Artificial allies

AI should be put to work on your marketing and product - and managed like a new hire.

AI-generated summary

What’s new: About 382,000 unadvised UK adults have used AI to guide decisions about £47.4bn, while the FCA warns AI providers and regulated firms to be clearer and more careful.
Why it matters: People will accept a worse answer for a quicker, cheaper one, so AI needs managing like a new hire, and doing so makes your firm easier to buy from and harder to leave.
What to do about it: Build AI agents that speed up client onboarding, answer each client's common account questions from their own data, and turn market commentary into personal insight, with marketing writing the brief and voice.

Read on to learn why:

① AI is already advising your clients.

② You should choose your AI as carefully as you hire your people.

③ You’ll drive action faster by framing your request in your audience’s terms.

④ When it comes to tokenised assets, the issuer matters more than the chain.

⑤ You will never justify the cost of events with lead generation KPIs.

⑥ Clients care about what you’re going to do for them, not how.

⑦ New technology doesn’t change finance’s fundamental risks.

📸 But first, flashback to last week when I told you that your marketing should embrace the AI agents that will be between you and your clients. Well, this week saw more evidence of why users want them and banks fear them. The Economist explained how AI-powered personal assistants could reshape the digital economy, while Axios ran a scoop by Madison Mills about banks — including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo — racing to contain agent risks. The payment networks — who, let’s face it, have the most to gain from the trend — are forging ahead with gay abandon: see Visa and Mastercard’s latest news.

What's new

AI is now one of the UK’s leading wealth ‘advisers’ with £47.4bn under influence, reports Professional Adviser.

Source: Professional Adviser, 22 October 2026

Research by consultancy The Lang Cat estimates that about 382,000 unadvised UK adults have used AI to help make decisions about £47.4bn. That is more than True Potential advises on (£40bn) and within reach of Evelyn Partners (£69bn). About a quarter of the 2,000-plus consumers surveyed had asked AI about their finances in the past two years, and 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds had acted on an answer without checking it anywhere else. This despite the fact that, according to research sponsor Saturn, the leading large language models get financial questions wrong 57% of the time.

Perhaps timely then that, on Monday, Jessica Rusu, chief data, information and intelligence officer at the Financial Conduct Authority, called on AI providers to add clear disclaimers, citing research that 40% of young investors wrongly believe chatbots are FCA-regulated. She also criticised regulated firms for building AI tools without a defined need, overstating their capabilities, or adding governance only after launch: “That is the wrong way around.”

None of this is holding firms back from their AI agent projects. On Thursday, John Thornhill argued in the FT that “Know Your Agent” will become the rule of the AI age. He cites Deloitte research showing 23% of companies already use AI agents and 74% plan to within two years. He also describes an Australian IT worker whose AI assistant booked him a gym slot by removing other members from the waiting list.

Why it matters

What matters is that 382,000 people took £47.4bn of decisions to tools built, as The Lang Cat's chief executive Mark Polson puts it, by companies "with no regulated permissions that weren't trying to disrupt this market". That's a demand story more than a technology one. Traditional advice remains out of reach for many, so people will accept a worse answer to get a quicker, cheaper one.

① Last week I argued that your marketing should make it easy for your clients' AI agents to deal with you. That's the defensive half. This week, let’s look at the other half: putting AI to work in your own products and marketing. The same instinct is at work in B2B markets: the adviser comparing comparing platform charges and the treasurer comparing payment providers can now get a plausible answer in seconds without speaking to anyone at your firm.

② Rusu’s warning should be the guardrail. Most of the poor practice she describes comes from treating AI as a tool to switch on rather than a colleague to manage, and Thornhill’s prescription sounds right: “Deploying an AI agent is just like hiring a human employee. How do you best train them? What privileges do you give them and when? How much access do you permit to sensitive data?” Hire your AI as carefully as you’d hire a person, and it will make your firm easier to buy from and harder to leave.

What to do about it

Take action

Turn onboarding into an agent. In institutional financial services, onboarding is where a newly won client first finds out what you're really like, and it can drag on for weeks of forms and chasers. Ask product to build an agent that requests only what you don't already hold, pre-fills the rest, chases missing documents and tells the client exactly where they stand at any hour. Marketing's job is to write the brief: the complaints from your win-loss interviews and the questions new clients ask most in their first 90 days.
Give every client an agent that knows their account. Pull the 50 questions your service desk and relationship managers answer most often, such as why a payment failed or which trades will settle late this week, and make them the agent's job description. It answers from the client's own data, cites its source and hands anything else to the client's named relationship manager. Marketing should own its voice and, with Compliance, the list of things it must never promise. The longer a client uses it, the more context it holds, and the harder you become to leave.
Transform your thought leadership into a product benefit. Most firms publish market commentary that tells every client the same thing. An agent can tell each client what it means for them: a custodian flagging which of a client's trades will be affected by the UK's move to settlement one day after trade (T+1) on 11 October 2027, or a payments provider showing what a client would have saved on foreign exchange last quarter. Marketing already knows which topics clients care about; this puts that knowledge where clients work rather than in their inbox.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

City exodus is ‘national security issue’ warns London Stock Exchange boss

③ You’ll drive action faster by framing your request in your audience’s terms.

