increased 25% year on year, totalling £500m on marketing and advertising in 2022, up from £399m the previous year.
45.7%
Lloyds Banking Group’s accounts, meanwhile, show spending on “advertising and promotion” grew from £161m to £170m over the same period, a rise of around six percentage points.
Coventry Building Society, the UK’s second largest mutual, increased spend by 45.7%, from £4.6m in 2021 to £6.7m in 2022. Yorkshire Building Society, meanwhile, followed suit, increasing spend from £9.8m in 2021 to £14.8m last year. Nationwide had not published its figures at the time of writing.
The Co-operative Bank did not breakdown its increase in marketing investment, only to say that higher operating costs were partly attributed to “higher marketing spend in 2022”.
Karen Quinn, director of Untamed Marketing, said while some businesses may be tempted to tighten their belts in a downturn, previous economic cycles show that those who maintain their presence see market share increase over the long-term.
“Spending more on your brand presence now will pay dividends,” she said. “And, in a world where costs are rising, and the focus on mental health is increasing, we’re seeing a post-Covid step change in how banks are communicating.
“Propensity to trust any financial organisation is low, so there is a positioning challenge that banks will try to overcome. It’s why straplines like ‘by your side’ are becoming prevalent as they position themselves as long-term partners that understand their customers.”
Quinn said that the growth of challenger banks has added pressure on high street banks to demonstrate their value, particularly when it comes to digital.
Mike Evans, founding partner of Marketing Alpha, agrees, noting that the battle for new customers is no longer focussed purely on acquiring people from younger demographics.
“The market is becoming more competitive, with disrupters entering who are appealing to a broader demographic (not just younger people), so maintaining market share in this environment is challenging and marketing helps do that.
“Banks are reinforcing their emphasis on service to be seen as more client facing, which is where a lot of advertising is positioned. This is against a backdrop of branch closures and a reliance on digital. The human side of banking has waned a bit and I think that is where banks are trying to change things.”
UK Finance declined to comment.
The increase in marketing spend between 2021 and 2022 by Coventry Building Society
Barclays' total marketing spend in the 2022 calendar year
Lloyds Banking Group's total spend on advertising and promotion in 2022
Warning issued on use of influencers
Companies using brand ambassadors for marketing campaigns have been issued new guidance on the acceptable terminology that influencers should use so followers can recognise a paid-for commercial relationship.
In an update issued in March, the Advertising Standards Authority said its research found that people often
struggle to identify when social media posts by influencers are advertisements.
“At a minimum, the ASA is likely to expect such posts to include a prominent label upfront to highlight that a post is a marketing communication.”
Retail-facing banks and fintechs are increasingly using influencers for content creation such as vlogs, blogs and social media posts.
Starling Bank, for example, used professional footballers Lauren Hemp, Jill Scott MBE and Rachel Yankey MBE as brand ambassadors for its #OurTime campaign, in the lead up to the UEFA Women’s European Championships in 2022.
Lloyds Banking Group, meanwhile, is recruiting students to be on-campus brand ambassadors in 2023, with duties that include “creating engaging social media content”.
In its latest guidance, the ASA said any posts where a commercial relationship exists should be marked “Advertising”, “Ad Feature”, “Advert”, “Ad” or “Advertisement Feature”, dependent on the context and the social media platform.
Virgin enters buy now, pay later market
Virgin Money UK has officially entered the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market with its new consumer credit product “Slyce”.
The company originally launched the new service with a YouTube campaign and a prize draw awarding five winners Virgin Red points (which can be exchanged for flights) and £2,000 in spending money. Customers interested in joining are being added to a waiting list, the company said in a press statement.
The new credit product is targeting adults in Gen Z, born after 1997. The
service has been designed as a partnership between Mastercard and payments company TSYS.
Virgin is offering customers the opportunity to watch changes in their credit score in the app, along with a broader suite of content including polls, videos and written content to educate customers on financial management and how to improve their credit score further.
Hugh Chater, chief commercial officer at Virgin Money, said consumers now expect to be able to pay using BNPL plans and the bank was keen to enter the market with a “regulated credit” offering.
“Importantly, Slyce will help our customers stay in control of their spending while also building their credit score for the future - allowing our customers to buy now, pay better on terms that work for them.”
Any monthly spend over £30 can be spread across three, six, nine or 12-month repayment plans. Paying back in three or six months is fee-free. For longer plans of six and 12 months, an instalment fee is added.
Schroders eyes biodiversity for launch
Schroders Capital has chosen natural capital, biodiversity, and climate change as core areas of focus for the UK’s first ever Long-Term Asset Fund (LTAF).
The open-ended investment fund is designed to give access to illiquid and private assets to a broader range of investors.
The new Capital Climate+ Long-Term Asset Fund (LTAF) is the first of its kind and designed for UK pension fund investors in the net-zero journey. UK master trust “Cushon” – part of the NatWest Group – is the founding investor of the strategy.
Sustainable Finance Awards now open
Entries for this year’s Finance for the future awards are open until Friday 19 May 2023.
Run by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), the awards are designed to showcase companies demonstrating innovation in how they invest or finance projects, with consideration for climate, biodiversity and nature risk issues.
Last year’s winners included Aviva Investors and NatWest Group, with Ceres Accelerator, Moody’s and ETF Partners all highly commended. The ceremony is on 12 October.
Lloyds promotes fintech contest
Lloyds Banking Group is running a competition to find the next big thing in fintech, with the most compelling ideas being invited to a “commercial experiment” with the bank.
The Launch Innovation Programme is open to fintechs interested in participating in a 12 week programme with “expert guidance” from senior figures and subject matter experts at Lloyds Banking Group.
Potentially, successful applicants may receive series B funding, at the discretion of the bank’s fintech investment team. Last year saw car admin software Caura land a £4m investment
Investment marketers afforded more time as regulator delays sustainability rule introduction
UK financial promoters have been advised that planned new rules governing how sustainable investments can be marketed have been pushed back.
At the end of March, the Financial Conduct Authority announced that its planned policy statement on the new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) has been pushed back to the third quarter of 2023.
The planned effective dates for mandatory disclosures, investment labelling and the so-called “anti-greenwashing” rules will also be revised.
“Consumers are at the heart of our proposals for SDR and investment labels,” the FCA said in a statement.
“To create a UK market that functions competitively and effectively, those consumers must be able to trust sustainable investment products.”
The watchdog said that it had enjoyed a significant response to its initial consultation, which resulted in 240 written responses. The regulator said it had been combing
over the submissions since the consultation closed in January, but was adjusting the dates to “take account of the significant response.”
In previous communications, the regulator suggested that around a third of investment funds would not qualify as sustainable under their current guise.
“It is expected that some firms may make changes to their products to meet the criteria for being a sustainable investment, whilst other funds may choose to operate without sustainability disclosure labels,” said Nicola Pangbourne and Ann Dingemans of law firm Kennedys.
“Most of the requirements will not come into force until June 2024 to provide firms with sufficient time to consider their products against the proposed labelling criteria required and choose whether to label their products accordingly.”
In their written analysis, Pangbourne and Dingemans warned that the rules around anti-greenwashing may still come into force earlier than June 2024, however.
Consumers targeted in European sustainable finance drive
Financial organisations across Luxembourg have launched a new initiative to educate consumers on sustainable finance.
The ABBL Foundation for Financial Education, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), the Luxembourg Association of Investment Funds (ALFI) and the Ministry of Consumer Protection collaborated to launch the campaign.
Prior to the launch of this campaign, the four organisations worked on a research study to better understand the levels of understanding of sustainable finance in the wider population.
While respondents acknowledged that the financial industry could play a positive role in the transformation of society, they were unsure about how their money could make a difference. The majority of those interviewed by researchers said they assumed sustainable finance equated to the same thing as “green finance”.
Vous, a marketing and communications agency, was appointed to devise the consumer-facing campaign which combined posters, videos and press promotion with a dedicated website and a Facebook page.
The campaign is designed to raise awareness of sustainable financial products and to inform consumers of the full range of sustainable finance criteria across environmental, social and governance categories.
The initiative aims to equip consumers with sufficient knowledge
to question and compare product providers, and to educate them about ESG considerations, so they can hold informed conversations with their financial advisers or product providers about their investment preferences.
“The European States have made firm commitments to make the ecological transition a success, by allocating significant financial resources,” a spokesman said in a statement.
“The desire to contribute to a better understanding of finance, as well as the desire to mobilise part of private savings for projects allowing the transition to a more sustainable world, are the triggering elements for this campaign.”
Further details on the campaign can be found, in French, German and English, at finance-durable.lu
LGIM partners with German wealth manager
Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) has partnered with wealth management group Gerd Kommer Invest to expand its presence in the German retail market.
The London-based asset management group, which boasts some £1.3 trillion in assets, signed a partnership with the German wealth firm to launch a co-branded fund.
Both companies have yet to announce the launch date for the first “multi-
factor” exchange-traded fund (ETF) as part of the deal, although LGIM confirmed that the ETF will track a global equities index in its preliminary management report to the London Stock Exchange.
“We have recently entered into a partnership with German investment management firm Gerd Kommer Invest, with a view to innovate in the ETF investment space and to launch a co-branded multi-factor global equities
Lloyds markets teenage banking in multi-channel promotion
Lloyds Bank has launched a multi-media consumer campaign promoting bank accounts for 11 to 15 year olds.
Promotional activity for Smart Start, an account for young people to begin budgeting and managing their own finances, began on 11 March and will run across TV, cinema, out-ofhome (OOH), on radio, social media, digital and video on demand.
The campaign was put together by advertising agency adam&eveDDB, with video production firm Smuggler responsible for the direction. YouGov conducted the market research for the audience profiling a year earlier, among more than 500 UK adults who had children in the target age range.
Richard Warren, marketing director at Lloyds Banking Group, explained that the campaign is the seventh advertisement in an eight-year-long campaign.
ETF in due course,” an LGIM spokesperson said in a statement.
“As an innovative provider of investment solutions, LGIM is always exploring opportunities to collaborate with third-party experts in different areas to provide value for its clients.”
LGIM has been aggressively growing its ETF operation across Europe since the acquisition of Canvas, the ETF platform formerly owned by ETF Securities, in 2018.
The advertisement, called simply “Bike” is about a young girl learning to ride a bike. The ad follows her progress between the ages of 11 to 15 as she grows in confidence, supported by the Lloyds Bank “distinctive, iconic, branded asset, the black horse”. The ad is set to the well-known pop song ‘Girl on Fire’ by Alicia Keys.
The bank’s research, conducted by YouGov, found that 85% of parents said they had a degree of influence on where their kids spend their money. The majority – more than 9 in 10 – said they wanted to know where their children were spending their money.
The Smart Start accounts have no monthly fees or charges and allow parents to keep watch of transactions on a parental mobile app. No overdrafts are available and there is the facility to freeze or cancel debit cards issued on the account. Attempted transactions at outlets for adults only will automatically be declined.
In a statement, Emma Abrahams, head of savings at Lloyds Bank, said the account would “give children the ability to manage their money and prioritise how they spend and what they save for, while giving parents visibility and oversight to help them if needed.”
The percentage of parents who say they can influence their kids' spending
The target age demographic for the new Lloyds Bank campaign
The number of people surveyed by YouGov
Why did you call it Rhotic?
There’s more to the name than you might think, explains Joe McGrath, founder and CEO of Rhotic Media.
It has now been five years since I founded Rhotic. (It’s pronounced “roh-tick” by the way.)
