InMarketing Today

Revolut will begin rolling out its own premium airport lounges next year, starting with Copenhagen Airport in 2027, in partnership with Plaza Premium Group. Hadi Nasrallah, director of Revolut's New Bets division, called Copenhagen a "perfect fit" in a "key growth market". It follows the first physical store, announced for Barcelona earlier this year. The group booked £4.2bn in revenue last year, up 46 per cent, with subscriptions the fastest-growing line at £708m, up 67 per cent.

A lounge is not a distribution channel. It is a brand asset, and Revolut has been unusually candid about why it wants one: the firm said it opened physical space because that is what "any other lifestyle brand would do". Read the competitive set hiding in that sentence. Revolut has stopped benchmarking itself against banks on price and app ratings and started benchmarking against Amex, airlines and hotel groups on how membership feels. Subscription revenue growing at 67 per cent is both what pays for that and what demands it, because perks have to read as status rather than discount.

Separate the places your brand is transacted from the places it is experienced. Most B2B financial firms have plenty of the first and almost none of the second, then wonder why relationship pricing gets shopped at renewal. Pick one high-dwell moment the client already sits through — onboarding, the annual review, your stand at the conference — and rebuild it as an environment you control rather than a process you administer.

Microsoft has struck a deal to embed S&P Global's licensed data, insights and analytics directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot, including a Copilot in Excel connector for analyst workflows and a plugin for agentic experiences. Rather than standing up a separate AI environment, customers run company research, financial analysis, transcript intelligence, peer benchmarking and competitive analysis without leaving Microsoft 365. Sally Moore, chief client officer and co-head of market intelligence at S&P Global, said the firm is "meeting clients where they work".

The marketing consequence is that S&P Global gives up its front door. Data vendors have spent thirty years fighting for the terminal, the portal and the login, because the login was the relationship — a daily reminder of who you pay and what for. Embedding inside Copilot trades that visibility for usage. What replaces the login screen is attribution inside the answer: whose data gets cited, and whether the user can see where a number came from. That is now the whole brand impression, and it is one line long.

If you sell information, settle this quarter whether you are a destination or an ingredient, because the two need different pricing, different renewal conversations and different marketing. If you are becoming an ingredient, make source attribution and evidence lineage contractual rather than a nice-to-have. And rebuild usage reporting around what the assistant cited, because logins are about to stop telling you anything.

Over 70 per cent of global ad spend will pass through AI-driven self-service platforms by 2028, up from 50 per cent in 2025, according to new Gartner research. Eric Schmitt, VP analyst in Gartner's marketing practice, warns the shift could undermine transparency, measurement and accountability, weakening an advertiser's ability to direct campaigns while raising what they pay. The platforms already decide who sees an ad, how often, in what sequence, and which creative version.

Regulated marketers come off worse than most. Gartner notes these platforms typically require API connections and the sharing of proprietary signal data — a technical burden and a governance problem that a financial services firm carries far more heavily than a retailer does. The deeper issue is time horizon. Schmitt points out that the great majority of AI functions optimise for near-term outcomes, while brand awareness and recognition compound over years. Left to itself, the machine will quietly defund the thing that takes longest to work.

Gartner's advice is to concentrate spend on the few platforms that genuinely matter, keep a short list for testing new markets, and favour platforms that permit independent measurement. Add one rule of your own: if the only evidence a channel works comes from the channel, you have a supplier's opinion rather than a result. Commission independent brand measurement now, while you still have a pre-2028 baseline to compare it against.