Battle of the brands

Brand is the only genuinely proprietary asset a financial services firm has.

Before we dive in, a quick favour: I rebuilt my personal website this week. I’d love to hear what you think. Would you mind hitting reply and letting me know?

Now, read on to learn why:

① Brands win by being meaningful, different, and salient.

② Your brand needs a deliberate and sustained strategy in order to grow.

③ The more complex your product, the clearer your positioning needs to be.

④ You have more target audiences than you might realise.

⑤ Your value proposition should be rooted in benefits you can actually deliver.

⑥ It’s better to reward excellence than punish mistakes.

⑦ Hannah Duncan’s judgement is questionable.

🚨 What's new

HSBC emerged as the only UK name on the Kantar BrandZ Top 100 for 2026 this week, City AM reports.

① The list puts a $13.1 trillion value on the world’s most powerful brands — a record, up over a fifth on last year. Google topped the rankings, displacing Apple, with Microsoft third. The top four brands have each crossed the trillion-dollar threshold. HSBC is the sole UK name on the list, reclaiming its spot. By Kantar’s framework, a brand earns its place by being meaningful (giving customers something they genuinely want), different (standing out distinctively from competitors), and salient (coming to mind quickly when a purchase decision arises).

② The companies sitting above HSBC on this list don’t win because they offer a better version of a basic thing. McDonald’s doesn’t win on food quality. Hermès doesn’t win on leather. Google doesn’t win because its algorithm is marginally superior to a competitor’s. They win because their brands have become inseparable from the needs they serve. In financial services — where regulatory constraints narrow the space for product differentiation still further — that lesson is critical.

HSBC’s presence on this list reflects a deliberate and sustained brand strategy. The bank has invested heavily across airports, sports partnerships, arts and culture, wealth summits, and a series of brand relaunches — and in October 2025 appointed John McDonald as its first-ever global CMO, unifying brand and marketing across all four of its core businesses for the first time.

💡 Why it matters

You might expect a marketer to say this but I believe brand is the only genuinely proprietary asset a financial services firm has. Why? Well, American Banker’s Paul Vigna put the underlying problem bluntly this week: how do you build a competitive advantage when your product is a commodity? For banks, the core product is by definition identical to every competitor’s. The responses Vigna identifies are instructive: Citi and Citizens Financial deepening relationships through existing branch networks rather than chasing scale through acquisition; software vendors FIS and Fiserv embedding AI into their platforms to make themselves harder to replace. Sensible moves, both. But they are operational responses to a fundamentally strategic problem — and, critically, moves any competitor can replicate.

Brand, built over years of consistent positioning, cannot be replicated overnight.

And therein lies the rub. Citi deepens relationships; so can JPMorgan. Fiserv embeds AI; so can FIS. Rates, platforms, branch networks, AI integrations — a well-resourced competitor can match any of them, often quickly. Brand, built over years of consistent positioning and investment, cannot be replicated overnight. The $13.1 trillion aggregate in this year’s BrandZ rankings is the cumulative return on that kind of investment. It didn’t appear by accident and it won’t be eroded by a competitor’s new product launch.

The broader list offers a useful provocation for financial services marketers willing to look beyond their own category. Asian brands now account for nearly a quarter of the Top 100; European entrants are clustered in fashion and luxury. The pattern is consistent: the brands that make this list have all solved the same problem — how to make something that is, at its core, a functional product feel necessary, personal, and irreplaceable. Citi can deepen its branch relationships. Fiserv can embed more AI. But neither will appear on the BrandZ Top 100 until they solve that problem too.

✅ What to do about it

Take action

Run the BrandZ diagnostic on your own brand. Are you meaningful — not generically, but in ways that matter specifically to your clients? Are you different in ways they can actually articulate? And do they think of you first when the need arises? Most financial services brands can honestly answer yes to one of these. One out of three is not a brand strategy.
Look outside your category for inspiration. The brief is not to be better than the bank down the road. It is to make your brand feel irreplaceable — the way Google feels irreplaceable, the way Apple feels irreplaceable. Benchmark against that standard, not against your nearest competitor.
Unify your brand leadership. If your marketing function is fragmented across business lines, geographies, or product areas, fix that first. HSBC’s appointment of a global CMO is the right structural move. Strategy cannot follow from fragmentation.
Treat brand as a balance sheet item, not a cost line. The companies at the top of the BrandZ rankings invest in brand through downturns, through regulatory pressure, through market turbulence. Consistency over time is what builds the asset. Cutting brand investment when conditions tighten destroys it.
Stop competing on product alone. Your rates, your platform, your AI roadmap — someone else has the same thing, or will have. Brand is the one thing they cannot copy. Invest accordingly.

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🗞️ Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Revolut wins UK approval to offer more complex financial products

③ The more complex your product, the clearer your positioning needs to be.

Source: The Financial Times, 14 May 2026

🚨 Revolut has been granted permission by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to offer leveraged products, private wealth services, and managed portfolio solutions. It gives its trading arm the ability to unite investment, advisory, and portfolio management under one roof. The licence follows the full UK banking licence awarded by the Prudential Regulation Authority in March — and comes as the company reported pre-tax profits of £1.7bn on revenues of £4.5bn last year.

