InMarketing Today

Almost half of 18- to 40-year-old UK investors wrongly believe AI-generated financial information is regulated, according to Financial Conduct Authority research covering nearly 700 UK adults. Forty-four per cent think AI chatbot output is regulated, 32 per cent believe they would be compensated if AI advice went wrong, and 38 per cent are comfortable making an investment decision on AI's word alone. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme says plainly that general-purpose AI tools are unlikely to fall within its protection.

Rob Hillock of Broadstone put it well: confidence is running ahead of understanding. That gap is not only a consumer-education failure, it is a brand-trust liability sitting with every financial firm using AI in its own products and marketing. A polished chatbot or a slick “AI-powered” campaign implies competence and protection whether or not either is actually promised. Customers fill any silence with the assumption that they are covered.

Audit every place your brand's AI talks to a customer, chat widgets, robo-tools, marketing copy, and say plainly, in the interface itself rather than buried in terms, what protection does and does not apply. Treat that disclosure as a design problem for product and content teams, not paperwork for legal to file away.

The Treasury will give the Bank of England a new statutory secondary objective to boost innovation in digital currencies and payments, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The Bank will also drop its planned ownership limits on sterling stablecoins in favour of a £40bn issuance cap, alongside a lower reserve requirement, changes deputy governor Sarah Breeden said would “further boost” its work on payments innovation. The amendment goes to the House of Lords next month.

For years the Bank's caution on digital assets gave crypto firms a ready-made villain and financial brands a ready-made excuse to wait. That excuse just went away. A regulator publicly reframing its own mission from gatekeeper to enabler is itself a marketing signal, one that resets what “credible” looks like for every bank, payments provider or stablecoin issuer weighing whether to move first or watch from the sidelines.

If your firm has a digital-assets strategy sitting in a drawer, this is the moment to take it out. Being early with a clear, trust-first story, what you are building, who protects the customer, and how, is now a genuine differentiator rather than a regulatory risk. The firms that stay quiet won't look careful; they will look absent.

Salesforce and Anthropic today announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership that embeds Claude's reasoning directly into Salesforce's data, workflows and governance. The launch product, Salesforce in Claude, ships with 37 prebuilt sales skills, letting sellers reason over live pipeline data and take governed action without leaving Claude. Marc Benioff called it “the world's number one AI” meeting “the world's number one CRM”; Dario Amodei said it lets companies “point Claude at the customer information and business context they've been building in Salesforce for decades.”

The interesting shift is not the AI, it is where it now sits. Enterprise software has always made people go to it, opening an app, hunting for the right screen. This partnership puts the interface inside the conversation instead, work happening through Claude with Salesforce's rules and permissions enforced behind it. For marketing and sales leaders, that is a preview of how buyers will meet your brand too, through an assistant that reasons and acts rather than a website that waits to be visited.

Get in front of it before it becomes urgent. Audit how discoverable and structured your own content, pricing and product data would be to an AI agent acting on a customer's behalf, and treat that agent as a channel worth designing for, alongside your website and your sales deck.