The Sibos, Miami issue

The most overlooked facet of marketing is making yourself easy to buy from.

Read on to learn why:

① Every client touch point should be delightful, not just easy.

② Marketing should shepherd the prospect through to being a brand advocate.

③ If you start with client needs, marketing will have a story worth telling.

④ Tokenised deposits may have found their ‘killer app’: programmability.

⑤ Journalists want news, not noise.

⑥ It’s better to hire for attitude than skills.

⑦ AI should be used to foster interaction between better-informed humans.

📸 But first, flashback to a fortnight ago when I told you that flexible working is the organisational challenge of our age. This week, Barclays has been forced to water down its return-to-office mandate.

What's new

In the only non-Sibos news in this week’s issue, the state wants to ‘buy British’ but the British don’t want to work with the state, argues Joe Hill in City AM.

Politicians want more of the UK’s £395bn of public procurement spending to go to British companies. Policy director at Re:State Joe Hill says mandates miss the point: too few British firms want to bid. One study he cites found that about 20% of tenders attracted a single supplier.

He blames the buying process. Tenders run for months against detailed specifications, which favours things officials already know they need. Contracts reserved for small and medium-sized enterprises dry up once a firm outgrows the definition. Winning bids must also carry “social value” commitments, from decarbonisation to relocating offices, which add to the cost of doing business.

His remedy is to make selling to the state easier. Re:State has published draft statutory guidance that he says the prime minister could implement tomorrow.

Why it matters

So, the government has £395bn to spend but can’t persuade suppliers to sell to it? That, I’m afraid, is a problem for another newsletter writer. But it matters to us because it calls to mind a mirror image: the company that makes it hard to buy from. In B2B financial services and fintech, our clients are often choosing between similar competitors. We’d so love to believe that the wonder of our service offering, the might of our technology, or the wit of our marketing material will tip the scales in our favour, that we often overlook another key factor: how easy — or not — it is to actually buy from us.

① Due diligence, security reviews, legal checks, procurement processes, onboarding: each is a moment where a client meets our brand, and too often that happens without someone from marketing in the room. You rarely know if there’s been any damage, because a client who stalls or quietly renews with the incumbent never tells you why. That’s why marketing needs to be in that metaphorical room every time. Marketing owns brand, and your brand is every contact a prospect or client has with your firm, from the first search result to the third support email. That makes each of those touch points marketing’s to manage, or at the very least to influence. The goal should be not just to make each one easy but delightful.

② Some friction is regulatory and unavoidable, but even a compulsory form can be clear, quick and courteous, and much of the rest is habit. Henry Ford’s ‘faster-horses’ quip applies here too: clients specify what they already know, so a request for proposal often describes the supplier they’ve just replaced, and helping them frame the problem is marketing’s job. Marketing’s work doesn’t stop when the lead is handed over either; it should shepherd the prospect through to being a client - and then go on to ensure that client is so delighted that they grow into an advocate for the brand.

What to do about it

Take action

Some questions for you to throw around with your head of marketing this week:

Who owns each touch point a prospect has with our firm, from first enquiry to signed contract? Which of them does marketing influence?
Have we ever tried buying from our own firm, as a client would? Which moments would they call delightful, and which a chore?
Which hurdles we set for clients are required by regulators, and which are habit?
Could a procurement team find the answers to their due diligence, security and pricing questions without calling our sales team?
What happens once the contract is signed? Who is responsible for turning a satisfied client into an advocate for our brand?

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Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Fraser tells Miami to move fast without breaking trust

③ If you start with client needs, marketing will have a story worth telling.

Source: The FinTech Times, 29 September 2026

Jane Fraser, Chair and Chief Executive of Citi, told the opening plenary at Sibos in Miami that clients want payments that are always on, instant and safe, and that the industry’s mandate is to move fast while retaining trust. Citi also expanded Citi Token Services to Japan and the UAE this week, taking it to seven markets, and announced a wider collaboration with Coinbase to connect stablecoin and fiat payments for corporate clients.

The chief executive of a bank that spends $12bn a year on technology used the main stage to take aim at technology for its own sake. In her words, as reported by Global Finance:

“There are a lot of shiny objects being built in this space at the moment, and a lot of hammers in search of a nail. Our industry’s responsibility is to understand what it is our clients need.”

Citi has applied the same focus to itself: it has exited 12 of 14 consumer franchises in certain noncore overseas markets, and its share price was up 37% year on year as of late August. None of this means waiting for clients to tell you what to build (Steve Jobs would turn in his grave!) It does however mean starting every new product or service with one question: how will our clients benefit?

Citi’s own announcement shows why that matters to marketers. It sells liquidity that moves around banking cut-off times and time zones, with the technology in support, so the story is credible before anyone drafts a headline. The lesson is not to be a magpie: a product built around a client need comes with its story ready for marketing to tell.

