Communicating in a crisis

Taking responsibility for a mistake is owning it but also acknowledging its seriousness.

Read on to learn why:

① Empathy is the key component of all - but especially crisis - communications.

② A crisis demands regret, responsibility, resolution, restitution, and reform.

③ Clients in private capital are having a confidence crisis as returns crater.

④ Regulatory arbitrage is now a strategic tool, not just risk management.

⑤ More than ever, your employees are the key to B2B marketing on LinkedIn.

⑥ The crypto sector continues to find new ways to part fools from their money.

⑦ A smidgen of megalomania is the secret ingredient of disruptive innovation.

What's new

On Thursday, Lloyds customers were shown strangers’ banking details, Finextra reports.

In short:

“Users logging in to Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland apps this morning have reported seeing other people's account details, including names, sort codes, spending histories back to December, and unfamiliar transactions.”
“Lloyds Banking Group has called it a ‘technical glitch’ and assured everyone accounts are safe with accurate balances, and suggested logging out and back in, which fixed it for many.”
“Lloyds' explanation for the problems didn't wash with some users.”

Why it matters

I feel for the poor soul who was presented with my bank details as their own on Thursday morning. I also feel for Lloyds and the comms team there. Dealing with a crisis like this is hard at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times.

The bank - already under fire for accessing 36,000 employees’ private accounts during pay negotiations - just last week declared it wanted to be ‘the UK’s biggest fintech’ by selling more customer data. It has been pushing customers away from branches and onto the very app that, this week, showed them someone else’s transactions. The Information Commissioner’s Office and the FCA will likely soon be investigating.

On the surface, the Lloyds team followed the crisis comms playbook: they apologised, provided reassurance by describing the limited extent of the impact, and committed to an investigation. But somehow it didn’t land. And the reason for that - the reason this story matters - is that they didn’t properly take responsibility for the incident. In their haste to downplay what had happened, they ended up sounding dismissive. “Technical glitch” makes light of something that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of IT would instinctively feel was indicative of a much more serious issue. “Log in and log out” might solve the symptom but it also sounds like a brush off. It certainly does nothing to build trust or reassure that the underlying fault has been fixed.

① A key part of crisis communications is taking responsibility. And that means not just owning the mistake but acknowledging the seriousness of it and accepting how it will leave people feeling. It demands true empathy. Lloyds - while being careful not to escalate or dramatise the situation - should have conveyed genuine regret and a much clearer acknowledgement of the impact of the mistake, and why identifying - then, in due course, sharing - its root cause was now its top priority. Instead, in what I suspect was a misguided effort to minimise the fallout, their comms Lloyds fumbled an opportunity to empathise with customers.

What to do about it

Take action

Regular readers will recognise what follows - I shared it with you back in 2024.

② When you get to the office tomorrow, ask your head of communications to show you their crisis comms plan. If they can’t, it’s time to write one. There are lots of crises frameworks but here’s one I find particularly valuable:

Regret: The first thing people want to hear when things go wrong is “I’m sorry”. That’s a lesson we’re taught as children yet seem to forget as adults. This isn’t the same as accepting blame; it’s empathy. If others have been harmed, inconvenienced or otherwise negatively impacted by your company, apologise - whether it’s your fault or not. Do so early and keep doing so.
Responsibility: As with regret, this doesn’t have to mean accepting blame or - shout it to your legal team - liability. This is different. What the impacted audience wants and needs to hear is that you have a sense of ownership of the problem, that you will behave responsibly and will not shirk from your role to see this thing through. This is the step Lloyds stumbled on this week. What ‘responsibility’ conveys is that you own the mistake, you fully understand how serious it is, and you’re not going anywhere until it’s put right.
Resolution: Convey the facts, explain what has gone wrong and then, once you’re confident you can make it happen, start articulating what you’re going to do to remedy it. Not too early on this one. Until they believe that you really feel empathy and that you’re going to act responsibly, your clients won’t care about your vision of the future.
Restitution: If people are injured, physically or materially, they will want to hear that you’re prepared to make it right. They will be angry if you withhold what seems like trivial money that would ease discomfort. For the third time, this is not accepting liability; it’s doing what you can to mitigate to ease immediate discomfort.
Reform: Eventually, when the crisis has passed and you’ve had time to analyse what happened, you’ll need to communicate what you’ve learnt from the experience. Your clients need to hear that things are actually going to be better in the future because of what happened.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Goldman executive says private markets clients ‘glad’ for Iran war ‘distraction’

③ Clients in private capital are having a confidence crisis as returns crater.

Kunal Shah. Source: The Financial Times, 11 March 2026

“A top Goldman Sachs executive has said that the bank’s clients in the private capital industry are ‘glad’ that the Iran war is providing a ‘distraction’ from questions over the sector’s exposure to software.”
“Shares in listed private equity and credit firms have tumbled this year over rising fears about their exposure to software companies that could be disrupted by artificial intelligence.”
“Private credit firms with heavy exposure to technology companies have come under particular pressure. Shares in tech-focused lender Blue Owl Capital, which permanently restricted cash withdrawals from its inaugural private retail debt fund last month, have fallen almost 40 per cent this year.”

👀 See also:

TECHNOLOGY

European fintechs ride the Trump train to Wall Street

④ Regulatory arbitrage is now a strategic tool, not just risk management.

“Trump’s sweeping deregulation of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010...helped open the floodgates to fresh lenders looking to grab a slice of the US’ banking market.”
“But the charge back into the US from the London-born fintech juggernaut will be bound to set off alarm bells in Whitehall, not least because the US deregulation endeavour mirrors the results the Treasury had hoped to unleash across the UK.”
“The move whipped up choppy waters for the London stock market and may yet indicate that – for fintech giants – the American dream could become a UK nightmare.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Why LinkedIn’s AI shift is the ultimate validation for B2B social

⑤ More than ever, your employees are the key to B2B marketing on LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn has effectively begun moving from evaluating who you know to evaluating what you know... the platform is gradually transitioning from a Social Graph to what increasingly resembles an Interest Graph.”
“Across LinkedIn, personal posts frequently reach between eight and twelve percent of an individual’s network, while company pages commonly reach around one percent of their followers... People trust people long before they trust brands. For that reason, employee advocacy is increasingly shifting from a marketing initiative to an organisational capability.”
“The relevant question is no longer how many people saw a post. The relevant question is which accounts engaged with the thinking presented, how those interactions influenced buying committees, and whether those conversations ultimately contributed to pipeline development or customer retention. This is where social analytics begins to evolve into revenue intelligence.”

WILDCARD

Five-minute bets are the new craze sweeping crypto markets

⑥ The crypto sector continues to find new ways to part fools from their money.

Source: The Financial Times, 13 March 2025

“Contracts on whether the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be higher or lower in five or 15 minutes are attracting roughly $70mn in daily trading volume across Polymarket and Kalshi, data from the two biggest prediction platforms shows.”
“These contracts now represent more than half of all crypto trading on both markets. Their growth has also created new inefficiencies that sophisticated traders have jumped on.”
“Retail investors are piling into increasingly short-dated crypto contracts in search of quick wins, even as the price of bitcoin has tumbled more than 40 per cent from its peak last October and despite Polymarket’s decision to charge fees on such contracts from January.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Tim Cook - quoting Steve Jobs - reflecting on 50 years of Apple:

Tim Cook. Source: Apple.com, 14 March 2026

“People crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

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Wishing you an interactive week,