The good, the bad and the ugly

The best ads are compelling, innovative, endearing, memorable and purposeful.

Before we dive in, a quick personal note: I'm on the lookout for my next full-time marketing or communications leadership role at a Series B+ fintech or established financial services firm. If you know someone who needs help growing their business’ recognition, reputation or revenue, I’d love an introduction >

Now, read on to learn why:

① This week, the UK’s financial regulator is also the sector’s best marketer.

② A compelling message needs to include a clear and very specific reason to care.

③ Competition in ‘DIY’ investment is heating up.

④ You should take estimates of stablecoin adoption with a pinch of salt.

⑤ A safe rebrand can be even more damaging than one that’s too clever.

⑥ Achieving productivity gains from AI depends as much on HR as IT.

⑦ Digital and in person experiences must coexist.

What's new

This week, the FCA unveiled a Waterloo station pop-up to warn against investment scams, Investment Week reports.

Source: Investment Week, 30 January 2026

In short:

“Commuters at one of London’s busiest transport terminals were greeted with a mysterious ATM promising to ‘give away a fortune’ on Thursday, as part of the Financial Conduct Authority’s latest campaign to increase awareness of financial fraud. However, people passing by Waterloo station came face-to-face with the FCA’s latest mascot, Emil the Seal, who delivered a message urging people to ‘check it is real before you seal the deal’.”
“The FCA’s pop-up ATM at Waterloo was designed to challenge people’s instinct to rush into offers that seem too good to be true – a tactic scammers heavily rely on.”
“The stunt was launched to promote the FCA’s Firm Checker tool, which is designed to help people verify whether a financial firm is genuine before they hand over their money.”

Why it matters

① You don’t expect a financial regulator to outshine the organisations it’s regulating in terms of marketing nous and yet here we are. This story matters because, in a week where a number of big brands in finance launched promotional campaigns, the UK’s FCA somehow came out on top.

The good: FCA

✅ Compelling message: The ad promises to protect me from losing money. I’m in.

✅ Innovative activation: A billboard giving away money in the middle of a railway station certainly catches your attention.

✅ Endearing content: Just look at that cute little seal…

✅ Memorable slogan: “Check it’s real before you seal the deal,” says it all and is annoyingly hard to get out of your head.

✅ Purpose: Scammers thrive on urgency and excitement. This campaign was designed to break that spell. It has a purpose was can all get behind.

The bad: Monzo

② I’ve seen positive reviews of Monzo’s latest campaign from marketers I respect - and who am I to criticise the grande dame of UK fintech? But somehow this doesn’t quite land for me.

✅ Compelling message: Money invested or saved is better than money sitting in your current account. Okay. But this campaign does nothing to tell me how Monzo will do that better than anyone else.

❌ Innovative activation: There’s nothing wrong with tube ads - you’ve got a captive, mostly qualified, audience. But there’s nothing unexpected here to grab attention either. Most people on the platform are more likely to be staring at their phones than looking at the posters.

✅ Endearing content: I’ll give this a tick because I think the audience will warm to the clever copywriting, if not the rather dull supporting visuals.

❌ Memorable slogan: “The bank that gets your money moving,” says nothing to me. Moving where? Why do I want it to move?

❌ Purpose: Other than Monzo selling more investment products and keeping its shareholders happy, I don’t feel any sense of purpose here.

The ugly: Coinbase

The UK advertising watchdog banned this Coinbase ad this week calling it ‘socially irresponsible’. If only that was the worst thing about it.

❌ Compelling message: Just like crypto itself, there is no actual value here. The message is the same lie the industry has been selling to the greedy, the gullible and the desperate for years: trading crypto is a magical shortcut to riches.

❌ Innovative activation: The best thing that happened to this ad is getting banned. At least now this derivative video will earn some views and notoriety on social media.

❌ Endearing content: Everything about this is ugly. The way it looks, the way it sounds and - mostly - the message it tries to convey.

❌ Memorable slogan: It is not fine.

❌ Purpose: Unless you’re invested in keeping the crypto Ponzi scheme going, you’re not going to feel any sense of purpose from this.

What to do about it

Take action

When thinking about your next promotional campaign, how many of our five levers can you pull?

Compelling: Your campaign must offer a clear, specific reason for your audience to care right now. In B2B finance, this typically means quantifying the cost of inaction or the scale of an opportunity - vague claims about "transformation" won't cut it. Think about Stripe's early messaging ("Start accepting payments today"). It worked because it promised an immediate, concrete outcome.
Innovative: Innovation in B2B marketing rarely means new channels; it means finding an unexpected angle on a familiar problem. Where does your audience not expect to come across you?
Endearing: Warmth and humanity are underused in financial services, where the instinct is to project authority and seriousness. Small touches - acknowledging the tedium of procurement, using plain language, showing the humans behind the product - build affinity without undermining credibility. If the FCA can use a seal to land a serious message, maybe you can let your hair down too.
Memorable: Distinctiveness beats polish every time. Your audience sees dozens of pitches a week; they'll remember the one that broke pattern, not the one with the slickest production values. A single vivid metaphor, an unusual visual, or a counterintuitive claim will stick longer than a comprehensive feature list.
Purposeful: Can you build your campaign around something that’s bigger than just the compelling message to the client? A campaign with a larger purpose, one that benefits society as a whole, is a slam dunk.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Hargreaves Lansdown overhauls fees as competition escalates

③ Competition in DIY investment is heating up.

