Read on to learn why:

① The way prospects learn about you is shifting fundamentally.

② AI has solved production but replaced it with an originality problem.

③ You should be using AI for targeting and amplification.

④ Personalisation at scale is now finally, genuinely possible using AI.

⑤ The key to unlocking AI’s power is your operating model, not the tech itself.

⑥ Competitive advantage lies in the gap between AI adoption and exploitation.

⑦ Effective use of AI demands judgement that’s human, specific, and earned.

🚨 What's new

I attended the EMEA Financial Services Marketing Leaders' Summit this week. As usual, this was a hugely valuable day of knowledge sharing and networking so I’m tweaking the newsletter’s usual format to bring you all the key takeaways.

With eight main sessions - and speakers from HSBC, Aviva, Schroders, Lloyds, NatWest, LSEG, Deutsche Bank, Adobe and others - there is a lot to distil but the main theme is clear: trust is still the currency of financial services marketing; it’s the way it gets minted that is changing.

① The data from Caroline Joyce's session with Gavin Horner of NatWest and Oliver Harrison, ex-Citi, made the shift hard to ignore. 71% of B2B buyers are now Millennials or Gen Z. 89% have used generative AI somewhere in their buying process. 50% start with an AI chat rather than a search engine. 83% prefer to do their own research before they engage a vendor. Trust in AI-generated advice has jumped from 37% in 2024 to 61% in 2025. And here’s the statistic that should sit uncomfortably with any CMO: 89% of unbranded prompts - the ones that don’t mention your firm by name - get fulfilled entirely by third-party sources. Adobe forecasts LLM-driven search in financial services will go from 1% of all search in 2025 to 21% by 2027. The front door is being rebuilt while we’re still inside the house.

② The bigger problem isn’t the technology itself - it’s what most marketing teams are doing with it. Satwant Wishart’s Global Marketing Leaders Content Study found that 54% of organisations now have AI embedded in daily content workflows. Yet only 20% report that their content is having significantly stronger influence than two years ago. AI has solved a production problem and replaced it with an originality problem. As Wishart put it: “AI has lowered the cost of content but raised the cost of originality.” The flood of indistinguishable AI-generated articles - the rhetorical opener, the line-break cadence, the trailing mic-drop - is doing measurable damage to the very brands publishing it.

③ Meanwhile, the firms making real progress with AI are doing something quite different. Adobe’s Simon Murray and Jamie Brighton walked through TSB’s personalised loans programme: a 300% increase in completions, built in nine weeks, by matching the right product to the right person at the right rate. Aviva has cut its first-notification-of-loss call times from 30 minutes to 10 by letting AI handle note-taking so agents can focus on empathy. Neither of these examples are about producing more content. They’re about using the technology to do something humans on their own cannot: deliver private-client treatment at scale.

Paul Fletcher, Global CMO of Schroders Wealth Management, offered the sharpest example of what that looks like at the high end of the market. Schroders’ sweet spot is clients with £10 to £50 million of investable assets - an audience where mass marketing is pointless and personal relationships are everything. Fletcher’s team hunts for what he calls “trigger moments”: the entrepreneur who’s just sold their business and pivoted overnight from risk-taker to ultra-conservative; the American relocating to London; the newly minted partner at a PE house. They produce 20 different content variants for narrowly defined client profiles, with a 100-strong client panel feeding back on what actually resonates. AI is the multiplier on that targeting, not the substitute for it.

💡 Why it matters

A few weeks ago, I argued that in financial services, growth is trust compounded. These sessions confirmed it. Every speaker, in different words, was making the same point: marketing’s job is to ensure prospects trust you can solve their problem - and that trust gets built across a mess of moments, not a neat funnel.

④ What’s new is that AI has now inserted itself into the majority of those moments, and it has the power to do one of two things at each one. Used badly - to mass-produce content nobody asked for, to write soulless executive posts, to push out generic personalisation pretending to be insight - AI is deeply corrosive. Each empty interaction subtracts trust. Used well, it does the opposite. It finally lets a financial services firm deliver the thing wealth managers have promised for decades and rarely achieved at scale: treat every customer as if they were a high-value private client.

⑤ That phrase came up more than once during the day, in different forms. Adobe’s framing was the cleanest: the future of financial services belongs to those who can treat their 10 millionth customer like their top private client. It’s the kind of line you’d dismiss as vendor copy, except the case studies suggest it’s becoming possible. The constraint is no longer the technology. It’s the operating model around the technology - which is exactly where most firms are still stuck.

⑥ Dominique Rose Van-Winther shared a striking data point on that front: top-performing companies are extracting 25 hours of saved work per person per week from AI, while the typical organisation gets 2 to 3. 40-50% of AI software licences in financial institutions go entirely unused. The gap between adoption and exploitation is now bigger than the gap between AI and no AI. Adobe’s own research found that just 9% of firms have AI genuinely embedded organisation-wide, against 76% who expect agentic AI to be handling half of their customer support within 18 months. The ambition is wildly outpacing the operational reality.

The firms that close that gap will compound trust faster than the rest. The firms that don’t will spend the next two years producing AI slop, losing distinctiveness, and watching their unbranded search prompts route around them.

And remember, in the not-too-distant future, calling out the use of AI in your marketing will be about as informative as telling someone you used a computer. The brands that play the long game already understand this. They're treating AI not as a talking point but as plumbing - invisible, dependable, and judged by what comes out of the tap.

