Trust compounded

In financial services, growth is trust compounded.

Read on to learn why:

① Revenue can’t grow without recognition and reputation growing first.

② Prospects don’t move through a pipeline, they experience a mess of moments.

③ Your brand assets are more numerous and more powerful than you think.

④ When it comes to AI, trust nothing and verify everything.

⑤ A well-timed, considered leak isn’t just good marketing, it can inform strategy.

⑥ Personal experience is the only differentiator in personal branding.

⑦ Even though social media are habit-forming and harmful, usage will persist.

📸 But first, flashback to International Women’s Day more than two years ago when I told you it was time to drop the platitudes and take meaningful action. This week, it transpires platitudes endure and very little action has been taken.

🚨 What's new

I was delighted to take part in a panel at the Fin.Tech Marketing Community’s European FinTech Conference 2026 this week. The discussion, called Building the Modern Revenue Growth Engine, was moderated by Andy Smith of StrategiQ, and featured Melanie Mills and Margaret Totten. Our brief was broad: what does growth actually mean and how should one achieve it? My argument was narrow: growth in financial services comes down to trust.

From left: Andy Smith, Margaret Totten, Melanie Mills, Andrew Carrier. Source: Alexandra Newlove, 23 April 2026

Rather than report on the entire session (hey, you should have bought a ticket - plus StrategiQ have already done it), I thought I’d expand on the notes I’d made in preparation. So what follows is just my take, not that of my fellow panelists.

① When most people talk about growth they mean growth in revenue - whether that’s acquiring new clients or retaining and cross selling to existing ones. They’re right, growth is revenue - of course it is, it has to be - but it’s also two other things. In order to get to revenue, first you have to grow recognition and reputation. People need to have heard of you and formed some affinity for you.

Marketing’s job is to ensure that your prospects trust that you can solve their problem.

② Nowadays, the marketing funnel we learnt about in business school - the one where you fed your ideal customer profile in at the top, nourished them with the right sequential marketing tactics until revenue magically popped out at the bottom - is little more than a myth. Prospects don’t move through a neat pipeline - they experience a mess of moments. Marketing’s job is to ensure that, at each of those moments, they encounter something that confirms your brand can be trusted to solve their problem. I’ve seen this in every job I’ve done but particularly in wealth management. Our AUM growth didn’t come from one clever campaign. It came from UHNW and institutional clients deciding - slowly, one by one - that we were worth trusting with their money. Great marketing makes that decision easier and happen earlier.

That’s why I argue that - in financial services - growth is trust compounded.

💡 Why it matters

Once you understand where growth comes from, the blocking factors become clear. The single biggest blocker to growth in fintech today is poor positioning. Most financial services and fintech firms swim in a sea of sameness because - instead of being crystal clear about the client they serve and making that client the hero of their marketing - they’re busy extolling AI-generated platitudes or writing long lists of clever features the CEO is proud of.

I’m job hunting at the moment so I get asked more often than usual to “tell me about yourself”. My answer is always some variation on “I turn complexity into commercial momentum”. That’s because I believe that marketing’s primary role is to generate growth and that growth only happens when your target audience is crystal clear about why they should trust you to solve their problem. Sharp positioning - i.e. turning something complex into something compelling - is how you achieve that. Who do you serve? Talk specifically to them in a human tone. Tell them what problem you can help them with, why you’re better than any alternatives they have, and how - specifically - they will ultimately benefit. Answer that in as few words as possible and you’ll unblock growth.

Fintech has spent fifteen years telling financial services to move faster, worshiping at the alter of ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’. These are noble goals and I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t be pursued but they ignore two fundamentals: the importance of trust and the fact that you should engage with your audience in their own language, talk to their concerns not your prowess or ideology. When I repositioned a blockchain company as a programmable money infrastructure for commercial and central banks, we did it by eschewing the crypto crowd’s talk of disintermediation and instead shared our expertise in regulation and liquidity management. That’s what are prospects cared about, that’s what we knew we could help them with. When a fintech walks in with a ‘move-fast-and-break-things’ mindset, the first thing it breaks is usually trust. And unlike a broken product, you don’t fix broken trust with a patch release.

✅ What to do about it

Take action

Build proof infrastructure before you build awareness. I’ve said that recognition leads to reputation, which leads to revenue. But that doesn’t mean you should execute in that sequence. Before you spend a pound on paid media, make sure a prospect who comes to your website can find the named customers, the case studies, the regulatory track record, the audited numbers. If they can’t, then you’re no smarter than Freddie my cat, who occasionally catches a mouse but then doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.
Make your client the hero of your marketing. Audit every page on your site and every slide in your sales deck. Ask one question: is this about them or about us? Become your organisation’s expert on the client. Better still, become the client’s voice within your organisation. Sit in on sales calls, interview existing clients, run regular market research. Good marketing feels like it was written for the client; great marketing feels like it honours them.
Treat your regulator like an audience, not an obstacle. Alongside prospects, clients and staff, the regulator is one of your most important stakeholders. Market to them accordingly - plain English, evidence-based claims, zero hype. The discipline of writing for a regulator will quietly make everything else you publish sharper.

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🗞️ Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

What's in a name? Or a ticker symbol?

③ Your brand assets are more numerous and more powerful than you think.

🚨 LendingClub is rebranding as Happen Bank this summer to reflect its evolution into a full-service bank, and quietly dropping its ticker symbol, LC. The new ticker hasn’t been chosen - leadership says they’ll pick a replacement closer to launch. LC was two letters, intuitive, and memorable.