Source: The Financial Times, 26 January 2026

“Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest DIY investment site, is reducing fees for about half its 2mn-plus customers as competition in the industry heats up. The company said it would cut its annual account and share-dealing fees but add a charge for fund trading in its first overhaul of pricing for more than a decade.
“The changes mean eight in 10 customers will pay either lower fees or the same amount, the firm said. However, one in 10 will pay up to £1 more each month, with 3 per cent having to fork out an extra £10 or more.”
“The fee overhaul comes as competition in the sector intensifies. Big financial services companies such as JPMorgan Chase have entered the fray, while digital upstarts including Robinhood have expanded their offering.”

TECHNOLOGY

It turns out crypto’s stablecoin adoption is around 1% of previous estimates

④ You should take estimates of stablecoin adoption with a pinch of salt.

“Raw blockchain transfers are oftentimes pointed to as proof of stablecoin adoption, but the reality is only a small percentage of this activity—around 1% of roughly $35 trillion in total transaction volume—is actually related to real-world payments.”
“B2B payments and international remittances account for most of the stablecoin payment activity, and activities such as crypto exchanges moving funds between blockchain accounts, automated activity with smart contracts, and trading on decentralized exchanges should not be included in payment measurements.”
“Of course, overblown or outright false adoption metrics are not new in the crypto world. Various data points, such as increased on-chain activity around decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, can be used to tell all kinds of tall tales.E.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Find me a blander corporate rebrand than This Bank

⑤ A safe rebrand can be even more damaging than one that’s too clever.

“Marketing strategies are hard to get right. Coming up with a new name, a new logo, a new motto is riddled with danger. A litany of botched corporate rebrands haunts various corners of the Square Mile. It’s not long ago that Aberdeen Asset Management changed its name back to Aberdeen from Abrdn. Despite years of defending it, execs just couldn’t stomach any more ridicule of the impossible-to-pronounce moniker.”
“This week, This Bank relaunched, after previously being known as JN Bank. Mindful of the perils of the failed rebrands of yesteryear, marketing chiefs clearly went for the most anodyne, innocuous name they could possibly come up with. And what an awful name it is.”
“Imagine walking down a high street, popping into a grocery store called This Supermarket, before swinging by This Corner Shop for a copy of the daily This News, and then heading over to This Pub for a pint of This Bitter.”

WILDCARD

How to avoid common AI pitfalls in the workplace

⑥ Achieving productivity gains from AI depends as much on HR as IT.

“A big new survey of executives in America, Australia, Britain and Germany, conducted by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Macquarie University, the Bank of England and the Bundesbank, shows that almost three-quarters of businesses are using AI in some way. Yet 86% of bosses across these four countries report the technology has had no impact on labour productivity over the past three years. […] The problems are behavioural, technical and organisational.”
“Being honest about the uncertainty that lies ahead might sound like a bromide, but it is vital. ‘There are jobs that are going to disappear,’ says Nimish Panchmatia, the head of AI at DBS, South-East Asia’s largest bank. ‘But new jobs are going to get created as well.’ […] The hidden costs of [solving technical issues ] are easily overlooked. The first cost is to adapt the model to the specific use case. This means training it on the right data, fine-tuning it and driving hallucinations down. […] Finding the right talent is an obvious issue. Failing to give the machines access to the right data is another common pitfall.”
“To make AI work within organisations, a prosaic set of management problems needs to be solved. These include well-designed incentives for adoption, guardrails to mitigate problems, and systems for choosing, measuring and implementing applications. You need a mixture of pragmatism and ambition, says Mr Swanson. You need to be ‘a cynical optimist’.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Chris Skinner on why humans need human service:

Chris Skinner. Source: The Motivational Speakers Agency, 31 January 2026

“Digital efficiency and human interaction are not competing ideas. They are complementary capabilities. The opportunity now is to design models that recognise both. Not because we want to return to the past but because the future demands it.”

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Wishing you an influential week,

P.S. I’ve found warm, wonderful respite from the self-improvement advice, political arguments, and market news that dominate my podcast feed. It’s a new show for “people who don’t get out much and can’t handle it when they do. A refuge for the clumsy and the awkward.” I think you’ll love it.

InMarketing This Week