The wonderful everyday

Your clients crave tasteful curation, delightful experiences, and human interactions.

Read on to learn why:

① The real threat to banks is that nobody senior is curating the experience.

② People are gravitating towards more analogue, more challenging experiences.

③ Credibility spent on premature hype is expensive to rebuild.

④ In a crisis, ‘no comment’ usually feels more like abdication than caution.

⑤ AI’s marketing superpowers are targeting, personalisation and amplification.

⑥ AI doesn’t remove the need for judgement, it raises the price of not having any.

⑦ Your messaging should be anchored by a truth that resonates.

What's new

NatWest has hired a banking outsider — Harsh Agarwal, most recently Ikea's chief omnichannel officer — to lead customer experience and digital engagement, Finextra reports.

Harsh Agarwal. Source: Finextra, 11 September 2026

Operating within NatWest’s retail banking operations, Agarwal is tasked with creating simpler, more intuitive experiences across the mobile app, digital journeys, products and services.

He joins after nearly seven years at Ikea, first as chief product officer and more recently as chief omnichannel officer. Before that, he spent six years at Target.

Solange Chamberlain, CEO Retail Banking at NatWest Group, said: “Harsh’s global consumer experience and ability to turn insight into commercial value will help us deliver simpler, more personalised banking and grow deeper customer relationships.”

Why it matters

Flat-pack furniture ain’t fixed-rate mortgages, you say? I disagree. Anyone whose sanity has been tested by their bank’s never-ending security questions, the cryptic text messages that should have been notifications, or the app force-opening a website just to download a PDF - that’s illegible on a phone without zooming and scrolling like a blind weasel knows that NatWest et al have much to learn from Ikea.

Ikea’s genius isn’t the flat-pack wardrobes; it’s the experience. Their app is clear, functional and one of the very few genuinely useful implementations of augmented reality. When you visit their stores you’re guided through rooms that nudge you to dream they were actually in your own house, then they offer you cheap Swedish meatballs so you don’t go home on an empty stomach. Every step of the way the message is clear: you’re dealing with thoughtful, if quirky, human beings who care about you and have considered every step of your journey.

Simpler, more personalised banking and deeper customer relationships.

① Why should financial services be delivered with any less thought? Agarwal’s appointment shows that NatWest understands that the real threat to banks isn’t fintech disruption — it’s the accumulating evidence that nobody senior is actually curating the experience.

② A smooth user experience combined with touches of humour and whimsy that feels distinctly human is a great start. But it’s just the start. As AI becomes omnipresent, people are gravitating towards more analogue, more challenging experiences. Jemima Kelly wrote a great piece last week illustrating the point. Her article was about carrying the lessons of summer — namely taking a little longer to enjoy the moment — into the rest of the year. She ended it by specifically referencing how AI’s “encroaching” on her life is making her crave more effortful things. Marketers should take note.

What to do about it

Take action

May Chamberlain’s words ring in your ears: “simpler, more personalised, and deeper relationships.” That’s the lens to filter your marketing strategy through.

Sit down with your CMO this week and review their plan. Look for ways to stand out in the AI-driven sea of sameness: analogue objects, human contact, creativity, thoughtfulness and memorable experiences. Keep things simple, make them feel like they were designed specifically for the client you’re targeting, design activities that make people want to come back for more.

As the Swedes say, lagom är bäst.

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Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Pisces’ first birthday was an intimate affair

③ Credibility spent on premature hype is expensive to rebuild.

Pisces, the London Stock Exchange’s private share-trading platform, marked its first birthday with just three listed companies — Wayve, Moneybox and Oxford Science Enterprises — and four auctions between them, even as JP Morgan reportedly seeks to join Bank of America and Rothschild as a registered auction agent. It’s a quiet party that echoes Goldman Sachs’ GSTrUE platform, launched in 2007 with a similar promise of liquidity for private firms: it attracted two prestigious early clients, Oaktree and Apollo, then nobody else, and folded within four years because, as one insider admitted, its shares “traded by appointment.” Meanwhile, fintech lobby group Innovate Finance is pushing the Treasury to scrap stamp duty on shares altogether, arguing the 0.5% levy is starving London’s IPO market and leaving UK-listed firms exposed to foreign takeover bids.

I wish I could tell you marketing has a fix for this; it doesn’t. Pisces and GSTrUE share the same flaw: they’re answers to a question nobody outside the City asked. No campaign changes that; only genuine liquidity, credible pricing and a tax regime that doesn’t punish participation will. Where communications does have a role is honesty: naming the problem instead of — as David Schwimmer, the boss of LSEG did in July — dressing it up as “growing momentum” that was “opening up significant new market opportunities”.