In the weeks prior to launch, I knew I wanted to start a company. It certainly would have been easier to have worked as a lone wolf.
But it would have limited my ability to do something that I’d wanted to do my entire working life – create a career pathway for junior talent (from ALL backgrounds), a route into financial journalism and financial services.
Today, I’ve become comfortable with the privilege I enjoy. I’m a middleclass, white, male, business owner and financial journalist. But none of this was handed to me.
Statistically, I shouldn’t be a financial journalist. State school educated, one parent was a supermarket shopworker “on the meat and fish” and the other was a jobbing musician who played gigs in a band and offered mobile music tuition without any formal training. I left technical college with modest grades and was the first person in my immediate family to get a degree.
Proudly Bristol-born and bred, I sounded – obviously - like I was from the West Country until my early 20s. I had an undeniable Rhotic accent. But my ambition to work as a journalist was, apparently, at odds with how I spoke. At various points in my life, I’ve been told be conscious of how I speak.
➥ “You need to adopt received pronunciation to be taken seriously.”
➥ “You won’t become a journalist if you sound like that.”
➥ “Your accent reveals you’re working class.”
➥ “Media employers don’t want people who sound like you.”
The most amusing, looking back, was probably…… “We don’t want no ‘orrrrrses.”
As
an industry, we’ve talked a good game for a long time, but our progress has been glacial.
Before I got my first journalism job, I’d already worked in media for several years. I sold advertising on the local paper for two years, I’d worked in multiple departments at one of the world’s best known financial newspapers… except in editorial (of course), I’d worked in non-editorial departments for customer magazines and for national titles. I also worked for free, part-time, for six months, for a FTSE 100 listed publisher, just so I had a shot at getting a job.
And you know what? I started to change how I spoke. In the years that followed, I worked hard to neutralise the Rs, I adopted phrases and idioms more suited to the home counties. My accent would swing wildly, depending on who I was speaking to. I was afraid that I didn’t belong.
I appreciate socio economic background (where an accent can be a key identifier), is never going to make any list of the oppressed. But the shortcuts and assumptions that employers make because of how people sound, where they were educated, what colour they are, what gender they are, who they date, and so on, still exist.
We all know how atrocious the stats are. I’m not going to signpost the data here, but diversity and inclusion in financial services and journalism is still woeful, whichever metric you’re looking at. As an industry, we’ve talked a good game for a long time, but our progress has been glacial. And it’s hardly surprising.
If you are an employer, I urge you to think about the steps you can take to make real change. This means creating initiatives that widen the entry points in our wonderful industry and enable people from every walk of life to get to the very top.
Some of the people that take these opportunities will need nurturing. It may require an investment. Some of those to whom you offer the opportunity will move on and join other companies. That is ok. I’d rather that, than just stand on a stage bemoaning the lack of progress.
So, why did I call the company Rhotic Media? It is a company that is proud of its people, like I should have been of my accent. My accent and my background didn’t limit my ability or my ambition, it just that other people thought it should.
As I look ahead to next five years, I look forward to working with colleagues and clients that share the vision of a future where “levelling up” is more than just a slogan. Let’s make those statistics change and create careers for anyone with the potential… accent or no accent. Who’s with me? ◆
Promoting pensions
Marketing a membership organisation requires an understanding of audience, regulatory developments, and third-party stakeholders. Ed Bogira is juggling all this and more.
Words: Joe McGrath
For UK institutional investors, there is a standout conference on the events calendar each year – the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s Investment Conference.
The Edinburgh convention is the largest gathering of institutional investors in the UK and, this year, takes place between 6 – 8 June at the EICC.
Edward Bogira is the PLSA’s head of digital and communications. He has the task of promoting the event while simultaneously juggling the organisation’s objectives as laid out in its threeyear strategy.
Core to these goals is improving pensions policy. In 2023, that is a particularly busy task with an extraordinary number of issues to be covered.
“Improving pensions adequacy is the main strategic aim,” Bogira explains. “There are more practical or regulatory aims in the areas of pensions dashboards, defined benefit funding, responsible investment, local government pension scheme issues, defined contribution (DC) decumulation and value for money.”
The event programme for this year’s investment conference is a reflection of areas where members are seeking information, the macroeconomic challenges facing business members, and the government’s regulatory agenda which continues to provide themes for exploration.
The convention always pulls in the big names and this year is no different, with City minister Andrew Griffith delivering a plenary in the main auditorium on day one and political broadcaster Robert Peston wrapping things up on the final day.
The agenda is no accident, of course. The association has been working to build attendance levels back to the numbers seen before the pandemic. Bogira says that the PLSA uses its events to bring the industry together behind the organisation’s policy, so it’s important to get the content mix right and ensure that delegates are of the right profile.
“Engaging our members effectively, so we maintain our very high retention rates, and making sure we understand how the market is changing and what they need, is obviously critical for a membership body,” he says.
The PLSA’s comms lead says marrying the business objectives with the marketing plan is relatively straightforward, as the association is naturally a collaborative place. That also means it can feed data and insight on products and services into the next development round.
“You have to use the data to keep things aligned, and you have to ensure that marketing is part of the design of a product,” Bogira says. “You can’t
just create something you think people should want and then sell it to them with a bit of clever messaging at the end of the line.”
This member-focussed mentality is exactly the reason why the PLSA has been careful with messaging about its centennial celebrations in 2023.
“Who wants to see a load of selfcongratulation on LinkedIn during a cost-of-living crisis?” Bogira says. “We are bringing out the strength of our history, or ‘leveraging our brand heritage’ as a marketing director should say.
“We’ve been here a long time and we’ve done great things, so let’s remind our members of the strength of that history and that we’re always here for them.”
The PLSA’s established influence on the UK institutional investment scene serves more than just its members, of course. Marketing managers from asset managers, custodian banks and support service providers regularly sponsor and support the organisation’s events.
“As well as helping our members with the challenges they face, the PLSA is a marketplace for bringing pension funds and people who supply services together,” Bogira says.
“Away from that, you’ve seen, through campaigns like ‘Pensions Attention’, the power of trade associations working together to do something new and positive.”
In the weeks ahead, the trade group will begin its next major piece of work - its biennial member perceptions audit. “This will inform our strategic development as an organisation,” says Bogira. ◆
Everything, everywhere, all at once
At ALFI’s 2023 European Asset Management Conference, institutional marketers set out their stall for the year ahead, with services for ESG data clarity, digital asset innovation and risk management.
Words: Joe McGrath
For investment marketers looking to target Europeans, the annual conference hosted by the Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry (ALFI) is one of the most important in the calendar.
Hosted over two days, the European Asset Management Conference is sponsored by the world’s largest financial institutions, including BNP Paribas, Citi, State Street and UBS.
As the largest country for funds in UCITS or AIF structures, Luxembourg has 27% of the European market, according to EFAMA’s 2022 Asset Management Report, so it’s easy to see why the conference is such a draw for banks, asset managers, policymakers, asset owners and marketers alike.
While this year’s regulatory keynote from the European Securities and Markets Authority chairperson, Verena Ross, focussed on the ongoing concerns about the vulnerability of money market funds, exhibitors on the conference floor were engaged in a broader set of discussions.
The marketing collateral in the exhibitors’ hall was relatively broad. Common themes included debt risk management, ESG data accuracy, innovation in alternatives and operational transformation.
On the main stage, the discussion on the digital tokenisation of mainstream asset classes was standout, and sufficiently stimulating to keep conference delegates in the main hall during the first part of the day one lunchbreak.
Day one came to a close with a discussion on ESG, featuring Fidelity International and Macquarie Asset Management, where panellists
We have been working with a French start up to improve the usefulness of ESG datasets.
Henri Berthe Product Manager, Linedata
gave a very honest assessment of the challenges that asset management marketers currently face due to unclear regulatory concepts in ESG.
The day two session on asset allocation, meanwhile, gave financial promoters more to ponder, particularly given that the conference was taking place just days after the Credit Suisse/ UBS deal was agreed. Delegates heard how there is likely to be much more promotional activity in the coming months focussed on inflation-linked bonds, tech-focussed private market opportunities, infrastructure, commodities and energy, due to ongoing market uncertainty.
ESG: The next chapter
It wasn’t that long ago that investment marketers had hoped that the interpretation of ambiguous ESG terms would become a thing of the past after the European Union published its initial taxonomy.
This classification system was supposed to create a list – which industry leaders signed off on – that would set rules around the description of specific activities and approaches. The days where ‘impact investment’ was used to describe any investment that had a consequence should have been numbered.
At this year’s conference, however, delegates heard that, while numerous industry parties worked to agree the boundaries of the original taxonomy (effected July 2020), there remains room for interpretation. This has left the potential for marketers to face allegations of greenwashing when their interpretation differs to that of their peers.
To add to the complexity, the UK, which “onshored” the EU taxonomy after Brexit, was supposed to be pushing ahead with its own UK Green Taxonomy, but this project has now been delayed, with a new timeline not yet published at the time of writing.
While, on the main stage, delegates heard about the problems from ambiguity and the taxonomy, exhibitors in the conference hall were discussing problems arising from a lack of standardisation of data. The latter was a central marketing theme for several securities services exhibitors at the event, including Linedata.
Speaking to Financial Promoter, Henri Berthe, a product manager for Linedata’s asset management business line, explained that the company had been
holding multiple conversations with asset managers and depositary banks at the conference to improve ESG compliance.
“It has become common for organisations to struggle with ESG data because providers supply it in such different formats,” he said, referencing the differences between data provision from S&P, Sustainalytics, MSCI and Arabesque as examples.
At this year’s Asset Management Conference in Luxembourg, Linedata was showcasing its compliance, risk and oversight services, including a new tool that gathers ESG data from multiple sources and standardises the output.
“We have been working with a French start up to improve the usefulness of ESG datasets,” Berthe explained. “Clients want reliable data and they are telling us that they have regulatory concerns relating to ESG and level two implementation of SFDR (the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation).”
Berthe is a long-time supporter of the conference, stating that the event is particularly useful for showcasing services to potential buyers and acting as a meeting place for peers with whom collaboration may be possible.
Tokenisation and digital tech
Another company with an established presence at the event is State Street, the US banking giant. This year, the bank presented insights from its proprietary research on the main stage, detailing the growing interest in the digital tokenisation of mainstream asset classes. Luxembourg was a solid choice for the presentation, given the country’s progressive regulations on digital ledger technology and tokenisation.
State Street’s discussion panel included Nasir Zubairi, chief executive of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology Foundation, an organisation which is conducting its own survey on trends in crypto assets – the second such piece of research.
Zubairi was keen to underscore that the pace of change in tokenisation was now quickening, with mainstream players in capital markets now considering how this will affect their future products, services and operations. He recalled a visit to London a few weeks earlier where he discussed the complexities of establishing crypto sub-funds with the chief executives of both Abrdn and Man Group.
For State Street, however, one major piece of work is exploring the potential for further innovation in money market funds, according to Luke Brereton, global head of client acquisition for GlobalLink and State Street Digital.
“Tokenisation of money market funds is one of the big projects we are working on this year,” Brereton told delegates. “We work with institutional investors, and it is clear there is a drive to get these funds tokenised.”
Brereton explained that futureminded asset managers need to “have an appreciation” of the potential of new technologies, but it was the responsibility of service providers, like State Street, to bring emerging business solutions forward.
“The conversations I have with asset managers around the world is that people are looking at their value chain and how they can compress that. They are asking ‘how do I get closer to the end investor?’ and this is just one component which could help them to execute on those plans. Over the past year or so, the emergence of tokenisation has dominated our conversations with clients.”
