Live well

Describing the outcome isn’t enough, you have to draw a crystal clear line to the benefit.

Read on to learn why:

① Most wealth management marketing is interchangeable.

② You cannot differentiate a commodity by talking about the commodity.

③ Market selection should be a marketing decision, not a geography default.

④ There are no shortcuts to building trust; it’s a slow, step-by-step process.

⑤ When it comes to AI, clients want you to do as they say not as they do.

⑥ Flexible working is the organisational challenge of our age.

⑦ AI might indeed kill us all.

📸 But first, flashback to last week when I told you that FNZ, a firm systemically important to the wealth management sector looks like a shitshow. Well, this week it was announced that Blythe Masters is stepping down as CEO.

What's new

Rathbones launched its first major brand campaign this week, IFA Magazine reports.

The campaign builds on Rathbones’ recently refreshed purpose — developed after its merger with Investec Wealth & Investment — of helping more people invest their money well, so they can live well. It centres on the Rathbones compass, a brand device meant to signal direction, perspective and long-term thinking, and deliberately steers away from market movements and jargon in favour of real-life outcomes.

“’Invest well. Live well.’ is a clear expression of our long-term approach,” says Simonetta Rigo, Chief Client Officer at Rathbones. “We believe good investing is about clarity, confidence and perspective — helping people make better decisions over time so they can focus on living.”

Independent testing from System1 gave the campaign a 5.9 out of 6 star rating among high-net-worth audiences, well above category norms, with a Spike Rating of 1.45 pointing to strong short-term commercial potential; eye-tracking data also recorded high attention and engagement. The platform is supported by line extensions — Relax well, Retire well, Sleep well — and rolls out across TV, streaming, digital, social, display and radio, with initial activity in London and the South East.

Why it matters

① “Helping more people invest their money well, so they can live well,” doesn’t strike me as a particularly distinctive purpose. But that’s not what I think matters here. Financial advice is a commodity. Strip away the branding and every wealth manager is selling the same underlying promise: we will protect and grow your money and probably charge you about the same as the firm next door for doing it. That’s a tough category to be interesting in — which is exactly why most wealth management marketing is interchangeable.

What Rathbones have done…errr…well is understanding that the outcome — investment performance — isn’t enough to drive action. Instead, they have drawn a crystal clear line between the outcome and the true benefit to their clients. Nobody actually wants a bigger number on a statement just for the sake of it. They want what that number buys them — the freedom to stop worrying, to retire on their own terms, to sleep at night. Rathbones’ line extensions make the substitution explicit: “Retire well”, “Relax well”, “Sleep well” are all just “more money” translated into something a human being can feel.

② The lesson for anyone marketing a commoditised product: you cannot differentiate the commodity by talking about the commodity. You differentiate it by being the clearest, most credible voice on what the commodity is actually for and how it makes you feel.

What to do about it

Take action

Write down what your product's outcome actually is, in the driest possible terms — for most financial services firms it's some combination of more money, less risk, or more time. Then ask the harder question: what does that outcome let your client stop doing, or start doing, or stop worrying about? Have you ever tested a campaign that talks entirely about that second thing, and drops the first thing almost completely, the way Rathbones has? If you're still leading with performance figures or product technical features, is that because clients ask for them, or because it's easier than doing the work of finding the human motivation underneath?

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Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

‘We prefer the US’: Revolut’s Storonksy confirms plan for dual US-UK listing

③ Market selection should be a marketing decision, not a geography default.

Nik Storonsky. Source: CityAM, 17 September 2026

Revolut founder Nik Storonsky has confirmed the fintech is exploring a dual New York-London listing ahead of an IPO that could value the business above $100bn. He told French newspaper Les Echos he “prefers” the US market, which offers “a larger market. It includes institutional investors, hedge funds, fund managers and a considerable number of individual investors. So we have the choice between selling in a small market with few buyers, or in a gigantic market with a huge number of buyers who will compete fiercely for our shares.”

It’s hard to argue with him and he’s neatly articulated the challenge faced by the London Stock Exchange. Stamp duty and cautious listing rules are part of the problem of course but I’d argue that the bigger one is cultural. Conservative pension funds and ill-informed retail investors here have never acquired the appetite for equity risk that’s second nature on Wall Street and Main Street. You cannot market your way around a customer base that doesn’t want to buy.