💡 A ticker is a brand asset. In a market like the US, where retail equity investing is a mainstream habit - CNBC in the background, Robinhood on the phone, stocks discussed at the dinner table - that asset works for you every single day. In the UK, where most people’s equity exposure sits inside a pension they never look at, the ticker does far less brand lifting. So, I concede, the LC decision matters more on Wall Street than it would ever matter in the City. But tickers are just the obvious example. Every brand has dozens of touch points that never make it onto the rebrand deck: email domains, legal entity names, invoice templates, URL structures, BICs and LEIs, office signage, Wi-Fi network names, out-of-office replies, 404 page copy, the sender name on your marketing emails. None will make or break you on its own. All of them are doing small, cumulative, usually subconscious work on how your clients perceive you. Rebrands sometimes fall short not because the logo is wrong but because the long tail of touch points gets missed.

✅ Commission a touch point audit before you sign off on any rebrand. Map every place your brand shows up - internal and external, digital and physical, obvious and obscure. For each one, decide: update, retire, or leave. The items you’d never have thought to list are the most revealing. They’ve been doing brand work while you weren’t looking.

TECHNOLOGY

Consumers turn to AI for investment decisions

④ When it comes to AI, trust nothing and verify everything.

Source: The Financial Times, 24 April 2026

🚨 Nearly half of consumers globally now use AI for savings and investment decisions - 68% of Gen Z, with ChatGPT well ahead of Gemini. The FCA, reviewing the implications since January, notes that any advice from these general-purpose tools is unregulated. Also this week, Citi Wealth unveiled Citi Sky - an “always-on” AI advisor built on Google DeepMind - while Sullivan & Cromwell, at $3,000 an hour, apologised to a US federal judge for filing an AI-hallucinated brief in a high-profile bankruptcy case.

💡 Three stories, one new reality. AI is now a distribution channel (half your prospects ask an LLM about you before they ask you), an audience (the model reads and summarises your content before any human sees it), and a reputational hazard (the same technology mediating your brand also confidently fabricates). Citi’s answer is to own the AI; Sullivan & Cromwell shows what happens when even rigorous firms trust its output. Most firms can’t afford a Citi Sky. None can afford to ignore how they appear inside the AI tools their clients already use.

✅ Audit your AI footprint: ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity what they say about your firm, products and leadership. The findings usually sober people up. Then write for both audiences - structured, dated, factual content with named sources - because vague corporate prose doesn’t survive LLM summarisation any better than it survived your readers. Make someone - I’d argue it should be your CMO - own AI visibility: it’s part SEO, part PR, part risk, and falls between teams otherwise.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Tim Cook retirement ‘leak’ worked perfectly in predicting reactions

⑤ A well-timed, considered leak isn’t just good marketing, it can inform strategy.

From left: John Ternus, Tim Cook. Source: 9to5Mac, 21 April 2026

🚨 Apple has confirmed that Tim Cook will step down later this year, with hardware chief John Ternus succeeding him and Cook moving to chairman. The announcement caught no one off guard. A Financial Times piece last November had reported both the timing and the successor, in what 9to5Mac read as a deliberate trial balloon. The market barely flinched then. It barely flinched again on the official news. The leak did its job.

💡 Trial ballooning is one of the oldest tools in corporate communications, and Apple just executed a textbook example: brief a credible outlet, watch how the market reacts, announce for real once the ground is prepared. The technique applies well beyond CEO succession - pressure-testing a brand repositioning, floating a new product direction, gauging investor appetite for a strategic pivot. The catch for financial services is that we sit inside a tighter regulatory perimeter than Cupertino. The UK Market Abuse Regulation treats selective disclosure of inside information as a serious offence, and the FCA’s senior manager regime puts named executives personally on the hook. The same leak that earns a Silicon Valley CEO a thoughtful Bloomberg profile could earn a bank CEO an enforcement notice.

✅ Use the technique, but apply it where the rules permit. Pre-announcement leaks of price-sensitive information are a red line, not a grey area. What is fair game: testing brand positioning through earned media interviews, floating product concepts at industry conferences, briefing trade press on directional thinking, running scenario stories past analysts under embargo. Pick the outlet for the audience you want to reach, agree the framing in advance, and treat the response as data. If the market doesn’t bite, you’ve learned something cheaply. If it does, you’ve built momentum.

WILDCARD

AI is rewriting personal branding. Identity wins

⑥ Personal experience is the only differentiator in personal branding.

🚨 AI is reshaping a creator economy projected to reach $480bn by 2027. The argument: AI has collapsed the cost of producing a polished personal brand, leaving depth, lived experience, and a specific point of view as the only durable moats. Authenticity, not output, now decides which personal brands survive.

💡 For financial services leadership teams, this is less a creator-economy story than a credibility one. We talked about it above: trust is the only thing a bank, asset manager, or fintech actually sells - and the personal voices of senior leaders are one of the few places that trust gets transmitted at scale. AI-generated executive content quietly erodes it. When every CEO post on LinkedIn sounds the same - the rhetorical opener, the line-break cadence, the trailing mic-drop - none of them sound credible. The corporate brand can survive a coat of polish. A leader’s voice cannot survive being indistinguishable from every other leader’s in the feed.

✅ Stop measuring executive content by volume and start measuring it by specificity. Before approving a post, ask one question: could this have been written by any other senior figure in the industry? If so, it shouldn’t go out. The job isn’t faster content production, it’s deeper extraction. Get your execs talking about the moments their thinking actually changed: the deal that fell apart, the regulator they disagreed with, the bet that didn’t work. Those are the assets no AI model can fabricate, and they’re sitting unused in every senior leader’s head.