Left to right: Nasir Zubairi, LHoFT Foundation; Dimitrij Gede, Deutsche Digital Assets; Luke Brereton, State Street; James Redgrave, State Street
Stronger
Left to right: Keren Miles-Perrott, Sarah Freeland, Jayne Fieldhouse and Louise Somers
together
A global rebranding initiative, a multi-jurisdictional change programme and hyper-aggressive growth targets face RBC GAM’s senior marketers this year, but they are not phased in the slightest.
Words: Joe McGrath
David Cotter
Pictures:
Corporate integrations are an agonising and fretful affair. When Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to become PwC in 1998, staff continued to identify as “legacy Coopers” or “legacy Price Waterhouse” long into the early 2000s.
The ill-fated Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merger, meanwhile, became an academic case study in the importance of integrating cultures. Both businesses were ultimately unable to marry approaches to operations, personnel, and sales. Managing change, internally and externally, is hard.
The extent to which any rebrand is successful rests largely with senior leaders in marketing. In fact, it is one of the big business tasks where marketing can truly show the value of the function.
Corporate communication is the key conduit en route to a successful integration. Senior marketers must digest corporate objectives and create an environment that fosters internal collaboration and outward-facing unity. For it to be done well, it requires listening, strategic thinking, repositioning, tactical manoeuvring, and agenda setting.
It is this particular mountain which the marketing team at RBC Global Asset Management are part way through scaling. Leading the expedition is Jayne Fieldhouse, the company’s global head of institutional marketing.
“When two businesses come together, it is going to be bumpy,” she admits. “Erich (Gerth, CEO of RBC BlueBay) talks about stages of grief. When I brought the regional institutional marketing teams together into a global team, we went through something similar.”
In the UK, where Fieldhouse is based, BlueBay Asset Management rebranded as RBC BlueBay in July 2022. The move was part of a wider global initiative designed to distinguish the investment businesses owned by the Canadian banking group through a series of recognisable sub-brands.
These cobranded and client-centric identities were chosen to showcase RBC GAM’s expertise and market understanding in the different regional territories.
RBC GAM is now the umbrella term for all of RBC’s
institutional asset management businesses, globally. Underneath that sits a series of region-specific RBC brands with which client groups in that locality will be more familiar.
RBC BlueBay is the brand used for RBC GAM’s institutional business outside of North America. It consists of the two former legacy businesses of RBC GAM UK and BlueBay Asset Management. RBC BlueBay will also be the brand used for the institutional presence in EMEA and APAC regions.
In Canada, the group’s institutional business carries the RBC logo with the PH&N Institutional anchorage of the legacy brand. In the US, all operations are under the RBC GAM brand, as are the retail operations in Canada.
“We know that outside North America, the BlueBay name is very strong,” Fieldhouse explains. “Clients said they did not want to lose the brand. We got the same feedback for the PH&N name as well, so we have recognised the importance of brand and culture, but we still have the RBC umbrella brand over the top.
“In Europe, with brand awareness in new markets, it is easier in some respects, as we are going to market as RBC BlueBay.”
It’s worth noting that BlueBay’s relationship with RBC is nothing new. The Canadian bank has owned BlueBay since 2010, but initially took the decision to maintain a federation of brands, post-acquisition.
The decision to bring these collective brands closer together is a logical one, but requires additional work internally, as well as externally.
During the initial weeks of the transition, the leadership team met with every single person in the business, some in small groups, others in one-to-one settings. The CEOs of both RBC BlueBay and RBC Global Asset Management have talked at length about the importance of culture.
“We have leaders in both businesses that really care about how we feel,” says Alexandra Rhys-Jones, senior director, Marketing, at RBC BlueBay. “They put themselves out there, held town halls and have had multiple touch points. That makes a big difference. →
We are quite intense as a team. We expect a lot from people when they come in and there is a delivery level which is not comfortable for many. We are very careful in our recruitment. We look for a hungry spirit. If they are not a team player, that won’t work for us.
Jayne Fieldhouse
→ “The leadership team were not just delivering a message. They were genuinely listening.”
Fieldhouse adds that, while the legacy cultures of both BlueBay and RBC GAM were slightly different, there are many qualities which are similar, such as colleagues possessing huge amounts of drive, determination, and ambition.
“One of the things I’ve tried to do is around transparency and collaboration,” she says. “It is not perfect, but there is a lot we are trying to achieve together.
“In January, we did an offsite where we had a breakout session to identify solutions to four problems. We have continued those groups so there is more ownership of problem solving.”
Firm but fair
Fieldhouse, as leader of the newly merged global marketing function, has been keen to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their respective areas through setting clear expectations.
“An integration isn’t necessarily right for everyone,” she admits. “There is a journey you take people on, but if that isn’t going to work for an individual, it is important to marry the nice with the tough.”
Fieldhouse assumed her current role in April 2022, having worked as partner, and head of communications and marketing at BlueBay Asset Management for seven years before that. She joined from JP Morgan Asset Management where she spent a significant chunk of her formative career in the corporate communications team. Before this, she worked in various roles in public relations and business development.
Her experience has shaped how she thinks about the skillset required in a global marketing function. At the newly combined business, she recognises that her team’s approach, striving for high performance within a busy, objective-driven environment, may not hold universal appeal.
“It may not be the right culture for everyone,” she says. “We are quite intense as a team. We expect a lot from people when they come in and there is a delivery level which is not comfortable for many. We are very careful in our recruitment. We look for a hungry spirit. If they are not a team player, that won’t work for us.”
Being clear about the corporate culture from the outset, has allowed RBC BlueBay to assemble an impressive squad of senior marketers in the London office.
In a hiring market sometimes deemed “difficult” by UK HR leaders, the London office has managed to attract some phenomenally well-known talent.
In December, the business onboarded Louise Somers as director of investment communications. Somers is the former head of global communications at Architas. A month later, she was joined by Keren Miles-Perrott, a former M&G corporate comms director, who has now taken up the same role at RBC BlueBay, covering a maternity role.
The two new joiners will work alongside RBC BlueBay’s director of digital marketing, Sarah Freeland, who has worked with the business for just under five years and Alexandra Rhys-Jones, the company’s senior marketing director, with prior experience at BMO GAM, Credit Suisse and Lloyd’s of London, among others.
“We look for people who will take ownership, be accountable and fully understand that accountability,” Rhys-Jones explains, her colleagues nodding in agreement.
“The business is a true meritocracy,” Fieldhouse adds. “It wants people to take initiative, it is welcomed, and people get rewarded for it. But you also get found out if you are not credible and you don’t push forward.”
At this point in the interview, the pace quickens. Every colleague is keen to be involved in the discussion.
“It is that curious mindset that we try to find, says Freeland. “Someone who has the maturity to be able to manage upwards and within the wider business objectives.
“We are looking for individuals who are able to partner with sales and not just perform a delivery function. They must be able to embrace the strategic inputs. That individual is quite unique in our industry, but it sets us apart. Trying to find those people can be a challenge.”
It’s clear that the team are incredibly proud of their work ethic, their quality of output and, crucially, the results they have achieved collectively.
The no-nonsense clarity on corporate culture, personal objectives, and boundaries is essential if the team are to achieve the ambitious business objectives set by RBC GAM at group level.
Good relations
As noted by Freeland, RBC GAM’s global marketing leadership team works in parallel with the sales leadership team. Crucially, marketing stands alone as a credible partner, it does not report into the sales function.
The result is that sales and marketing have a collaborative relationship where they share information, where marketing enjoys the same level of seniority and has the power of veto in instances where an initiative is unlikely to generate the necessary return on investment.
The marketing strategy is built from the overall business objectives and runs alongside the branding strategy. With the branding element bedding in, strategic marketing has a heavy growth-focus in 2023.
“Most of the areas we are in are growth areas for North America and EMEA APAC,” says Fieldhouse. “RBC BlueBay is focussed on growing its financial institution clients (such as fund platforms, wealth managers, private banks, etc. In the US, we are targeting overall growth in fixed income and in Canada, we are working to grow our alternatives capability, while staying relevant to our core client base.” →
THE CANADIAN PERSPECTIVE
Today, PH&N Institutional sits within the RBC Global Asset Management federation of brands. The subsidiary is the Canadian institutional arm of RBC GAM and is somewhat ahead of RBC BlueBay on the rebranding journey, having started its rebrand just over three years ago.
Leading the project, on the ground, is marketing director Lisa Leong McPhee, who has been with the business since January 2018. She explains that some of the milestones RBC BlueBay has passed, follow a similar trend to PH&N Institutional.
“People in Canada knew we belonged to RBC GAM… but our materials were a bit inconsistent so we wanted to bring that together. It’s a bit like BlueBay in that the BlueBay brand also holds a lot of value.
“All of RBC GAM’s businesses are in different stages of maturity. In Canada, with PH&N Institutional, we are very well established and institutional clients know who we are. We have a really strong reputation.”
Historically, PH&N Institutional was renowned for its credentials in fixed income but it has worked hard in recent years to showcase what it does in other asset classes. Another similarity with the legacy BlueBay business is that it has a value proposition focussed on quality. This has a major influence on how it anchors its marketing, including entering –and winning – the Greenwich
Quality Leader awards for the past nine years. The Canadian operation’s approach to marketing does have its differences, though.
PH&N Institutional’s editor works with the other areas of RBC GAM such as the corporate governance and responsible investment teams, but the Canadian offshoot works with content in a different way.
While it repurposes some of the content from RBC GAM and RBC BlueBay, this is tailored to specific client groups. Similarly, its own content follows a more ad hoc timetable, but when content is to be deployed, it is done in a deep dive with specific Canadian institutions in mind.
The approach to events, social media and client communications are also different from some of their colleagues in other jurisdictions.
“Historically, with things like social media, we were very reluctant whereas RBC GAM is pro social media. We now use it as a tool to drive traffic to our thought leadership,” Leong McPhee explains. “On social media, we have demonstrated there absolutely is value but it is still not our main channel.
“We do measure engagement, though. If we get one engagement, but it was from a big client, then that is worth it, and the number of clicks don’t matter. It goes against a lot of what is happening in today’s world where people are interested in how many people are reading, and for how long.
“PH&N Institutional clients have high expectations and expect white glove service,” Leong McPhee, says. This is why the business focusses much of its marketing on face-to-face activities. These include event sponsorships and proprietary events.
“Our roadshow is called PH&N Perspectives,” she says. “We are going to 11 cities this year. We host three or four different seminars and so much of our resources are dedicated to this. It is our premier event, and it shows what we are all about. Client service at these events is top notch. The way we do business is different to other regions, because of our history.”
Lisa Leong McPhee Marketing Director
PH&N Institutional
→ In the Nordic region, the company is also investing on expanding its marketing efforts instead of using a placement agent, as it has done previously.
“This year has been around client touch points, client engagement and some lead generation, too. It’s all about getting in front of clients,” Fieldhouse explains. “We do bottom up country/territory plans. These align with both the sales strategy and the business strategy.”
Spending wisely
When pressed on the specifics of the current marketing activities, the team note they have been able to achieve considerable ROI on limited budgets.
“We know that we are very strong on thought leadership,” says Fieldhouse. “We also know that we have been able to build a platform that allows us to deliver that thought leadership.”
The business has invested considerable time in developing its technologies, so it can use its thought leadership to entice prospects, and existing clients, to engage with the business more frequently. In addition to creating strategic content assets, the business has also invested in a tech platform which allows it to gather information about the profile of its clients and the challenges they are experiencing.
