InMarketing Today

Global deregulation is handing the biggest US and UK banks a combined $1.3tn in freed capital today, with Alvarez & Marsal projecting the total could reach $2.9tn as rules continue to ease (Source: Financial Times, 26 May 2026). Goldman Sachs stands to gain most: its CET1 ratio is expected to fall from 15.1% to 13.3% as total assets climb 8% to $1.95tn. The communications imperative for any institution in this position is to get ahead of the narrative — “disciplined deployment” needs to be the story before regulators or critics write a less flattering one.

Italy’s state-backed development bank CDP is raising its stake in payments processor Nexi from 19.14% to just under 30%, blocking a reported €9bn takeover approach from private equity firm CVC, which sent Nexi shares up 5% yesterday (Source: Financial Times, 25 May 2026). Nexi processes €1.8tn in transactions annually and has been positioned publicly as a strategic part of Italy’s financial infrastructure. When governments plant a flag in payments infrastructure, M&A communications teams need a new playbook — one that accounts for sovereign interests alongside commercial ones.

Monzo retained Best British Bank at last week’s Smart Money People awards, winning three categories — Best Current Account Provider and Best Children’s Financial Provider among them — from a pool of 229,000 customer reviews across 29 categories (Source: IFA Magazine, 26 May 2026). No advertising brief delivers 229,000 unprompted reviews. The brand is the product; the product is the marketing.

The European Central Bank convened banks today for an emergency briefing after Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model identified thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, with patches reported to be reversible within 30 minutes of release (Source: Financial Times, 26 May 2026). European banks had already been excluded from Project Glasswing, the joint US patching initiative. ECB Board member Frank Elderson set the tone: “Andante may have been good enough, but we need to go to presto. The clock is ticking.”

The race to regulate digital finance is producing two distinct governance models: the UK is deploying precision instruments — a Bank of England draft stablecoin framework due in June, 16 firms active in the Digital Securities Sandbox including Euroclear, HSBC and LSE Group — while the US is relying on a sweeping executive order with 90- and 180-day implementation deadlines (Source: Finextra, 23 May 2026). Digital transactions in the UK grew from 55 to 251 per adult between 2017 and 2024. For marketing and communications teams at regulated firms, building authority in an environment where the regulatory tempo varies by jurisdiction — and by week — is now a core strategic competence.

The governance challenge for AI in financial post-trade infrastructure is structural, not cosmetic: large language models’ inherent non-determinism conflicts directly with DORA and EMIR requirements for deterministic, auditable outcomes (Source: Finextra, 24 May 2026). OSTTRA’s Nitin Pahwa argues for closed-loop AI architectures with explicit human oversight checkpoints as the only viable path to regulatory acceptance. The reframe for client-facing teams: governance is not a constraint on AI deployment — it is the commercial differentiator that makes institutional clients willing to trust the product enough to use it.

Monzo spent £143mn on marketing last year — up nearly half year-on-year — including £29.5mn on refer-a-friend rewards, a 40% increase, adding three million customers to a total base of 15.2mn while pre-tax profits rose 44% to £87.3mn (Source: Financial Times, 26 May 2026). John Cronin, financial industry analyst and founder of SeaPoint Insights, described the referral spend as “staggering” — “the standard tech playbook”. CEO Diana Layfield said the company is not in a rush to float — which reads as confidence, not caution, when the unit economics look like that.

Surveillance pricing — adjusting the price shown to an individual based on their personal data — is moving from academic concern to legislative reality today (Source: Financial Times, 26 May 2026). Colorado has banned it outright; New York requires disclosure; a JetBlue class action is under way after a cache incident exposed individual pricing data. For financial services marketers, the implication is direct: personalisation strategies that slide into price discrimination are no longer just ethical risks — they are legal ones.

Ghost consumers — users who research products via dark social platforms such as WhatsApp and Discord without engaging with any tracked channel — are making traditional conversion attribution structurally incomplete, compounded as cookie deprecation removes the last reliable third-party proxies (Source: MarTech Series, 25 May 2026). Behavioural signals — scroll depth, dwell time, return visit frequency — are emerging as the practical substitutes. Brands that treat privacy-first positioning as a customer acquisition strategy, rather than a compliance obligation, will outperform those still trying to recover the data they used to have.