Julia Hoggett. Source: This is Money, 22 October 2026

Julia Hoggett, CEO of the London Stock Exchange, has warned that the exodus of companies from London is becoming “a national security issue”, urging ministers to treat UK capital markets as a strategic national capability ahead of the Budget. Her warning came as Mobico and Ashtead Technology agreed foreign takeovers worth nearly £800m, adding to 166 takeovers worth £180bn since the start of 2023.

Hoggett has made the economic case for domestic investment before, most recently calling on the Chancellor to “take the handbrake off” listings by scrapping stamp duty on shares. What’s changed here is the framing. By recasting a listings problem as a security one, she has aligned with the priority this Government talks about most, in front of a Chancellor who used to be Defence Secretary. She backs it with evidence, citing Cambridge Quantum Computing and Arm, and heads off the obvious objection by saying she doesn’t want to penalise companies that leave. The result is that a request from the boss of the exchange losing the listings now reads like a matter of state.

People rarely act on your priorities; they act on their own. Think of the biggest ask your firm will make this year, whether of a regulator, a board or a prospective client. Is it written in your priorities or in theirs? And can you name two facts that make the link between the two impossible to dismiss?

FINTECH

HSBC launches first stablecoin

④ When it comes to tokenised assets, the issuer matters more than the chain.

HSBC has launched RedCoin, its first stablecoin, to the 3.3 million users of its PayMe peer-to-peer payments app in Hong Kong. Licensed by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and pegged to the Hong Kong dollar, it can be used to pay friends and merchants now, and to invest in tokenised assets, including a new share class of HSBC’s money market fund, soon. Days earlier, JPMorgan brought JPM Coin, its US dollar deposit token for institutional clients, to Ethereum.

Two coins pegged to the same currency are designed to be worth exactly the same. That makes tokenised money the ultimate commodity, and the only real differentiator is who issues it. HSBC clearly knows this: Maggie Ng, its CEO for Hong Kong, sold RedCoin on the “trust and security of a global bank”, not on its technology. JPMorgan’s vocabulary feels just as deliberate, with “deposit token” keeping a careful distance from the crypto baggage that “stablecoin” still carries. In this market, a coin is only as stable as the name behind it.

If you’re taking tokenised money or assets to market, sell the issuer before the instrument. Lead with what clients can do with it and why they should trust you with their money; the chain it runs on belongs in the technical due diligence. And pick your nouns with care, because whether you call it a stablecoin, a deposit token or simply digital cash decides which shelf journalists and clients put you on.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Performance vs brand: Why events are one of the few channels that deliver both

⑤ You will never justify the cost of events with lead generation KPIs.

Source: Financial Marketing Insights, 23 October 2026

At Cvent CONNECT Europe this week, my ex-boss at Deutsche Bank, Christoph Woermann, and Myllisa Patterson, Vice President of Demand Generation at Cvent, argued that events can serve brand and performance at once. Woermann described events as the moment a firm delivers on the expectations its brand has created. Patterson warned marketers against judging awareness activity by the pipeline it produces.

FMI’s headline promises a channel that delivers brand and performance. I think this needs qualifying. In B2B financial services, it's rare you'll do real lead generation at a conference, in the sense of meeting someone you wouldn't otherwise have met, and that's okay. Engagement is also about deepening relationships with the clients and prospects you already know.

So, stop asking your events budget to justify itself in badge scans. As I told you in 2024, at least half your marketing should go on brand, and conferences belong on that side of the ledger. Agree with your CFO, before you book the stand, how you'll measure them: conversations with existing prospects and how clients progress afterwards, not new names captured.

WILDCARD

Hiring, pay transparency, the CMO and AI

⑥ Clients care about what you’re going to do for them, not how.

Executive search firm tml Partners reviewed hundreds of senior marketing and communications leaders’ profiles over the past year and found that 53.1% explicitly mention artificial intelligence, but only 8.3% show documented experience of leading an AI transformation. Its chief executive, Simon Bassett, says employers need to look past familiarity with the tools and ask for evidence of outcomes.

This is a recruitment story, but it’s also a branding one. Hear me out. Swap “candidate” for “company” and you have a fair description of the state of financial services marketing, where “AI-powered” has become as standard as a blue logo in the top left corner. My sense is that the gap between firms that make the claim and firms that can show what the AI actually does for a client is at least as wide as the one tml found. Bassett is right that a profile doesn’t capture everything a leader has done. Neither does a homepage, but buyers, like hiring managers, can only judge what you show them.

“AI-powered” claims fall flat because clients care about what you’re going to do for them, not how you’re going to do it. Most businesses would do well to remove references to AI from their marketing copy and focus on how their clients benefit: hours saved, errors caught, onboarding made faster.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Brendan Greeley on why tokenisation doesn’t suspend the laws of finance:

Brendan Greeley. Source: LinkedIn, 24 October 2026

“Much of the work of the blockchain is simply renaming old things, then selling them as something new.”

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Wishing you an invigorating week,

P.S. I failed a test I thought would be child’s play this week. Can you do better?