“We have spent a lot of time making sure our tech stack is aligned with sales,” Freeland explains. “That translates to lead generation. We have been working directly with our sales stakeholders to get an understanding of what clients want and what ‘touch points’ across the digital sphere we can leverage to bring these leads to sales in a qualified way.”
Freeland explains that the digital marketing body of work has included some aggressive timelines with the key objective to deliver leads.
What works in Switzerland is different to what works in Italy. In Switzerland, the market is far more ‘pay to play’ and PR is more difficult. In Italy, we have a strong PR agency, but we marry that with advertorial spend. It is very bottom-up. It is about the proliferation of content and activity.
Jayne Fieldhouse
“We use multiple digital channels to drive traffic to our website, which is the core integration for us with our CRM platform. That is the centre of the digital universe that we have engineered.”
Rhys-Jones is quick to note that this approach was not something they have achieved in weeks or even months, however. “It has taken years to get to this point,” she adds. “When you are building a digital platform, it has to be in stages.”
What is most impressive about RBC GAM and RBC BlueBay’s approach overall is that they have married the long-term digital project with the immediate needs emanating from the external environment. The company continues to sweep up clients in institutional markets across all of its main target segments.
Fieldhouse says that information gathered from working on the digital platform has been put together with other sales and marketing groundwork to build a deep picture of clients, and potential clients, in every geography. She uses their approach to owned-content, earned-media and paid for placements, as an example:
“What works in Switzerland is different to what works in Italy. In Switzerland, the market is far more ‘pay to play’ and PR is more difficult. In Italy, we have a strong PR agency, but we marry that with advertorial spend. It is very bottom-up. It is about the proliferation of content and activity.”
Given the scale and proliferation of marketing activity at RBC BlueBay, RBC GAM and PH&N, it would be easy to assume that the board had significantly loosened the purse-strings with budgets in recent years, but Fieldhouse maintains that is not the case.
“We’re not talking silly dollars,” she says. “This has been about building something that is robust and make sense. You can’t do lead generation off of a bad website. It needs strong user journeys and a good CMS.
“Erich (Gerth, CEO of RBC BlueBay) and Mike Lee (North American Institutional head at RBC GAM) are very supportive. I can go in and say ‘we need to do this’. We may not get all the money, but we will get their backing in driving the project forward, but, if we mess it up, it is on us.”
Looking ahead
While the team acknowledge the progress made to date, they have also carved out an ambitious programme of objectives for the rest of 2023.
“Asset owners are going to look for more partnership opportunities,” Fieldhouse says. “We are focussed on being more product-agnostic and listening to client problems, rather than just selling our funds.
“The challenge for us is to filter through and make sure we are answering client problems. We are not perfect, but it is a mandate I have given to every single one of these guys.”
The addition of Miles-Perrott to the team is almost perfectly timed, given the product-neutral agenda which has been laid out. A ‘Returner’, having taken two years out to begin a family, she is a respected entity on the circuit, having previously directed corporate communications (UK and Asia) at M&G earlier in her career. Prior to that she worked on a host of blue chip client accounts at global communications agency FTI Consulting.
She says her time out from the industry has allowed her to spot some noticeable differences in the landscape, since her return.
“Coming back, I’ve really noticed the increased regulatory scrutiny,” she says. “The marketing team have to be much more cognisant of what they can, and can’t, do. That is an added layer of complexity to comms.”
“ESG is at the pointy end of that”, Fieldhouse interjects. “We talk about ‘the credible’. How do we demonstrate we are credible in ESG without coming across as greenwashing? This is about being product agnostic and making sure we answer a prospect’s needs.”
Credibility, of course, will ultimately extend from marketing being able to accurately capture the essence of this newly integrated, global beast. But, from these detailed plans, the marketing strategy, at least, looks set to give the business every chance of achieving its aims. ◆
THE US PERSPECTIVE
Director, Marketing & Communications
Across the international marketing functions, Maryanne Sheehan is RBC GAM’s longest serving member and looks after all efforts in the US, whether strategic, product-related, sales support or digital.
Her decade-long relationship with RBC GAM means she has seen more than most, yet she is incredibly positive about how the new centralised marketing approach has enabled the team to “break down silos” between distribution and marketing.
Her current priorities are to integrate BlueBay into the wider RBC GAM business and to actively promote BlueBay’s fixed income expertise on the ground in the US.
“That is a key driver for our revenue generation,” she says. “We have the RBC master brand and the BlueBay investment brand that we are messaging and communicating within the US. We view raising brand awareness and BlueBay’s subject matter expertise as integral to our efforts.”
Sheehan is a formidable force in US institutional marketing. Her career has included director-level positions at Eaton Vance and Allegiant Asset Management and a decade clocked up at Natixis prior to that.
This experience allows her to make solid, critical, assessments of the competitive landscape in the US and beyond. When asked about how she is positioning BlueBay in the States, she notes the current geopolitical
landscape as an important consideration.
“Political, geographical and exogenous events have provided considerations for how we market our capabilities. BlueBay has strong emerging market debt expertise, of which we have spent a good deal of our efforts raising awareness.
“We have added US fixed income products into a crowded space in the States. It is important that we differentiate BlueBay within the highly mature US fixed income marketplace.”
Sheehan notes this year’s major market-moving events in her assessment of the geopolitical landscape. The emergency sale of Credit Suisse and the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank are front of mind.
“It isn’t just what is going on in the US anymore….” she says. “….it is what is happening across the world and dissecting how that is impacting markets, and our clients.”
In terms of her approach, Sheehan explains that the US strategy is multi-faceted.
“We are doing a lot of both ‘earned’ and ‘paid’ media. We have embraced e-distribution, digital technologies, the use of expressed preferences and we are going out with sophisticated and differentiated content.”
Her team runs an events strategy alongside the main communications operation. Around half of the events this year are devoted to amplifying BlueBay’s expertise through third party conferences. This is supported by a host of podcasts and webinars.
“All of these techniques are integrated. They are pushing people to our website for deeper engagement,” she says. “We closely monitor feedback with our social outreach, we use A/B testing which is highly targeted both geographically and demographically.
“The effectiveness of each post is monitored, and we are applying those learnings to subsequent posts. We are leveraging the feedback and behaviours to help us exploit and optimise our strategy further.”
Maryanne Sheehan
RBC GAM
EDITOR’S EYE
Helen Lewer
Less is more on ESG
The importance of ESG investing means companies produce vast reams of content on the various related sub-themes. But is this really the best strategy?
Browsing Rhotic Media’s vast content library, I was struck by the volume of copy we produce on one theme alone – sustainable investing. And with financial services under growing pressure by regulators and investors to demonstrate their green credentials and social mindfulness, commissions for blogs, features, news analysis, white papers and reports on the topic keep filtering in.
So, this has got me wondering of late whether the sector is getting close to ESG information saturation. From my editorial perch, it can sometimes feel that way. Everything that needs saying, has been said – several times over. The same terminology, the same mantras and sweeping statements appear repeatedly. So much so, it’s becoming difficult to distinguish one firm’s messaging from another’s.
Getting it right
Let me caveat the above. I’m in no way advocating for the sector to dumb down the importance of ESG in all its guises. Nor am I lobbying for any abandonment of firms waxing lyrical on their netzero or impact investing goals and successes to date. For sustainability, particularly in relation to the climate crisis, is mission critical and must remain a top-line item to address. The financial sector has, after all, a key role to play in the global cause.
But overcommunication can risk diluting the message and, worse, raises the menacing spectre of audience fatigue. And other than reputational damage, that is probably a marketing/ PR department’s worst nightmare.
This is a concern I’m beginning to hear come up in conversation with a bit more regularity. And that is positive. It indicates an awareness among marketing professionals and content creators, alike, of a need to work harder to make their sustainability story stand out from the crowd if they are to
keep their audiences engaged.
It is a challenge that will require deeper thinking on how to present ESG perspectives, objectives and achievements in a fresh, more imaginative way; finding unique selling points to differentiate a firm’s contribution to solving climate change conundrums from competitors.
Quality trumps quantity
For my pennies worth, when it comes to content, quality always trumps quantity. So, now is a good time to take a pause on ESG messaging and consider whether we are collectively, as an industry, presenting new insight to the market on this topic.
I’m reminded at this point of an analogy that Rhotic’s chief client officer, Elizabeth Pfeuti – a storyteller extraordinaire if ever there was one –shared as I was busying myself writing this column. It struck a chord.
Keeping the ESG narrative sounding original and newsworthy, she said, is akin to the latest pop sensation tasked with following up a highly successful platinum-selling first album with a second of equal quality. It’s not an easy task, and why many end up
one-hit wonders. The most successful, on the other hand, find a way to reinvent themselves.
Content that empowers a company to stay memorable to its current audience, and capture the attention of potential new business, is worth its weight in gold. So, in the world of sustainable investing communications, give serious consideration as to whether another text-dense annual survey report or white paper is the best way to achieve that, unless it is presenting truly ground-breaking information.
Time poor audiences
Readers today are more time pressured than ever. We all know this. Few have the desire to digest a 10page plus document from cover to cover. The art is to convey your ESG message with brevity. And the more solutions-focused, the better.
Consider, for example, a series of short case studies than home in on how your business has handled and overcome specific ESG problems, or an interactive data-led infographic that showcases the journey to a successful outcome.
Have discussions with your clients about their ESG concerns – this is often a useful barometer of the issues to spotlight in your content.
Next time you face pressure to circulate more information on sustainable investing, pose this question: Are you adding anything new to the debate or telling a different story about your business’s contribution to ESG? Are you offering insight or answers to clients’ pressing questions?
Content churn for the sake of being seen to have an opinion may not be a value-add to the business’s marketing efforts. Sometimes, less is more. ◆
Lewer is Editor in Chief of Rhotic Media
Helen
Building the future
In a consumer market littered with failures, it takes guts and strategic brilliance to succeed where others have not. Moneyfarm and M&G think they have both.
Words: Joe McGrath
Rising inflation, high energy prices, steadily increasing interest rates and a cost of living crisis.
It’s certainly not the textbook market environment within which to launch a new retail investing proposition. And yet, in the autumn of 2022, a joint venture between Moneyfarm and M&G began testing for a new investing app.
The entirely new “&me” proposition is the result of both organisations wanting to increase their footprint in the direct-to-consumer space, off the back of substantial growth in the UK direct investing market in recent years.
According to the figures quoted when the JV was announced, direct personal investing had seen assets under management grow to £351 billion by the end of June 2021.
However, gaining a foothold in consumer investment market is far harder than the figures suggest. Recent years have been littered with expensive launches, which later withered and died.
BlackRock-backed Scalable Capital quit the UK in 2021 to focus instead on the German market. Moola, the platform founded by TV personality Gemma Godfrey, was sold to JLT Employee Benefits in 2018, but later closed in 2020, while Investec’s Click & Invest brand lasted just two years before it was shuttered in 2019.
As anybody in investments knows, past performance does
not determine future behaviours. And, having announced a “digital wealth partnership” in January 2022, M&G and Moneyfarm set to work on creating their new brand. Initially, M&G took the lead on the brand creation and Moneyfarm was commissioned to work on the tech delivery. However, as the two organisations started working more closely, M&G embraced Moneyfarm’s business-to-consumer (B2C) approach, eventually asking them to lead on marketing strategy across all channels.
Talent spotting
As both businesses started planning their strategic objectives for the initial years of the new brand, they started to look for an experienced marketer to lead the take-to-market strategy.
