InMarketing Today

Barclays is halving its investment bank's leadership team again. Bank of America dealmaker Mike Joo joins Adeel Khan as co-chief from February, ending the four-person structure chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan installed less than three years ago; current co-heads Cathal Deasy and Taylor Wright are expected to leave shortly after. It is the investment bank's seventh co-CEO arrangement in four years, and comes after managing director attrition already ran to 25% of the M&A team between 2023 and 2024, almost 40% in the US alone.

The real cost here is not the org chart, it is what serial restructuring signals externally. Barclays bankers still call themselves "Lehmanites" almost two decades after the acquisition, and every reset reopens the question of what the franchise actually stands for. A brand, internal or external, needs continuity of message to earn trust; leadership musical chairs is a communications event whether Barclays intends it to be or not.

Any leader restructuring a senior team should pair the announcement with a clear statement of what will not change: the strategy, the client promise, the culture. Treat the reshuffle as a message to control, not a personnel matter to bury in a Monday announcement — the market, and your own staff, will write the story for you if you don't.

Asset managers are expanding tokenised share classes of regulated money market funds, letting corporate treasurers pledge or transfer holdings 24 hours a day, seven days a week, instead of waiting on T+1 settlement windows and weekend liquidity freezes. The Global Treasurer reports the shift already lets treasury teams sweep idle cash into yield-bearing tokenised vehicles and trigger settlement automatically through smart contracts, collapsing operational friction that has defined corporate cash management for decades.

There is a genuine communications job buried in this story. Adoption will not be held back by the technology; it will be held back by trust. Corporate treasurers need convincing that these instruments still count as cash equivalents under IAS 7 and US GAAP, not some novel risk category invented by a crypto desk. That is an accounting question dressed as a communications one: whoever explains it most plainly to a naturally conservative buyer wins the mandate.

If you sell tokenised liquidity into corporate treasury, lead with the regulatory and accounting reassurance before the blockchain pitch — treasurers act on "still classified as a cash equivalent, now available on weekends," not on "24/7 on-chain settlement." If you are the treasurer, audit where cash sits idle over the weekend and ask your banking partners for their tokenisation roadmap now, before a competitor's treasury desk gets there first.

Buyers spend just 17% of their purchase process in direct contact with vendors, according to Gartner research cited by B2B social platform Oktopost. The other 83% happens in peer conversations, analyst calls and social feeds that never fire a single click. Most B2B marketing dashboards are built entirely around that missing 17%: clicks, form fills and pipeline credit.

That means most brand-building work is invisible to the tools built to prove it happened, and invisible work gets cut first when budgets tighten. A CMO measuring only click-through rate and marketing qualified leads is optimising for the smallest, coldest slice of a buyer's attention and mistaking it for the whole picture.

Track share of voice, saves and sends, branded search growth and follower quality among named target accounts, not raw impressions, and review the results monthly; brand awareness moves too slowly for weekly reporting to show anything but noise. Put that awareness dashboard in front of the board on its own terms, rather than competing line by line against MQLs in the same weekly deck.