FINTECH

What does sovereignty look like in a multi-rail payments landscape?

④ Tokenised deposits may have found their ‘killer app’: programmability.

In one of the more interesting sessions at Sibos, central bankers and the private sector argued over who should issue tokenised money and where it should live. The Bundesbank confirmed that wholesale central bank digital currency settlement is now running for tokenised financial market transactions, with digital euro payments due in 2029. Ubyx’s Tony McLaughlin countered that banks tokenising on private, permissioned ledgers expect customers to come to the money, which he called a market failure. Elsewhere, Lloyds found that 71% of 100 senior UK financial institution leaders expect tokenisation to transform financial services, up from 41% a year ago. Capgemini forecasts that stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs will carry around 4% of global payments volume by 2030, putting $230bn of bank revenue at stake.

Let the bankers and technologists argue. What is clear is that tokenised money is now credible whoever issues it. And while the token itself won't set anyone apart, what it can do will. When I was at Quant, we built programmable money for Project Rosalind, the Bank of England’s exploration of a digital pound, and it was at the heart of why the experiment worked. Banks want that flexible functionality, not least because their corporate clients are already weighing up alternatives: Capgemini found that nearly 60% would turn to a non-bank stablecoin provider if their bank falls behind. Banks still hold the trust advantage, but programmability is what could make the relationship sticky.

So, if tokenisation is the ‘how’, programmability is the ‘what’ - but marketing needs to lead with the ‘why’: and that’s the benefit the client derives from programmability. If you’re taking tokenised deposits to market, pick one programmable use case your corporate clients already struggle with, such as milestone payments in trade finance, and show it working with a real example. Then explain why regulated money matters; as the Bank of Chile’s Alberto Naudon put it, money is institutions, not technology. Do it before a non-bank does it for you.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Paul Penrose, co-founder Finextra steps away from the newsdesk

⑤ Journalists want news, not noise.

Paul Penrose. Source: Generated by ChatGPT, 2 October 2026

Paul Penrose, co-founder of Finextra, retired this week after 26 years on its newsdesk. Finextra’s first story ran on 16 June 2000, and Paul wrote 36,122 of them. His co-founder Steve Ellis says the idea was hatched over a beer at a Sibos conference, when Paul, then editor of Banking Technology magazine, complained that traditional publishers didn’t “get” the internet. Finextra now has millions of users and over 40,000 members.

Paul was one of the first journalists I met when I began my career as ‘the marketing guy’ for a financial middleware company. To this day, he remains one of the more cantankerous and sceptical. Back then, he was dismissive of my so-called press releases, and he was quite right to be. Paul taught me a vital lesson early: journalists want news, not your marketing communications.

The best way to get a reporter to write about you is to help them with a story they’re already working on (by providing a contrarian view or informed insight) or offer them a data set or research no one else has. Most comms teams do the opposite: they wait until they have a new product feature to announce, then expect a stranger to care. 26 years of institutional memory has just left the newsdesk, so who on your team is busy earning trust from the next generation of reporters?

WILDCARD

Don’t just think tech, think talent to achieve broad AI literacy

⑥ It’s better to hire for attitude than skills.

A Sibos audience poll is a thin sample but an interesting data point and a third of the audience polled at a panel this week said that broad artificial intelligence literacy is the biggest capability gap in their own organisations. Deep AI expertise came last, just 4%. Federico Cohen Freue, EVP for AI and data operations at Mastercard, said that hands-on learning beat traditional training, and 80% of staff now use the AI learning hub it relaunched this summer. Anjali Shah, managing director of AI strategy and operational readiness at BNY, said every employee there uses its Eliza or Copilot tools daily.

AI adoption is no different to the adoption of almost anything new: nobody learns a tool from a slide deck. This reminds me of when social media arrived in B2B marketing. A lot of senior people - particularly in financial services - were nervous about it. There was talk of qualifications, training, workshops with Compliance. But the people who got good at it were simply willing to open the apps and have a go. AI is no different, and it explains why the poll put deep expertise last and broad literacy first.

My advice? Stop hiring for experience of specific tools, which has a shelf life of months, and start hiring for evidence of self-directed learning: ask candidates what they’ve taught themselves lately and what they made while doing it (I taught myself Claude by building an iOS app I’d always wanted.) Then give your existing team a protected hour a week and a real campaign problem to solve with the tools, rather than a course to sit through.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Elitza Kavrakova, Group Head Institutional Clients, Raiffeisen Bank International, on why banks need to double down on relationship banking:

Elitza Kavrakova. Source: LinkedIn, 2 October 2026

“AI can also help identify relevant developments earlier, enabling relationship managers to engage with clients in a more informed and meaningful way.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an intentional week,

P.S. Sadly, I didn’t make it to Provence this summer - this was the next best thing.