💡 Revolut built its brand on simplicity — frictionless accounts, easy FX, banking for everyone. But wealth management and leveraged products sit in a different register entirely: they demand credibility, nuance, and a fundamentally different kind of customer relationship. The brand that says “we make money simple” now also needs to say “we’re the right people to manage the complexity of your portfolio.” Those are not the same message, and closing that gap is a marketing challenge. As product complexity grows, the instinct is to add detail — more features, more credentials, more disclaimers. That instinct is wrong. Complexity demands clarity. The brands that win in sophisticated markets are the ones that make the complex feel intelligible without making it feel simple.

✅ If you’re expanding into more complex product territory, don’t simply extend your existing marketing — interrogate your positioning first. Ask whether your brand carries the trust architecture the new category requires, and whether your messaging gives sophisticated buyers the clarity to act. At Quant, I repositioned enterprise blockchain away from technical complexity and towards client outcomes. The product didn’t change. That’s what turns complex into commercial momentum.

TECHNOLOGY

UK fintech funding falls by 43% in Q1

④ You have more target audiences than you might realise.

🚨 UK fintech funding fell to $741m in Q1 2026 — a 43% drop from the $1.3bn raised in the previous quarter, according to data from Tracxn. The headline looks alarming, but the composition tells a more deliberate story: late-stage rounds contracted 62% while early-stage funding surged 177% year-on-year, with 9fin Technologies and Allica Bank accounting for the quarter’s largest raises. Tracxn describes it not as a retreat but a strategic rebalancing — investors growing more selective, not more fearful.

💡 When funding tightens, the instinct is to focus marketing entirely on pipeline — new leads, new logos, new revenue. But I think this story reminds us that investors are a target audience too. So are regulators, the press, prospective employees, and the clients you already have. Most fintech marketers treat stakeholder communications as an afterthought or, worse, someone else’s job. In a tighter funding environment, the firms that retain investor confidence, hold their talent, and maintain regulatory goodwill are the ones that survive long enough to raise the next round.

✅ Map your stakeholders before you plan your next campaign. For each group — prospects, existing clients, investors, employees, regulators, media — ask what they need to hear right now, and what you’re actually saying to them. The gaps are usually obvious and often damaging. A single narrative that serves only one audience is not a marketing strategy.

MEDIA & MARKETING

AI in banks? It’s all marketing and FOMO

⑤ Your value proposition should be rooted in benefits you can actually deliver.

🚨 At Temenos’s annual community forum in Copenhagen last week, AI FOMO was the dominant theme. City AM reports that banks are less focused on what AI can do for them than on what their competitors might be doing with it. Insiders were blunt: “It’s become a game of marketing,” said one senior executive. “Anyone can say they’re doing AI and their stock pops.”

💡 We’ve been here before. When fintechs emerged a decade ago, traditional banks scrambled to rebrand as digital innovators — the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan declaring themselves technology companies rather than banks. Now the same race is being run with AI. The marketing lesson is an old one: FOMO is one of the most potent forces in financial services communications, capable of moving investment decisions, share prices, and even buying decisions. But positioning built on peer pressure rather than genuine benefits is fragile. When the gap between claimed and actual AI maturity becomes visible — and it will — the brands that over-promised will pay the reputational price.

✅ The smarter play is to resist the herd and build an AI narrative grounded in what you are actually doing. Be specific about use cases, honest about where you are - and are not - in implementation, and clear about governance. The audiences that matter most — institutional clients, regulators, long-term investors — can tell the difference between substance and spin.

WILDCARD

Why leaders should let minor mistakes slide

⑥ It’s better to reward excellence than punish mistakes.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 11 May 2026

🚨 Managers who overlook minor underperformance aren’t being soft — they’re being rational. The study models the true cost of employee retaliation (slower work, gossip, sabotage) and concludes that firms are often better off rewarding exceptional performance with bonuses, letting small shortfalls go unremarked, and separating developmental feedback from compensation decisions entirely.

💡 The implications run wider than HR policy. How a firm structures its performance narrative — what it rewards publicly, what it addresses privately, and what it chooses not to amplify — is an internal communications strategy, whether leadership realises it or not. Guess what? Cultures built around recognising what good looks like tend to pull people toward it.

✅ Make your bonus and recognition programmes visible and generous, because positive reinforcement is doing more work than most firms realise. When performance falls short, address it in a conversation that's explicitly disconnected from pay — frame it as development, not verdict. And if you don't have a clear internal comms strategy around how performance is communicated, you're leaving culture to chance. And I’d never advise you to leave anything to chance.

✂️ Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

🎤 The last word

⑦ Hannah Duncan on….well, on me:

Hannah Duncan, Source: LinkedIn 15 May 2026

“Kind of a legend.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an innovative week,

P.S. That Claude Max plan you’re dithering over? It might well be worth it.