InMarketing Today

Two stories from UK financial services this week illustrate how strategy and rate sensitivity interact. Investec announced on 21 May a £30m investment to expand its UK private bank, targeting 95,000 households and aiming to double its client base from 8,000 to 16,000 (Bloomberg, 21 May 2026). The model is advice-led: an integrated banking, lending and wealth proposition built in partnership with Rathbones, who provide underlying investment capabilities. The stated targets — a compound annual growth rate of 15%, a loan book growing to £9bn, UK market share rising to approximately 13% — are ambitious, and the strategic logic is sound. In a segment where trust and relationships are the product, an advice-first model is more differentiated than rate-led acquisition. Investec is positioning itself as a primary bank for wealthy UK clients, not a niche lender.

Starling’s full-year results, published today, demonstrate the risk of the alternative. Revenue fell 6% to £887m; pre-tax profit declined 3% to £217m, with interest income dropping £52.5m as rates fell an average of 91 basis points across the year (Financial Times, 22 May 2026). CFO Declan Ferguson described the rate cuts as “a headwind that pretty much all banks will face” — which is precisely the problem. When your largest revenue driver is a macro variable you cannot control, it becomes your story whether you want it to or not. The mitigating numbers are genuine: Starling’s Engine SaaS arm grew 24.5% and won City AM’s Innovation of the Year, and roughly 900,000 new accounts were opened in the year, bringing the total to 6.2 million. Those are the numbers Starling needs to lead with. The diversification story is there; it is not yet the headline.

Wired published a detailed profile today of Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief of global affairs, framing him as the company’s fixer for AI’s reputation collapse. The numbers he is working against are stark: a recent NBC News poll found just 26% of US voters view AI positively, while 46% view it negatively (Wired, 22 May 2026). Lehane — a veteran Democratic Party operative who joined OpenAI as global policy chief in August 2024 — describes public narratives about AI as “artificially binary”, oscillating between utopian and catastrophic framings neither of which reflects likely outcomes. His proposed remedies lean toward policy advocacy: a four-day working week, expanded healthcare access. The credibility challenge is considerable. Former members of OpenAI’s own economic research unit have resigned, concerned the team was becoming an advocacy arm. When your own researchers are among your critics, the PR strategy is secondary to the governance question it reflects.

The adjacent question for financial services specifically is posed in a Finextra analysis published today by Raktim Singh (Finextra, 22 May 2026). Singh’s central argument: the greatest AI risk for banks is not failure but success — specifically, systems that become so capable and so trusted that institutional judgement gradually atrophies. His distinction between reasoning and judgement is worth holding: reasoning produces a coherent answer; judgement asks whether that answer should be trusted. A model can be more accurate and still reduce human attention; an AI agent can complete more work and still weaken accountability. For CMOs leading AI adoption inside financial institutions, this is the communication challenge as much as the governance one. The organisations that get this right will not just use AI for capability — they will be able to demonstrate that they have preserved the human judgement that makes the output trustworthy.

LinkedIn’s global editorial VP Laura Lorenzetti announced on 22 May new measures to suppress AI-generated content lacking genuine human perspective (Social Media Today, 22 May 2026). Restrictions will limit the reach of algorithmically detected AI content; automated comments will be filtered; users will gain the ability to restrict their feeds to verified profiles only. Simultaneously — and the timing is notable — LinkedIn expanded Crosscheck, its AI model comparison tool, to all US users, allowing professionals to pit OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft models against each other for their specific sector (Social Media Today, 22 May 2026). The apparent contradiction is, on examination, a coherent position: AI assistance is becoming platform infrastructure; AI substitution — content that replaces rather than amplifies a human point of view — is what LinkedIn is moving against.

The commercial implication is sharpened by a Meltwater analysis published yesterday: across 9.5 million AI citations from six major models, LinkedIn ranked as the second most-cited domain overall (Social Media Today, 21 May 2026). Of those citations, 83% came from individual articles and plain text posts rather than company pages. Every top-cited article used structured formatting — bullet or numbered lists — and 92% had clear headings. The practical message for B2B financial services communicators is direct. Structured, expertise-led content published by named individuals is the format AI cites. If your firm’s LinkedIn presence is dominated by company page posts rather than individual voices, you are absent from a growing share of AI-mediated discovery.

On creative work: two campaigns stand out this week. Hiscox’s “Most Disastrous Campaign Ever” — created by Uncommon Creative Studio, originally an award-winning OOH series — is coming to TV for the first time, running during the World Cup on ITV across June and July to reach an estimated 22 million adults (Campaign Live, 22 May 2026). The executions make the ads themselves “accidentally” go wrong: glitching, running upside down, airing in a foreign language, displaying at the wrong size. There is staged copyright infringement of Specsavers, Weetabix and Cillit Bang. It is the best B2B insurance creative of the year, because the concept is inseparable from the product promise: things go wrong in business, and Hiscox is there when they do. Nationwide, meanwhile, returned with its fourth Dominic West spot, directed by Bryan Buckley for Mother, celebrating Which?’s Banking Brand of the Year award (Campaign Live, 22 May 2026). The “A.N.Y. Bank” platform, running since 2023, has become a case study in building long-term creative equity through consistency rather than reinvention.