InMarketing Today

Monzo has become the first British digital bank to pass one million business customers, with numbers doubling in the past two years alone. One in six UK businesses now banks with Monzo, including one in five newly formed businesses, and more firms switched to Monzo than to any other business bank in 2025. Jordan Shwide, general manager of Monzo Business, said the bank's ambition since launch in 2020 was "to build a bank that genuinely made running a business easier."

The number that matters here isn't one million — it's one in five. Capturing new businesses at the moment of formation means Monzo is becoming many founders' default bank before the Big Four even get a look in. That's not won with broad brand advertising; it's won by being genuinely useful on the specific, unglamorous problems — getting paid, setting aside tax, tracking expenses — that founders actually have.

Audit your own onboarding funnel for the moment a customer first needs you, not the moment you'd like to pitch them. Whoever solves a founder's first problem well usually keeps the account for good.

Jamie Dimon is personally contacting CEOs of major US banks and technology firms to expand the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure into a cross-sector group focused on managing AI risk, according to Reuters. The expanded coalition, targeted for completion by the end of the year, aims to feed its findings on AI guardrails back to the Trump administration to help shape policy. Dimon, who is reportedly planning his succession, has repeatedly warned that AI poses systemic risks to the financial sector.

Dimon isn't announcing a policy; he's assembling a room. Building a coalition of credible peers before you speak is a communications strategy in itself — it turns one bank's opinion into an industry position, and an industry position carries far more weight with regulators than a single CEO's warning ever could.

If you're pushing for a position on a genuinely contested issue, don't go it alone. Find the peers who share the concern, get them in the room first, and let the collective voice do the work a solo statement can't.

WPP cut 1,267 jobs in the first half of 2026 — 1.3 per cent of its workforce — leaving 97,388 staff at the end of June, as headcount fell by more than 6,000 over the past year. Pre-tax profit still dropped 7.7 per cent to £277 million despite reducing staff costs by 5.9 per cent to £3.47 billion, while the group deepened its AI data partnerships with Google, Meta and AWS. Shares surged 23 per cent on the update. Chief executive Cindy Rose said the results were "in line with our expectations" and show the company's strategy "to become the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands is beginning to deliver."

The market didn't reward WPP simply for cutting costs; it rewarded the story that came with them — that the cuts are building towards leaner, judgement-led work rather than defending a shrinking production business. Cutting headcount only reads as strategy when leadership pairs it with a specific, credible account of the capability being built in its place.

If you're cutting headcount, don't let the cut be the headline. Pair it with a specific, credible account of the capability you're building instead, or the market will read retrenchment, not strategy.