Given the product set was investment-focussed, some might have opted for a seasoned investment marketer, or perhaps a corporate comms lead with an experience in finance. But they did neither.
In September 2022, Moneyfarm appointed lifelong consumer goods marketer Shweta Sharma to lead the brand launch of &me. It was a world away from Sharma’s previous roles, but her consumer knowledge would prove invaluable. In the month’s that followed, she would use her experience at GSK, Akzo Nobel, Premier Foods, Revlon and Unilever to success.
“When I came here, I asked why everyone in investment talks like that,” she said in an interview with Financial Promoter. “Everything felt like a boilerplate legal requirement. We worked intensively with behaviour consultants to refine it.”
Sharma explains that work on the tone of voice for &me was one of the most significant pieces of work for her team. It is also an agenda that has continued to this day.
These efforts required extensive discussions with both M&G and Moneyfarm because Sharma wanted to avoid investment jargon, phrasing or compliance talk. →
"When I came here, I asked why everyone in investment talks like that. Everything felt like a boilerplate legal requirement. We worked intensively with behaviour consultants to refine it."
→
On occasion, this required support from senior leaders within M&G, as it was an entirely new approach to marketing communications for the investment firm.
“The leadership team at M&G have been amazing. They understand that we were trying to create something different. They really helped us to get it across the line.”
Establishing priorities
When Sharma joined, a clutch of new agencies were appointed at the same time. Together, they started work on the strategy for the year ahead. So far, this has been a magnificent illustration of how agencies with different specialisms can pull together to achieve a shared goal.
London-based Camarco was the appointed lead on public relations, All Response Media (ARM) on advertising, Wunderhood for television, and influencer agency, Goat, for digital marketing.
All parties on the delivery side were supported by market research from Flood & Partners to better understand both the audience segments. This was in addition to separate research from Kantar to appreciate how consumers felt about the initial drafts of the creative before launch.
“Everybody needed to follow the timeline,” Sharma recalls. “It was important to keep everyone together and updated so the whole campaign looked like one hymn sheet, but the approach of collaborative working helped the creative development process immensely.”
By December 2022, all agencies were brought together to share the feedback from Kantar and to discuss any necessary adjustments prior to the launch of the out-of-home (OOH) element of the campaign in early 2023.
OOH was traditionally an advertising term for any activity that reached potential buyers outside of the home. This was historically billboard posters or bus stop advertising. More recently, the OOH market has also become more varied, expanding to include advertising on street furniture, at supermarkets, sports grounds and even at medical centres and pubs. On 27 February 2023, the OOH element of the campaign began.
Identifying the target market
“When you start building a brand, you are trying to create awareness and build trust. You need to clearly define your audience, develop the brand’s identity and share your values,” Sharma explains.
We are not trying to offend crypto advisers (in any shape or form), we are just trying to use humour to show that there are people who can fool the market into thinking they can make people rich, quickly.
Shweta Sharma
For &me, this meant establishing a strong online presence, supported by OOH and television media plans, but it also meant establishing a positive customer experience for clients going to the website or downloading the app for the first time.
The market research for the new joint venture was substantial. It enabled the launch team to divide the consumer investment market down into five, distinct groups. Of these groups, the researchers identified three key consumer categories with a preference for investing without financial advisers or intermediaries. Together, they equated to just over two thirds of the UK population.
The first of the three groups that &me decided to pursue were to become its core market. This group of selfdirected investors already had an ISA or a JISA elsewhere, but were found to be interested in joining a new provider, as long as they perceived the provider to be the right fit.
The second group were novice investors without an adviser. The research found there were 2.5 million individuals within this category across the UK. This group have not started investing beyond their work-based pension schemes and they typically are interested in learning more about investing, after substantial volumes of self-directed research.
Finally, there are the “uber investors”, a group of highly competent but knowledgeable individuals, who prefer to make their investments without the input of a financial adviser or intermediary. This group are by far the smallest of the three segmented categories.
Building the creative
Having united the agencies and internal stakeholders around the approach, identified the target audience, agreed the style, tone and brand guidelines, Sharma started to nurture the various assets for the creative.
In their discussions on the initial approach, the launch team made several observations about the current consumer marketplace. Noteworthy was how the role of experts had been eroded in recent years, often in favour of influencers who had no significant background or knowledge of investment.
This concerned the team, particularly given they had identified that around 2.5 million of their potential audience were complete novices.
As a result, they decided to cultivate an edgy, tongue-in-cheek, campaign which highlighted the ridiculousness of taking investment advice from unknown social media personalities, rather than looking to experienced and knowledgeable individuals from the world of investment.
“Reliable advice probably doesn’t come from cryptok1ng69,” laughs Sharma, quoting a line from the new campaign. “When everyone has got an opinion on investing, go with a lifetime of expertise.”
While amusing, this campaign is a huge departure from the usual “safe” approach to consumer marketing from sister brand M&G Investments, both in terms of language, style and tone. It is also incredibly near the knuckle, following a torrid time for cryptocurrency investments, which saw many inexperienced consumers lose the majority of their principal sum.
“We had to get that message approved because we didn’t want to offend anyone,” Sharma explains.
“At the same time, we didn’t want this idea to get lost in compliance approvals, so we pushed hard and the leadership team signed it off.
“We are not trying to offend crypto advisers (in any shape or form), we are just trying to use humour to show that there are people who can fool the market into thinking they can make people rich, quickly.”
Sharma likens the advice of fictional influencer “cryptok1ng69” to the comments she received when she was pregnant. Notably, that everybody felt entitled to say something.
“Even those who didn’t have a child used to give me advice. It was just one of those things. Everybody put their two cents in. This strategy is the same.
CAREER IN FOCUS
Shweta Sharma &me Investing
Senior Brand Marketing Manager
September 2022 - Present
GSK Brand Consultant
November 2021 - September 2022
Maternity leave / consulting February 2019 - November 2021
AkzoNobel
Senior Brand Manager, Dulux July 2018 - February 2019
Scott’s Miracle Gro Company Marketing Manager March 2016 – June 2018
Premier Foods Brand Manager May 2014 - March 2016
Revlon Brand Manager May 2013 - May 2014
Unilever Assistant Brand Manager January 2013 - March 2013
In a world where everybody has an opinion on investing, we are bringing the truth to life.”
Measuring success
On 31 January 2023, the &me brand launched fully to the public, although the app, and some other test elements were launched earlier. Sharma was aware that launching the brand in the middle of a gloomy consumer finance environment would mean a degree of pragmatism in terms of what could be achieved.
“But, it is important to remember that the environment is ever changing,” she says. “The consumer confidence index goes up and down. Trustpilot reviews are a good benchmark for this. When markets go up, Trustpilot reviews go up. When the market goes down, Trustpilot reviews go down.
“That said, even in the current market, we are expecting those paying higher fees, elsewhere, to come and join us. There is never a good or a bad time to start saving and that is what we are trying to bang home. It’s why we have kept the entry threshold low and accessible.”
While Sharma doesn’t commit publicly to any agreed metrics, she does acknowledge that through various promotions, &me’s team have been tracking the profile of each customer and where they are coming from. QR codes have allowed the advertising agency, ARM, to capture data on the profile of new customers signing up.
Sharma also recognises that not all marketing sources are as easy to track and acknowledges that repeat exposure to brand messaging may mean that customers may not take action until multiple brand interactions.
“When the TV (campaign) goes live, it will be more difficult to track,” she says. “…that is why ARM is running a YouGov panel for us to ask consumers ‘have you heard about the brand?’ This will help us to make sure the consumer is being targeted correctly.”
While the email campaigns around the brand launch are focussed on customer acquisition, YouTube campaigns will allow the business to ask prospects how they first found &me. Similarly, if a customer requests a call with one of the business’s investment consultants, they will also be asked how they learnt about the company.
Of course, for external parties, the ultimate measure of success will be the longevity of the proposition. Given the frequency with which new market entrants have retreated from the UK consumer market in recent years, &me will be keen to justify taking a different approach.
“When I saw the OOH creatives, it became real,” Sharma concludes. “I was so proud of what we had achieved. We had launched a new brand – a robo adviser with a human touch. I am attached to that launch forever now.” ◆
Preparing for COP
2023 has already seen asset managers focus marketing efforts on biodiversity and nature risk. Will this be the theme that persists in the lead up to COP28.
Words: Jon Yarker & Ella Farmer
At last year’s COP27, many were disappointed. Encouraging rhetoric was insufficient to lift delegates’ spirits who left feeling somewhat dispirited.
For asset management marketers looking ahead to this year’s event between 30 November and 12 December in Dubai, the planning begins now to ensure that their firms’ efforts are recognised on the world stage.
Since the beginning of 2023, an emerging campaign theme among UK asset managers has been the issue of nature and biodiversity.
Tom Peterson, head of marketing at Mallowstreet, says fund firms are increasingly considering the role they have to play in protecting nature and that this is already starting to figure in their marketing efforts.
This, he suggests, is partly a result of the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference, which took place at the end of 2022 in Montreal. The event saw a biodiversity preservation deal struck between nearly 200 countries. Agreements were put in place to reduce - and potentially reverse –damage to the natural environment.
The decisions made at the summit resonated with several asset managers, triggering new approaches to the themes they are keen to address within their environmental, social and governance approaches.
Schroders is among the fund groups to adopt biodiversity as one of its keen talking points in recent months. In a statement at the beginning of 2023, Andy Howard, global head of Sustainable Investment at Schroders explained that investors no longer have a choice as to whether they want to be exposed to “nature risk”, explaining that it is now an integral factor to investment risk and returns.
Separately, the company’s CEO, Peter Harrison, stated that transnational companies and financial institutions will increasingly be required to disclose nature risks, dependencies and impacts.
It is no surprise, then, that other asset managers are looking at nature as a theme that has potential for their educational campaigns, too.
In Q1 of this year, Scottish Widows produced an interactive white paper entitled ‘Nature and Biodiversity: The Pensions Imperative,’ designed to be distributed on LinkedIn and other
social media channels.
This kind of collateral has two main aims: showcasing both a firm’s insight into the topic, and its own activities linked to biodiversity. According to marketing consultant Lisa-Marie Mallier – managing director of No Fluff Communications – the latter is crucial to helping firms stand out.
“To enhance the brand and attract new investors, asset managers must effectively communicate their commitment to emerging sustainability themes and showcase their expertise”, she says.
Key drivers
The nature risk theme looks set to be this year’s hot topic for marketers at asset management firms in the lead up to COP28 in Dubai.
Dr Vian Sharif, founder of Nature Alpha and head of sustainability at FNZ identified three key drivers for this.
“First, the agreement of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which requires finance institutions to consider reporting on their nature impacts and dependencies, saw unprecedented attention from asset managers at COP15 in December,” she explains.
“Secondly, assets under management
in biodiversity-focused funds have tripled in recent years. Finally, the launch of the Taskforce for NatureRelated Disclosures in September coupled with the nature focus of the ISSB will be a major area of focus for investors.”
The establishment of the Taskforce for Nature-Related Disclosures is a huge development for financial institutions. The organisation’s membership comprises 40 senior executives with more than US $21 trillion in assets under management. Together, they have a footprint in more than 180 countries.
Members include Celine Soubranne, group chief sustainability officer at Axa, BlackRock’s investment stewardship director, Jessica McDougall, HSBC’s natural capital adviser, Marine de Bazelaire, Swiss Re’s senior sustainability risk manager, Nora Ernst and Judson Berkey, managing director and group head of engagement and regulatory strategy at UBS.