✅ What to do about it

Take action

The to-do list from the event is more practical than the speakers themselves may have realised. Six things:

1. Treat brand as an enterprise system, not a marketing campaign. Gavin Horner of NatWest was sharp on this: brand has to be an enterprise-owned promise, executed consistently across every touch point, because AI will mercilessly punish any inconsistency it detects. The CMO doesn’t own trust alone. She co-owns it with the CEO, the Chief Risk Officer, the Head of Operations, and every client-facing team. Audit your touch points accordingly.

2. Write for two audiences, not one. Humans need emotional resonance. Machines need structured, dated, sourced content with clear schema. Caroline Joyce was emphatic: LLMs favour FAQs, glossaries, named experts, and meta-tagged content. If an AI can’t summarise your product cleanly, you’re excluded from the conversation before the customer even knows you exist. The brief is now bilingual.

3. Restructure for AI before you scale it. 78% of marketing teams have restructured in the last 12 to 18 months, according to Wishart’s study, and the ones doing it best are building what she called a corporate newsroom - editorial judgement, research, storytelling, AI fluency, and subject matter expertise, in that order of value. If your marketing team still looks like a brand team and a digital team taped together, you’re optimising for 2020.

4. Make originality the deliverable, not volume. Paul Fletcher of Schroders was blunt: AI is enabling lazy content production - more volume, less relevance. The opportunity is the inverse. Fantastically targeted, insightful content that says something nobody else is saying. Your own experts are the differentiator. CIOs, fund managers, analysts, regulatory specialists. Most of them are sitting on perspectives no LLM has been trained on, because they’ve never been published. Get them on the page then use AI to ensure they reach those clients to whom they’re directly relevant. (In one poll on the day, 47% of the room said the biggest barrier to building client communities is targeting the right audiences, not producing more content. Community isn't a content problem; it's a clarity problem.)

5. Use AI to deliver advisory experiences at scale. TSB’s 300% lift in loan completions and Aviva’s halved call times came from the same insight: AI is best used to free humans up for the parts of the job that need empathy, judgement, and relationship. Map your customer experience, identify the friction, and ask where AI can take the mundane work so the humans can do the trust-building work. That is the route to private-client treatment for the 10 millionth customer.

6. Audit your marketing before AI amplifies it. Chris Clark closed the day with a discipline he calls the three-thirds rule: one third of what your marketing team does is genuinely useful, one third could be with some changes, and one third nobody would miss if you stopped doing it tomorrow. AI changes the maths dramatically. Putting the wasted third through an AI engine doesn't transform anything - it just produces more of it, faster and cheaper. Before you accelerate, audit. Work out what's worth amplifying in the first place.

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I am currently pursuing senior marketing and communications leadership roles — ideally a permanent position, although I'm also taking on a small number of fractional and interim engagements. If you need help growing your business’ recognition, reputation and revenue - or know someone who does - let's talk.

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✂️ Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

📈 FCA must still fix investing culture, says LSE CEO

🧀 UBS: the bank that outgrew a country

👮🏻‍♂️ Deutsche Bank hit with six-figure fine in UK for breaching Russia sanctions

🎯 Investec targets UK wealthy with private banking push

💷 Monzo’s profit rockets as outgoing boss collects £12m pay packet

TECHNOLOGY

🇬🇧 Bank of England outlines tokenisation, stablecoin vision for UK finance

🏦 Why financial institutions struggle with digital transformation

✄ Standard Chartered to cut around 7,800 jobs amid increased AI use

🤖 OpenAI begins roll out of personal finance suite

🇩🇪 Chase launches digital bank in Germany

MEDIA & MARKETING

🔎 Google Search is dead. Welcome to the era of the ‘intelligent search box’

🗣️ PRs: This is how to handle conflict

👋 Lloyds considers scrapping Halifax brand after 173 years on high street

📲 LinkedIn doesn’t want your AI slop anymore

💰 James Murdoch buys Vox, New York Magazine and podcast network

🎤 The last word

⑦ Chris Clark closed the day. He’s the former Group CMO of HSBC - the man behind “The World’s Local Bank” - and now Senior Independent Director at Aviva, where he chairs the Conduct Committee. His conversation with Hannah Last of Economist Impact was full of insights but one line really stuck with me.

“It’s about how the soil smells.”

When he was at HSBC, the brief for the “World’s Local Bank” campaign came from a simple commercial problem: making a generic global bank mean something to clients in 40 countries who had no reason to care about it. Clark’s answer was to send his teams into local markets and listen - properly. He told the story of HSBC’s Malaysia CEO winning a DHL deal by getting a chef into the room to explain Malaysian fusion cuisine to the prospect. The point wasn’t to impress the prospect with a private chef. It was to demonstrate local knowledge. “It’s about how the soil smells,” Clark said.

There’s no robot in the world that knows how the soil smells. AI can deliver private-client treatment at scale and amplify the heck out of your message - but only if the underlying understanding is human, specific, and earned.

As Clark said in conclusion, ideas alone aren’t enough. Every spark needs a flame. Growth is still trust compounded. The compounding has just got faster.

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an insightful week,

P.S. Are you a watch nerd by any chance? Claude and I built something for you.