InMarketing Today

EBAday 2026, held in Copenhagen today, brought together payments leaders from HSBC, J.P. Morgan, EBA CLEARING, and the European Payments Council to assess Europe’s regulatory and commercial payments landscape. The mood was cautiously positive. Giorgio Andreoli of the European Payments Council pointed to SEPA as a genuine success — citizens in the Balkans “literally queued to join” — while Erwin Kulk of EBA CLEARING described how 39 banks came together to build instant payments infrastructure before anyone knew what it would be used for.

The client experience angle sharpens quickly. Katja Lehr of J.P. Morgan described how directive-based regulation, rolled out across multiple markets, produces “maybe 11 or 12 different versions of what’s supposed to be the same truth.” That is a compliance problem — and a brand one. Institutions that deliver materially different experiences across markets signal, however unintentionally, that consistency is optional. The panel’s conclusion was unambiguous: whoever best meets customer needs wins in payments, and banks hold a structural advantage — customer trust — that operational incoherence will steadily erode.

Two steps are worth taking now. First, audit the client experience you are actually delivering across markets — not the experience you believe you are delivering, but the one clients encounter. Second, if your institution is not present in the digital wallets your customers use, Vanessa Manning of MUFG was explicit: absent from the wallet means absent from the data that informs your own product decisions. That gap compounds quietly, then quickly.

The Financial Ombudsman Service ordered Revolut to pay £25 compensation to a customer — referred to as Mr A — after push notifications woke him in the early hours on two separate occasions. A family member was unwell at the time, adding an edge of genuine distress to an unwelcome interruption. Unable to return to sleep, he described a bad day at work the following day. Revolut, valued at $75 billion, initially paid the compensation into his business account rather than his personal one, and was subsequently ordered to redirect it.

The marketing angle is direct and uncomfortable. Revolut’s explanation — that regulatory requirements meant some communications “didn’t have timeframes” — is technically defensible and reputationally weak. Every notification a bank sends is a brand interaction. A $75 billion fintech with the engineering capacity to build global instant payment rails can almost certainly build notification logic that distinguishes 3am from 9am. The ombudsman found no fault with the notification itself. In the court of customer perception, that finding is beside the point.

Audit your notification strategy — not for regulatory compliance alone, but for brand experience. Two questions are worth putting to your communications team today. First, can customers control the timing and type of every notification they receive? Second, can you say with confidence which messages go out at which hours, and why? If “some are regulatory and cannot be timed” is the best answer available, that is worth communicating clearly to customers — before they discover it at 3am and take it to the FOS.

Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report — based on surveys of more than 85,000 respondents across 48 regions — confirmed that social media has overtaken television and news websites as the primary daily news source globally. TikTok and Instagram are rising in overall influence; X continues to decline, with Threads emerging as an alternative. Online creators are rising as key news sources across multiple regions, guided by engagement metrics rather than editorial standards. AI chatbots are also increasing as news sources — a development the report flags as a concern, given the documented rate of factually incorrect responses.

For financial services and fintech brands, the implication is specific. Clients and prospects are forming their views about your market, your competitors, and your credibility through social feeds curated by algorithms and motivated by engagement — not accuracy. All age groups have shifted further towards social apps for news consumption, per the Reuters data. If your brand is not producing content that earns its place in those feeds, you are ceding the information environment to whoever is. The regulated sector’s traditional preference for caution has merit in many contexts. Here, it is costing ground.

The practical response is not to chase virality or abandon editorial standards. It is to show up consistently on the platforms your senior audience actually uses — with content that is substantive, accurate, and worth sharing. For B2B financial services, that means LinkedIn above all. The Reuters data is a clear signal: your audiences are telling you where they want to be reached. Meet them there, or leave the narrative to others.