Before you default to your home market — for a listing, a launch or a target segment — ask whether it’s actually where the demand lives, or just where you happen to be from. Audit buyer appetite not borders. And if your home market genuinely lacks enthusiasm, don’t waste a campaign trying to manufacture it.

FINTECH

The ex-JPMorgan banker facing Wall Street’s toughest turnaround job

④ There are no shortcuts to building trust; it’s a slow, step-by-step process.

Takis Georgakopoulos. Source: The Financial Times, 15 September 2026

Takis Georgakopoulos became Fiserv’s chief executive in June, its third leader in two years, after Mike Lyons quit for Truist within a year of taking over from Frank Bisignano, who left to join the Trump administration. Fiserv’s market value has fallen from close to $90bn to below $30bn since Georgakopoulos joined as co-president in 2024, after Lyons disclosed that more than half the payments business’s organic revenue growth had come from Argentina’s hyperinflation rather than genuine client demand. Georgakopoulos, a former JPMorgan Chase executive who ran its wholesale payments business under Jamie Dimon, now has to turn things around.

By most accounts, Fiserv does indeed have a technology problem — it’s up against much nimbler competitors like Adyen and Stripe — but Georgakopoulos’ real challenge is regaining trust, the trust of its clients and the trust of the market. It’s squandered both. And no wonder. As if losing a CEO to the Trump administration wasn’t cause enough for concern, the real issue here is that the growth story it told the market couldn’t survive contact with the facts.

Credibility, once spent, doesn’t come back with a new CEO waving a shiny set of slides. There are no shortcuts to building trust, a bolder narrative won't win it back. It’s a slow, step-by-step process. Modest guidance met consistently rebuilds credibility faster than ambitious guidance missed again.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Your best customers are using AI to find you. Your AI-made ads are losing them

⑤ When it comes to AI, clients want you to do as they say not as they do.

New research from Net Conversion finds 54% of US consumers trust a brand less once they can spot AI in its advertising, even as the same proportion now use AI tools to research what to buy — rising to 60% among under-40s. Chief executive Ryan Fitzgerald says shoppers welcome AI that works for them and resent it the moment it’s aimed at them.

The data draws a clean line between AI that serves the client and AI that serves the marketer, and in regulated financial services, where trust is the entire product, that line matters more than anywhere else. A wealth manager’s AI-optimised campaign can hit every click target while subconsciously conveying to the prospect it’s chasing that the brand didn’t think it worth a human’s attention.

Avoid using AI for content creation. It’s ill-suited to the job. Your prospects can spot it and are increasingly hostile to it. Instead, leverage it for jobs it excels at: research, targeting, personalisation and amplification.

WILDCARD

Barclays staff revolt against tightened work from home policy

⑥ Flexible working is the organisational challenge of our age.

More than 1,000 Barclays staff have signed a letter organised by the union Unite objecting to a tightened office attendance policy. Under the new rules, senior leaders must come in four days a week and other staff three, up from two, with no change for anyone living more than 40 minutes from the office. Staff are demanding a one-off payment to offset the extra commuting costs and exemption for those living further away. Unite, which represents nearly 80 per cent of Barclays’ 45,000 UK staff, says 94 per cent of survey respondents want the changes delayed pending consultation.

This is such a complex issue and one is inevitably sympathetic to those in similar circumstances to one’s own. I have little sympathy for the letter signers. Instead my gut reaction to the story was that forcing anyone who lives within 40 mins of the office to come in when those that don’t are exempt feels like discrimination. Why should someone who lives in town — and likely pays more for the privilege — be offered less flexibility than someone who chooses to live more cheaply out of town? And forcing anyone into an office to sit on video calls is pointless anyway. But the informal learning that happens near in the office — overheard conversations, absorbed behaviour, corridor politics — is real, disproportionately valuable to people early in their careers, and essential for culture and team adhesion. The office has its benefits.

Any policy which can’t survive being explained to the person it disadvantages isn’t a policy. It’s negative press coverage waiting to happen. Sensitive issues like this often fail as communications, not policy per se. If a rule can’t be defended in one sentence that survives scrutiny from the person most inconvenienced by it, it’s likely time for a rethink.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Mustafa Suleyman on the dangers of advances in artificial intelligence:

Mustafa Suleyman. Source: LinkedIn, 19 September 2026

“I think that if we all create AIs that are able to act autonomously, that can define their own objectives, that can earn money, that can own assets, that could run businesses, we’re essentially seeding a new silicon species which will no doubt compete with us for resources.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an ingenious week,