InMarketing Today

The FCA's review of how firms design, monitor and distribute products under the Consumer Duty found real progress alongside real gaps. One banking firm cut ATM complaint volumes by 45% in three months simply by making its app clearer and improving staff training. Another created a special debit card so caregivers could buy essentials for dependants without handling their original card and PIN, cutting the risk of financial abuse. But the FCA also found firms still relying on broad, generic target markets that make it harder to spot who a product is failing.

The dividing line between the FCA's best and worst examples is entirely a marketing discipline: precise, researched knowledge of a specific customer's actual circumstances, translated into product features, pricing and service. Firms that could name exactly who a product was for, and what that person needed, built genuine trust. Firms working from generic personas produced generic outcomes — and generic outcomes are what erode a brand fastest in a regulated market.

Pull up your own target market definitions. If they read like compliance boilerplate rather than a description of a real person's life, your marketing has the same blind spot as your product design — and the FCA has just told you where to look first.

Goldman Sachs has told staff they can no longer use platforms like Kalshi to bet on event-based contracts tied to financial markets or political outcomes, according to Reuters. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are adding similar restrictions to their conduct codes. Repeat breaches could mean termination and forfeited winnings, Bloomberg reports. The move follows a Commodity Futures Trading Commission case in which a Google employee, trading under the username 'AlphaRaccoon', allegedly made $1.2m on Polymarket using non-public search data — against a backdrop of Kalshi's own valuation reaching $22bn.

The communications angle here is less about advertising and more about how a firm signals its own integrity. In an industry that sells trust for a living, moving first to close a conflict-of-interest loophole is itself a form of reputation management — proof a bank polices itself before a regulator or a headline forces the issue.

Review whether your own employee conduct code has kept pace with new speculative products staff can access personally; prediction markets are only the latest example. If you update the policy, say so plainly to staff and, where relevant, to clients — a quiet fix invites more suspicion than an open one.

Microsoft has rolled out Workplace Check-in for Teams, a feature that uses office Wi-Fi to automatically log where an employee is working from — down to the room or floor — replacing manual status updates. It is off by default and needs both admin activation and employee consent. Microsoft told Fortune the feature is 'not a monitoring tool', pointing out there is no reporting dashboard, no historical log and no way to query someone's past location.

This is a case study in language outrunning experience. Calling a feature 'voluntary' does not make it feel optional when you are the one person on the team who has opted out and everyone can see it. An ExpressVPN survey cited in the piece found 80% of employers already run remote-work surveillance, and the American Psychological Association found 56% of monitored staff feel tense or stressed as a result — numbers that work against Microsoft's chosen framing, not with it.

Before rolling out any monitoring-adjacent tool internally, describe it the way an employee would describe it to a colleague, not the way legal would describe it to a regulator. If the two descriptions don't match, fix the policy or the message — but fix the gap before someone else names it for you.