Despite new initiatives like this, some PR professionals are unsure that COP is the marketing driver that it once was for asset managers.
Charlotte Walsh, a director at JPES Partners explains that because fund firms, and their underlying clients, are now making continual improvements, “COP does not act as a stimulus for action in the way it once did.”
But, in a market as saturated as the UK, asset managers are continually jostling with one another for attention from fund buyers. In-person events have returned after the disruption of the pandemic and firms know that this presents a host of, more integrated, marketing opportunities.
Last year, Marsh McLennan took advantage of relaxed restrictions and hosted 10 events in the run-up to COP27.
Hosting a fringe event at COP, itself, has enormous benefits, says Ludivine Evra, global head of marketing at Mercer Investment, a Marsh McLennan company.
“[COP] was once exclusively for governments and NGOs, so now the level of corporate involvement, means it is regarded as the most important event at which companies like Mercer and Marsh McLennan demonstrate their credibility.
“It allows them to articulate how they contribute to the debate,” says Evra. “These companies have to go there so you will notice a growing presence around the COPs.”
The agreement of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which requires finance institutions to consider reporting on their nature impacts and dependencies, saw unprecedented attention from asset managers at COP15 in December.
Cutting through COP28 is already generating a buzz, which can be beneficial to firms that have their messaging right. Cutting through the noise and standing out could be a challenge for those with generic campaigns, as buyers become more sophisticated and aware of the material issues.
In its 2022 ESG Report, Peregrine Communications found that 57% of the top 100 ESG themes are ‘over indexed’ by asset management firms – meaning more content is being written around these issues than there is organic demand. In the rush not to fall behind, some firms can be in danger of marketing for the sake of it.
Market research is crucial, argues Mallowstreet’s Peterson, to help firms identify the right partners and decide on the strategies that work for them. This helps campaigns to have relevant messaging with the best chance of leaving an impact.
“Getting marketing schedules prepared in advance of the Q3 rush for space will give firms greater security that their messaging will be heard,” says Peterson.
“We expect online media advertising, email advertising, and native content promotion to be highly in demand during COP 28. Once firms know whom they are going to target, where they are, and what will land, they are onto a successful campaign.”
In agreement is JPES Partners’ Walsh who argues that asset managers should be careful not to rush into marketing activity and risk sounding inauthentic (and potentially invite suspicions over greenwashing).
“The best marketing strategies will be those that are led by a business that considers it a strategic imperative rather than a marketing opportunity – and are able to demonstrate tangible examples of what they are doing and the benefits of their approach,” she says.
“Audiences are increasingly outcome-oriented in these matters, so case studies are absolutely critical.”
The good news is, that with some months to go until COP28 marketers still have time to perfect their strategies, but with the world’s focus on Dubai for the 13-day event in December, it will be a huge opportunity to showcase what their businesses have already achieved.
“The opportunity at Marsh McLennan is to build visibility and knowledge to transform our participation from observer to leader,” said Mercer’s Evra. “That is the overarching strategy in our evolution and what’s changing.”
Vian Sharif
Vian Sharif Ludivine Evra
Bringing Nature and People together to transform lives
At Green Light Trust we believe in the healing power of nature to transform lives.
Using nature as a backdrop for our transformative programmes, we’ve helped thousands of people challenged with mental health issues or learning disabilities. We teach social and life skills to children and adults who have become disengaged and marginalised by society – helping them to rebuild their self-esteem and personal resilience.
Each week participants join our programmes in the woods, stop the world for a day and put aside their troubles for a few short hours.
Will you help us reach more people who can benefit from the healing power of nature?
Green Light Trust: The Foundry, Bury Road, Lawshall, Suffolk, IP29 4PJ. Registered Charity Number: 1000977 Registered Company Number: 02550866
“Anxiety, depression, self- harming, alcohol and drugs are all symptomatic of society and are peaking nowadays. Green Light Trust introducesdistressed peopletothecalm and non-threatening ways of nature. It allows people to stop, think and look around and see what really matters.“
Suffolk GP
“Being out in Frithy Woods is amazing, it has absolutely changed my life. Instead of hiding away from people, I am curious about them, I want to engage with them instead of tailoring my behaviour to fit with what I thought would make them happy.”
Adult participant on a GLT Earth Wellbeing course
We can work with you to achieve your ESG and CSR goals and offer tailored team building and wellbeing activities for your staff. To find out more about partnering with the Green Light Trust: visit: greenlighttrust.org email: partnerships@greenlighttrust.org call: 01284 830829
Elizabeth Pfeuti
The art of talking about yourself
If you’re going to keep people interested, make sure your story is relevant and connects your audience.
Have you ever attended a wedding and been lumbered with the table bore or had a first date that dragged on and on?
What usually links these types of memorable events is one key failing: the person in question talked mainly about themselves and – crucially –believed you were fascinated. It’s a common affliction.
Me, myself and I is the topic we know the most about, so it’s only natural that we are the most comfortable telling people about it in depth, with complexity and authority.
It’s also why biographies are so popular, regularly topping bestseller lists. Our stories are the ones we like to tell the best.
However, there is a keen difference between the dinner party bore giving intricate detail about his trip to Costa Rica (“You should have visited before mass tourism spoiled it”) and the gripping tale of a plucky East End urchin who grows up to captain England.
That difference is understanding the audience, and the first step towards this is to appreciate that there actually is one.
What the table bore or the nervous first date don’t realise is that any story, anecdote or piece information has to be relevant to who’s listening. It needs to reach out to them and strike a chord.
The vast, overwhelming majority of the material sourced to write biographies ends up on the cutting room floor. Only the most significant events or those that will really resonate with the reader are kept and deftly woven into the narrative.
This careful crafting builds up –or reinforces – a multi-faceted picture of the subject, allowing the reader to relate with either compassion or revulsion, as the writer intends.
The same needs to be true of any commercial, marketing or thought leadership content.
Being impressive does not necessarily translate into sales.
The reader needs to recognise, pretty much instantly, that you both understand a specific challenge they face and may have a solution to help them meet it.
Yes, they need to know your credentials for providing that solution and how long and with whom you’ve been working to get it. They also need to know your heritage and develop a sense of reliability and trustworthiness.
But the key is to create a rapport with the reader so the fleeting moments you might grab from them do the job for which they are intended. Otherwise, from 30-second video scripts through to 16-page white papers, you’re wasting everyone’s time.
It’s important to recognise that it’s not only the time of the reader you’re trying to engage that’s wasted, but that
of the whole chain of colleagues who have been involved in its creation. How better could that time have been spent?
Happily – and the reason for Rhotic Media’s very existence – not only marketing and comms teams, but their directors and C-suites are latching on to the value of clearly defining both specific audiences and the messages they want them to hear.
Over the past five years, we have seen a growing willingness within financial services to tone down the presentation of top-class credentials and accolades in favour of a more accessible and awareness-driven approach to client communications.
The skills, solutions and stature of a company mean nothing if a potential – or existing – client is not shown how it’s applicable to them.
Being impressive does not necessarily translate into sales.
That’s not to say that these hardearned honours or innovative products should not be put on display – far from it. Rather, what they all mean to the reader (or person within the reader’s organisation with buying power) needs to be paramount.
Luckily, those being charged with creating and implementing content strategies across financial services are grasping the importance of getting this message across. This is leading to a rapid and exciting evolution in content.
This evolution has the power to change how companies all across our sector engage with their public, and as times are increasingly volatile and uncertain, it has not come too soon.
Sadly, the same cannot yet be said about wedding breakfast bores and first dates, but we have to start somewhere. ◆
Elizabeth Pfeuti is the chief client officer of Rhotic Media
FFintech marketing’s summer spend:
SPLURGE OR SQUEEZE?
With media outlets suggesting marketing budgets are being cut, are fintech businesses likely to be facing a summer of thrifty spending? Financial Promoter finds out
Words: Girlie Garduce Burn
intech businesses and organisations are having to become money savvy when it comes to marketing spend and priorities this year. With budgets squeezed and funding slashed for many, how are fintechs adapting to attract and acquire new and existing clients, while also being strategically smart with their spend?
This summer, the list of worldwide events from fintech expos to summits and forums are endless. For example, in Europe, Fintech Week London is a five-day event in June spotlighting an in-person conference that will focus on industry trends in fintech and financial services, while the Paris Fintech Forum Leaders’ Summit in May will bring over 100 speakers together for the latest news in banking, regulation and more. In Asia, Seamless Asia 2023 in June will cover banking, payments and e-commerce trends over two days, while over in the Middle East, the Fintech Summit Middle East will take place as a hub for fintech, digital payments, banking, retail and e-commerce insights in the same month.
With this vast plethora of choice when it comes to destination, size and programme content, fintech marketers are rethinking what’s worth the money, how to stand out to clients, but at the
same time, still meet their strategic targets and crunch numbers. Is it the case that (spending) less is more when it comes to turning client heads?
Marketing ramp up
According to Gartner, financial services firms are some of the biggest spenders on marketing. In 2022, they led the way with the highest marketing budget at 10.4% of company revenue, up from 7.4% in 2021, as cited by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council.
This seems to be a distinct nod to how the current economic environment is currently moving. And it’s upwards, apparently. But are marketing budgets for fintechs really following suit and holding steady?
It’s a yes for the Open Banking Expo – a global community of open banking and open finance executives that drive digital transformation across the financial services sector and organise digital and face-to-face events in the UK, North America and Europe.
“Our marketing budgets have increased a little year-on-year,” explained Kelly Stanley, co-founder and director for Open Banking Expo. “As an event organiser, we need to demonstrate that the number of attendees increase each year, so to reduce our budget would be counter intuitive.
“We are continually looking at new channels to spend our budget; all with the aim of reaching a wider audience of financial services and fintech professionals to encourage them to visit one of our global events.”
In fact, the company is ramping up its marketing campaign to support its UK event, Open Banking Expo, this summer. It’s also hosting the Open Banking Expo in Canada in June, as the only open banking event in the country, and leading two Women in Opening Banking Meetups later this year to highlight the importance of closing he gender gap and boost the careers of females in the sector.
Steady approach to spending
For Bottomline, a market-leading provider of SaaS platforms for business payment and digital banking to customers worldwide, it has taken a considered approach to its marketing spend across its global reach.
“Marketing budgets constantly flex, based on the requirements of the business, especially in B2B organisations,” said Andrew Davidson, head of marketing EMEA and APAC or Bottomline.
“We have seen budgets realign to specific market segments. For instance, in the UK where our business splits into two main markets of corporates and banks, we’ve had to consider where the
As an event organiser, we need to demonstrate that the number of attendees increase each year, so to reduce our budget would be counter intuitive.
growth stems from and how we can reach those audiences. While in North America, we have entirely different markets which require alternative programmes with associated budgets,” he added.
With summer only a few months away, Andrew explained that Bottomline’s marketing campaigns are being built to suit each segment’s goals and various strategies.
In North America, it is focusing on n account-based marketing (ABM) approach to its banking sector in the region. ABM moves from thinking about buyers as individuals, to individuals within an organisation who decide together. This helps to identify the highest priority accounts, understand what teams and individuals are involved in the buying processes, and then builds detailed profiles of their roles so they can engage through strategic messaging campaigns. Marketers can then develop and deliver customised content to target accounts as a group, based on their collective informational needs as a decision-making entity. This way, ABM engages with fewer but more likely prospects.