If you’re running comms for a market infrastructure product, resist the urge to oversell a slow start. Credibility spent on premature hype is expensive to rebuild. Wait for genuine proof points — real liquidity, repeat participants, secondary trading — before building a campaign around them. And if the fundamentals are broken — tax, regulation, cost of capital — that’s worth tackling publicly rather than asking your marketing team to paper over it. Policy, not positioning.

FINTECH

FNZ: the Credit Suisse spinout haemorrhaging cash

④ In a crisis, ‘no comment’ usually feels more like abdication than caution.

Blythe Masters. Source: The Financial Times, 7 September 2026

FNZ, the fintech that powers investment platforms for Barclays, Santander and Aviva, raised a further $450 million this week to shore up its balance sheet — its fourth capital raise since August 2024. The Credit Suisse spinout reported $1.4 billion in pre-tax losses last year, has lost five board directors since June, and is defending a lawsuit from employee shareholders who allege their stakes were diluted in favour of institutional investors. Chief executive Blythe Masters, brought in by the board in 2024 to lead a turnaround, has cut jobs and sold off its Swiss private banking technology business and German bank — even as president Roman Regelman claims the group could be managing $1 trillion in the US within three years.

The FT’s in-depth report is a must read, not least because it makes a firm that is systemically important to the wealth management sector look like a shitshow. But what struck me, just from a communications perspective, is that FNZ declined to comment for the article.

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.

FNZ’s external story is ambition while its accounts, its departing directors and its own aggrieved shareholders paint a picture of repeated rescue financing and internal strife. In financial services, where the product is trust, a credibility gap that wide needs a proactive narrative. Silence doesn’t feel like a defensible position for them.

“No comment” has its place — not least in the case of active legal claims — but in most crisis situations, my advice is to lead the narrative rather than let others fill your silence. FNZ’s clients — regulated institutions whose own reputations depend on FNZ’s stability — are left with nothing to point to internally.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Why AI hasn’t solved marketing’s time problem

⑤ AI’s marketing superpowers are targeting, personalisation and amplification.

New research cited by Kath Pay in MarTech found that 85% of marketing teams missed at least one campaign launch date in the past year because of workflow constraints, and 82% still spend at least half their time on production rather than planning or strategy. Pay’s argument: AI has made it easier to produce marketing, not necessarily easier to produce good marketing, because it speeds up drafting without touching the approvals, unclear ownership and handoffs that create the actual delay.

Anyone who has ever worked in a regulated business knows the pattern all too well. The bottleneck is never the blank page — it’s Legal, Compliance and three senior stakeholders each with a different vision of the same article. Savvy marketers know that ‘getting shit done’ is as much about aligning their activity with strategic business objectives, collaborating with other functions and navigating internal politics as it is producing more stuff.

If you’re using AI to write content you’re just creating more drafts for your colleagues to argue over and — worse — those drafts are likely mediocre. Marketing teams should double down on quality over quantity, on creativity over content, and instead apply AI to the areas where it really shines: targeting, personalisation, and amplification.

WILDCARD

The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here

⑥ AI doesn’t remove the need for judgement, it raises the price of not having any.

Good news! America added 162,000 jobs in August against expectations, with unemployment at 4.1%, one of the lowest readings in half a century. AI is certainly having an impact though. “Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants such as Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block and Intuit are replacing people with bots.” But - and here’s the important bit - The Economist estimates that “AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.”

Dig into the numbers and it becomes apparent that the roles shrinking are the ones built on routine and repetition. The roles growing are the ones where AI raises the value of a human doing the synthesis — the paralegal spotting the clause that matters, the analyst framing what the numbers mean. In other words, as I said to you back in February, without strategic, creative and brave humans at the helm, AI will simply sail with the tide. This technology doesn’t remove the need for judgement, it raises the price of not having any.

Most marketing leaders are still organising their teams by function. I think it pays to look at it by task, to ask role by role: is this person doing something AI does adequately on its own, or something that only gets better with a human’s judgement layered on top? That second category is the one to spend time on. The first you can hand to a bot. Oh, and if you’re hiring, for the love of Jobs please stop advertising for “AI-savvy marketers” and start describing the actual judgement you need instead — The Economist suggests that’s where growth lies.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Bryan Adams on selling the truth:

Bryan Adams. Source: Sell the Truth, 12 September 2026

“We want something real and meaning that is anchored in human experience. We want truth that resonates rather than messaging that merely performs.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an innovative week,

P.S. The pen is truly mightier than the sword.