InMarketing Today

Gareth Thomas, the Labour MP for Harrow West and a former business minister, has written to Barclays, Santander and HSBC asking each to commit £10 million to community development finance institutions (CDFIs) — lenders that serve small businesses mainstream banks won't touch. The letters, sent last month and seen by The Times, follow a £10 million UK community finance pledge from JPMorgan Chase and a similar commitment from BNY. The UK's entire CDFI sector lent just £181 million to 6,869 small businesses in 2025, according to Responsible Finance — a fraction of the US market Thomas wants Britain to emulate.

Barclays and Santander both reported bumper results last week — Barclays' pre-tax profit up almost a third to £3.3 billion, Santander's underlying profit up 17% to €3.8 billion — which makes visible hesitation over a £10 million community commitment look tone-deaf, whatever the commercial logic behind it. Lloyds, not one of the three banks targeted, has already committed £43 million to CDFIs; its rivals now risk being cast as the ones who said no.

Marketing and comms teams at Barclays, Santander and HSBC should get ahead of the decision, not wait for it to be forced. A public commitment — framed around the businesses and communities it will reach, not the number itself — costs far less than being remembered as the bank that declined to help.

Major banks and exchanges are ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into tokenisation — turning bonds, stocks and other assets into blockchain-based tokens that can trade around the clock — according to the Financial Times. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has told shareholders the bank needs to "roll out our own blockchain technology," while Nasdaq plans to launch its own equity token next year. The IMF has warned that in these systems, "failures can propagate faster than institutions or supervisors can respond."

The marketing risk is that tokenisation strips out the humans who once absorbed a crisis quietly. Hilary Allen, a law professor who has testified before Congress on the subject, points out that automated systems remove "grace, discretion, things that are very helpful often in times of panic" — meaning the first sign of trouble will be public and instant, not a phone call nobody hears about.

Any institution moving deposits, collateral or trading onto blockchain rails needs a crisis communications plan built before launch, not after the first automated failure. Explain the safeguards in plain English now, while there is no incident to explain away.

Brunswick, the PR firm retained by roughly a third of the FTSE 100, is reviewing its capital structure and could sell a further stake to outside investors, The Times reported yesterday. It would be only the second outside investment since Sir Alan Parker founded the firm from his parents' kitchen table in 1987 — the first, a 10.7% stake sold to BDT Capital Partners in 2021, valued the business at roughly £500 million and paid partners a £140 million windfall.

The timing tells its own story. Brunswick's talks come as reputation management sits at the centre of a market reshaped by AI-fuelled disinformation — precisely the environment its 220 partners are paid to navigate. A firm built entirely on communications advice raising fresh capital, rather than being squeezed by new technology, is the clearest signal yet that reputation work is being priced as core infrastructure, not overhead.

Use this valuation in your own budget conversations. When a business that sells nothing but reputation management can raise fresh capital to grow, it is harder for your CFO to treat the communications budget as the first thing to cut.