“We are testing our first real ABM approach in the North American banking sector, while in our Financial Messaging sector, it’s about thought leadership, customer engagement and
deepening relationships,” he explained.
“In other segments, we aim to extend our reach through associations, industry groups, social activity, webinars, roundtables, and growth programmes in our existing customer base.”
This year, Bottomline’s most significant partnership and key event will be the global financial services event and fintech hotspot, SIBOS, in Canada in September, hosted by SWIFT, which it aims to use an opportunity to actively connect and engage with global SWIFT customers.
Marketing innovation in fintech
So, while it is apparent that there is still spending and exposure in marketing for fintechs, are there innovative new ways about how they can use their budgets?
The buzzword of the moment, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has been reported as having great potential for the financial services industry, according to a recent global report by PWC. It has illustrated that the sector has an ‘AI impact index’ score of 3.3 (1 being the lowest impact, and 5 being the highest), but would need to overcome consumer trust and achieve regulatory acceptance.
This shows that fintechs have the possibility of benefiting from saving time and money with the help of AI technology, and in turn, enable them
to use their budgets wisely –something that the Open Banking Expo has already adopted.
“AI for marketing is on everyone’s lips at the moment due to time-saving and automations that would make our lives easier,” explained Open Banking Expo’s Kelly Stanley. “We will look to uncover more opportunities to harness the power of AI in the business.”
Bottomline’s Andrew Davidson is also onboard with looking at new technology to build relationships with clients.
“Engagement is where we will see the most significant impact of new tech, by building a unified customer data platform with a 360-degree customer view. We have over 11,500 users of our UK-based business payments platform, PTX – and understanding who they are, what products they use, how they use them and where they need help is our biggest goal.
“How can we learn and modify our relationship with them, so they continue to buy from us in the future? By building engagement prediction patterns and segmentation models that leverage AI recommendations to act on customer behaviour in realtime. Although we’re not there yet, it’s where we should be using the technology to help us,” he added. ◆
Kelly Stanley Open Banking Expo
Meaningful change
With gender inequity and inequality still rife in financial services, one senior marketer has launched a network to change the status quo.
Words: Joe McGrath
In the past, financial institutions had been accused of paying lip service to equality and inclusion.
Marketing teams sometimes shouldered the brunt of these criticisms, when promotion of new initiatives did little to effect meaningful change. With gender diversity, there are plenty of statistics to suggest that efforts, this far, haven’t achieved the ultimate goal of equality in the workplace.
A 2022 report by Deloitte found that women held 21% of board seats at financial institutions in 2021, 19% of C-suite roles, and just 5% of CEO positions. For one senior leader, the frustration became too great, and she decided to take a very practical approach to solving the problem.
Rosie Guest is Apex Group’s chief marketing and communications officer. Highly educated, exceptionally competent, and with years of industry experience under her belt, she is a member of the Executive Committee of a company that is growing at breakneck speed.
Yet, despite the example set by industry leaders like her, female senior leaders in C-suite roles remain ridiculously low, as suggested in the Deloitte report.
In 2022, Guest recognised that she was now in a position where she could effect change for future generations and launched an internal initiative designed to accelerate the progress of high-performing female talent within the business.
“I feel really strongly that it shouldn’t be as difficult as it is for women to progress,” she explains.
“The Women’s Accelerator Network is a development initiative designed to drive equity for female progression and diversity at all levels within the industry."
Rosie Guest
“At the current pace of change we’re still nearly 300 years away from gender equality, so I wanted to find ways to ease the path for women and make it happen faster.
“In 2022, we launched an internal initiative at Apex Group. This was designed to accelerate the progress of high-performing female talent, mending the broken rungs on the career ladder and eroding the gender
disparity at mid-and seniormanagement levels to provide a clear path for career progression.”
Even as an internal initiative, the project achieved remarkable results in its first year. Of the 51 women who took part in year one, more than half secured promotions or progressed into new roles. Some 86% of those on the programme said it enabled them to have confidence to discuss career progression with their manager and a community evolved as a result. This year, she has taken that initiative to the entire industry.
Worthy ambitions
The Women’s Accelerator Network has the potential to be game-changing. It claims to be the only free-of-charge, grassroots private membership community that connects women across age groups, roles and professions, throughout financial services.
It is designed to foster positive change through mentoring, community events, knowledge sharing and cross financial sector collaboration.
“We are looking for women that have a genuine passion for supporting one another,” Guest explains.
“It’s about us as individuals, but also as a community, that can affect change. Although supported by Apex Group, the network is a grassroots, community -driven initiative, so although places initially will be limited, we encourage anyone who is interested to register their interest.”
At present, membership to the programme is only available for those identifying as a woman, but others are welcome in the discussion, where deemed appropriate, as the initiative also recognises that allyship is a crucial element of change.
Guest says that the goal is to ensure members represent a diverse range of women, across all ages, ethnicities, and specialisms, so they can create an environment of mentoring, reverse mentoring, and change, for a lasting impact on the industry.
“The Women’s Accelerator Network is a development initiative designed to drive equity for female progression and diversity at all levels within the industry,” she explains. “When it comes to gender diversity, people tend to look at the C-suite as it’s the most visible. But, the issue starts much earlier and we need to be supporting women through mid-management to have a lasting impact.”
Crucially, the network is not about quotas – there are other industry initiatives focussed on that. It also doesn’t aim to get women promoted over men. Instead, it is designed to nurture existing female talent in the industry to drive equity in progression.
In the coming months, the network will be focussed on growing the number of chapters to have a presence in as many key financial centres, globally, as possible.
“Success will be when we start to see more women move through our industry with equity,” says Guest. “We hope our members take their learnings from the network back to their own organisations to instigate movements for change there too.”
A confident outlook
Research for the Network found that women make up around 52% of the workforce across the financial services industry, but that percentage declines at each rung of the career ladder, resulting in representation of 37% at mid-management and reducing significantly further thereafter.
In 2021, Harvard Business Review published an article entitled “Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome” where academics noted that women’s lack of confidence was actually attributable to the systemic bias within sectors, and the widespread exclusion that remains in industry.
Guest agrees with this sentiment and says Apex’s internal programme identified that the strongest theme among skilled, capable, women was that they lacked the confidence, or the necessary tools, to articulate their ambitions or boundaries in a way that felt comfortable to them.
“We talked a lot about not needing to take on male traits to be successful and the reticence women often have about being assertive for fear of being branded ‘difficult’ or ‘bossy’,” she adds.
“I think community is key, and hearing from others that are experiencing the same emotions or dealing with similar scenarios gives confidence. That was something almost 100% of our members felt was their biggest learning and created a real sense of strength in the community.”
In her own career, Guest says she has learnt to embrace “being underestimated” and to use what was originally a frustration and turn it into a strength.
“In my early career I really jumped into the workplace as an outgoing and energetic young professional, unafraid to bring her personality to work and was comfortable interacting and building relationships even with the most senior people across the business.
“Particularly when working in a male dominated industry it’s so important for women to resist being stifled by outdated perceptions of how a female professional or leader 'should' behave,” she says.
As Guest started to progress into more senior roles, she admits that she tried to temper some of her personality traits, believing that she would be “taken more seriously” if she was less jovial or more reserved. But she found that impossible to do and learned to embrace her own style.
Looking back, she now believes that embracing her own approach was ultimately what underpinned her ability to be successful.
“You should be proud of not fitting the mould,” she says. “Find a working environment that allows you to flourish and draw on these strengths.” ◆
For those interested in finding out more, the Women’s Accelerator Network is now open for applications and the website is live. Visit www.womens-accelerator.com for more information
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2023 Programme:
MOD001 Content basics
MOD002 Building narratives
MOD003 Format and structure
MOD004 Features and articles
MOD006 Whitepapers and policy documents
MOD007 Brochures and sales aids
MOD008 Audience segmentation
MOD009 Great award entries
MOD010 Editing, proofing and sign-off
MOD011 Sourcing and referencing
MOD012 Persuasion and influence
MOD013 Content strategy
MOD014 Working with data
MOD015 Interviews and profiles
MOD016 Investment writing
MOD017 Organisational communication
MOD018 Identity, style and tone
MOD019 Sustainability
MOD020 Briefing for success
MOD021 Ethics and integrity
MOD022 Content for events
MOD023 SEO and influencer content
MOD024 How newsrooms work
MOD025 Scripting and speechwriting
Grabbing attention
Financial businesses produce more content than ever, but the majority don’t take a strategic approach. As spend grows, Financial Promoter highlights the basics for a good content
strategy.
Words: Joe McGrath
Experienced financial marketers are strategic geniuses.
Approaches to advertising strategy, corporate identity, public affairs, public relations, direct mail, market research, and even guerrilla marketing are now well established.
However, the past five years has seen an explosion in content marketing, with financial institutions spending big, building in-house teams, and using external agencies to develop a content strategy that aligns with both operational and sales objectives. 2022 research by the CMO Council and KPMG explains why this may be.
The report states that 68% of businessto-business buyers “prefer to seek out information online before talking to a salesperson” with 62% able to “finalise selection criteria, or a vendor list, solely on digital content.”
The ability to produce great content and build an audience, organically, has now become a fundamental support pillar for corporate sales teams.
It is, therefore, important that financial marketers understand how to build a content strategy that is strategically aligned with the company’s mission and its other marketing initiatives.
Most marketers will have produced content before. Blogs, whitepapers, video clips, podcasts and newsletters have become core assets in the content mix. It is less likely, though, that these assets will have been scheduled, structured, deployed and measured within the same parameters as traditional marketing programmes. For many people, content is
simply a string of blogs that grab at product themes.
For a content strategy to have real impact, it is important to take more time on the “strategy” part. Far more so than the writing (or production) of the content itself. That’s not to say there is not a place for tactical, last minute, content, but strategic content is something which takes careful thought and planning.
Identifying objectives
To get the best value from an investment in a content strategy, it is imperative that the programme has structure. And, before you even begin planning, you need to think about what you want your content campaign to achieve. Consider whether the programme is a standalone initiative, or whether it is to complement and run alongside, other marketing activities.
➥ Set campaign objectives
➥ Identify target audience
➥ Understand deployment timeline
➥ Consider internal & external events
➥ Weigh-up asset suitability
➥ Assign distribution
➥ Draw up the briefing documents
➥ Start writing / production
You should consider the timeline for the campaign and whether corporate events or activities may distort, elevate, or interrupt your campaign at any point.
Once you have nailed down the objective(s) for the campaign, it’s time for some in-depth thinking about your readership.
Audience considerations
Most marketers will be familiar with identifying and segmenting an audience for traditional campaigns. With content, this is even more important.
Written or broadcast content should ‘speak’ to every individual in your audience group – which means being more granular in your analysis.
Traditional segmentation techniques are a good way to start, considering your target readers’ geographical locations, demographics, attitudes, and lifestyle characteristics.
It is also important to assess the seniority of your target audience, alongside their level of familiarity with the concepts you are discussing. Consider the level of influence they have with their peer group, colleagues, and other industry stakeholders.
Be careful - seniority and influence are not the same thing. It is very possible for a leader of a business or division to be among the most senior and yet unable to influence others in the peer group. Similarly, more junior members of the organisation might be incredibly well thought of, and incredibly well-connected.
Your content team will benefit from having a specific person in mind when producing your content assets.
→ This means going deeper than segmenting audience groups and thinking about individuals within those groups.
The development of specific audience personas allows you to anticipate any objections to ideas raised in your content, and it encourages the writer/ producer to think about the issues that may trigger your audience into taking action. You need to be clear about what you want your audience to think, feel, or do, after consuming your content.
To create a reader persona, begin with the work you have done on segmentation and drill down further. Think about the lifestyle habits, age, marital status and educational level of the individual you want to reach. Try to picture them in your mind. It might be helpful to capture a photo which you think matches the profile of that person.
For your content to truly resonate, you need to understand what matters to that individual. Try and map a mini biography of your target reader. This means considering the motivations of your target individual, both in and outside of work. For example, are they motivated by their work performance, their family, or their desire to become more focussed?
Beyond their day-to-day motivations, you also have to chart what their aspirations are. Consider why they might be sympathetic to your message. Are they looking for career progression? Do they want solutions that make their day job easier?
The more you can anticipate the drivers for why a reader will take action, the more successful you are likely to be in crafting the message.
Deployment timing
Having whittled down your objective for the campaign and clearly identified your audience, your attention should now turn to when your content will be distributed. Your audience research will help here.
Once you have agreed the timeline for your campaign with internal stakeholders, you can start identifying key dates where potential readers will be more pre-disposed to consuming your content. Begin by looking at internal materials that you already have. Are there any activities planned in other areas of marketing during this period which will support your content programme’s aims? For example, are there press releases going out during the campaign window?
You need to be clear about what you want your audience to think, feel, or do, after consuming your content.
Joe McGrath
Are your colleagues speaking at industry events? Is there any market research being conducted?
The more difficult, but valuable, research piece is considering the events that are happening outside of the business during your campaign. Are there any major regulatory announcements or consultations? Are there any industry events? Are any related themes scheduled to be discussed in UK or European Parliament? Are your competitors planning any launches in the same area? Are trade bodies planning any collaborative roundtables or panel debates?
These ideas are not an exhaustive list, but your subject matter experts should be able to share some pointers if you are struggling to build the list out. Finally, if the list you have put together still doesn’t afford sufficient opportunities to integrate your
campaign messages into a calendar of events for your target market, think about whether some of the assets you are creating could be deployed as hero assets. Hero assets are major pieces of content, from which other pieces of content can be deployed.
For example, you may have produced a 5,000 word survey which has multiple findings, conclusions, and trends. Rather than just dumping this on a website on the day of publication, consider a trail of “breadcrumb content” which will lead your audience to the hero asset in the weeks before, or other more digestible assets which can be deployed after the hero asset. This can also work well with panel debates, webinars, podcasts, and roundtablebased assets.
Asset identification
With your list of events nailed, you can start to think about the assets you want to create as part of your campaign. Begin by looking for any major events (i.e. The Budget, a General Election, a regulatory deadline, etc.) which would be an obvious magnet for your content.
Whether you are attracting readers to your content through a push function, such as an emailed newsletter or magazine, or you’re hoping to organically attract them through social media or unpaid search, it is important to deploy on dates when your audience will already be looking at that area/product/idea/service.
Attracting readers this way ensures the content feels less “salesy” and becomes more of a problem-solving interaction. When this works best, the reader feels they have stumbled on information they were already looking for. Use the profiling work you have done on your audience, together with your content calendar, to plan the type of content that should be distributed at each day during the campaign.
For example, if most of your audience are likely to be at an industry conference three days after your campaign launch, you might want to think about some digital content in the lead up to the conference, some print materials for distribution at the conference, and some webinars, vox pops or podcasts after the conference to discuss key themes and relate it back to your campaign objectives.
Similarly, if you are planning a major product launch on a day when some disruption is expected (i.e. a major public transport strike), you should
consider how home working practices will affect how your audience interacts with your content. Are they more likely to embrace short-form or audio?
Different content types have strengths and weaknesses, so pause before deciding the best format to convey a message.
Blogs are short, punchy and digital friendly, but they are not great for deeply technical issues. News stories, meanwhile, are great for grabbing attention if the information is genuinely new, but they are time limited and go stale quickly.
In longer-form content, surveys are great for generating new ideas and for breeding other smaller pieces of content, but they are expensive, time consuming and can be lost, if not promoted in the right way. Similarly, whitepapers are super for tackling big themes and they perform well on LinkedIn. However, any call to action (CTA) can be easily buried, so conclusions might be better captured in other, smaller assets.
When choosing your content formats of choice, remember to consider the volume of information being conveyed, the complexity of the message, the sophistication of the audience, the timing of distribution and whether there is a need for data to be illustrated alongside the main narrative.
Distribution
A final, but critical, consideration for your content strategy is how your newly crafted assets will be distributed. So many blogs and whitepapers are thrown on websites, never to be read again.
Considering the distribution approach allows you to think about the channel of distribution and how content can be repackaged to reach audience members who may have missed the content in the first round of deployment.
Whether distribution is digital, print, broadcast, or event-driven, marketers should weigh up the pros and cons of each method before deploying assets.
Digital newsletters, for example, are great for building an organic audience, but if the content isn’t of high quality and curated keenly, it can easily alienate your audience and result in your organisation’s domain being blocked from email inboxes, causing a headache for your sales team, and extinguishing your marketing efforts.
Partnering with a media owner may allow you to tap into their distribution list, but consider using your own
ENHANCE YOUR KNOWLEDGE FOR FREE!
Every two months, Rhotic Media hosts free taster sessions of our content training programmes. Hosted in the City of London, these workshops are designed to highlight the role that content can play in the modern day mix of corporate communications.
Themes covered include:
➥ Content marketing basics
➥ An introduction to content strategy
➥ Using newsroom techniques for corporate objectives
➥ Audience segmentation for beginners
➥ Briefing and editing fundamentals
If you would like to attend the next event, please contact Ella Farmer for further details: ella.farmer@rhoticmedia.com
content agency or staff member to write the piece. This ensures that any technical information is recorded exactly as you would like, and that nothing is lost through the involvement of any third party intermediary.
Briefing
Now that your strategy is planned, your audience identified, your deployment timeline agreed and your distribution methods chosen, you can begin writing up the briefing document for your writers/producers.
Your briefing document should be comprehensive, so your writers are able to deliver what you need, as quickly as possible. The more scope for ambiguity at this stage, the higher chance these pieces will need significant edits/ rewrites at a later stage.
To avoid this, you should prepare a briefing document for each piece of content. This may seem like overkill, but there are likely to be subtle differences in each element of the campaign and the writer/producer needs to know about these.
The briefing document should include the project lead and their content details, the deadline(s) for the piece, specifics on the audience and the objective of the asset itself. If it is a written piece, there should be a word count and if broadcast,
a post-production time length.
The brief should name the asset and this should relate back to the name on the content strategy project plan. The specification, meanwhile, should include guidance on tone of voice, style of writing, format type and an indication on whether any interviews are required with third parties or stakeholders within the business.
A supporting information section on the briefing document should offer the opportunity to highlight any other materials which could inform the writer/ producer, such as previously published brochures, whitepapers, marketing, news stories, articles, etc. This section is also the place to put any other thoughts on direction or approach.
If you’ve gone through all of the above stages, your assets should start to come through in line with expectations, with only modest requirements for edits and adjustments.
Finally, most organisations have a structured approach to editing, proofing, sign-off and approval. This will be covered in the next piece in this series, in issue two of Financial Promoter ◆
Joe McGrath is the founder and CEO of Rhotic Media. He is a financial journalist of 20 years and holds degree level qualifications in Corporate Communication, Leadership and Journalism.
Awards 2023
Each issue, Financial Promoter publishes a round up of industry award schemes where the closing dates are approaching. To have your scheme listed, please contact Ella Farmer on ella.farmer@rhoticmedia.com
Asset Management
AIM Awards aim-awards.co.uk/ Entry deadline: 4 August 2023
Financial Adviser Service Awards financialadviserserviceawards.com/ Entry deadline: TBC
FN 10 Most Influential Women in Finance fnlondon.com/forms/2023/FN_ lists_awards_diary.pdf Entry deadline: 7 July 2023
FN Rising Stars of Professional Services fnlondon.com/forms/2023/FN_ lists_awards_diary.pdf Entry deadline: 26 September 2023
Institute of Revenues Rating and Valuation Awards irrv.net/awards2023/ Entry deadline: 9 June 2023
PFA Public Finance Awards https://publicfinanceawards.co.uk Entry deadline: 3 May 2023
Events 2023
Financial Promoter rounds up the forthcoming industry events for the months ahead. If you have an event that you’d like listed, please contact Ella Farmer on ella.farmer@rhoticmedia.com
Asset Management
Impact Investing World Forum 4 – 5 August 2023 impactinvestingconferences.com London
Institutional Investor Institute –UK & Ireland Summit 13 – 14 June 2023 iinow.com/European-Institutional-InvestorInstitute/Institutional-Investor-SummitUK-Ireland-2023 Isleworth, London
International Investment Middle East Forum 27 September 2023 event.internationalinvestment.net/ iimiddleeastforum2023/en/page/home Dubai
Investment Risk Europe
7 June 2023 events.risk.net/buysideriskeurope
London
InvestOps
17 – 19 October 2023 clearingsettlement.wbresearch.com London
PEI Operating Partners Forum 17 – 18 May 2023 peievents.com/en/event/operating-partners-forum-europe London
PEI Women in Private Markets Summit 20 – 21 June 2023 peievents.com/en/event/women-in-privatemarkets-summit-north-america New York
PERE Network Europe Forum 9 – 11 May 2023 peievents.com/en/event/pere-europe/ London
Public Finance Live 27 - 28 June 2023 publicfinancelive.org Westminster, London
Reuters ESG Investment (Europe) 6 - 7 September 2023 events.reutersevents.com/finance/esg-investment-europe London
Risk.net ESG & Climate Summit (Europe) 7 June 2023 events.risk.net/esg-sustainable-investing City of London
Sustainable Investment Festival 14 - 15 June 2023 sustainableinvestmentfestival.co.uk/sif2023/en/page/home City of London
TSAM (The Summit for Asset Management) 7 - 8 June 2023 tsam.foxonmedia.com/london/#about City of London
Banking
American Banker Conference 12 – 14 June 2023 conference.americanbanker.com/digital-banking Miami, Florida
Banking Transformation Summit 22 June 2023 bankingtransformationsummit.com/ London
CFP Risk EMEA 2023 13 – 14 June 2023 cefpro.com/forthcoming-events/risk-emea/ London
Global Capital Sustainable and Responsible Capital Markets Forum 28 September 2023 events.euromoney.com/event/4803ca63 -eafb-4ecb-ace4-5213c10ca2b6/summary London
Turnaround Management Association –UK Regional Conference 8 June 2023 tma-uk.org/events Birmingham, UK
Fintech + Crypto
Digital Assets 2023 24 – 25 May 2023 digitalassets.wbresearch.com London
Finnovate Spring 23 – 25 May 2023 informaconnect.com/finovatespring San Francisco
Fintech Connect Leaders Asia
28 – 30 August 2023 fintechconnectasia.wbresearch.com Singapore
Fintech Nexus USA 10 – 11 May 2023 fintechnexus.com/usa/2023/ New York
Fintech Talents 20 June 2023 fintechtalents.com/events/north-america New York
Fintech Week
19 – 23 June 2023 fintechweek.london/event/0d7c012f-85934b1a-a93d-0d4a22b5b9b9/summary London
FinTech World Forum 9 – 10 May 2023 fintechconferences.com London
Money 20/20 Europe 6 – 8 June 2023 europe.money2020.com Amsterdam
Seamless Middle East 23 – 24 May 2023 terrapinn.com/exhibition/ seamless-middle-east/index.stm Dubai, UAE
