InMarketing Today

Citi has processed live transactions on Swift's new blockchain-based ledger, becoming the first US bank to conduct native transactions on the network. It worked alongside First Abu Dhabi Bank and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, with further pilots planned this month with DBS and United Overseas Bank. The programme runs as a controlled proof of concept from July to December, and sits alongside Citi Token Services, which already processes around $1bn in transactions on its own blockchain-based platform.

What stands out is not the announcement but its construction. Every partner bank supplied a named executive and a specific claim — first in the Middle East, first in Southeast Asia, a defined pilot window — rather than a shared line about “transforming payments”. That specificity is what makes an infrastructure story credible: readers cannot fact-check an adjective, but they can fact-check a name, a bank and a date.

When you announce a technical milestone, resist the pull towards a single unified soundbite. Give each partner their own named quote and their own specific claim. A release built from five verifiable facts will always outlast one built from a single unverifiable adjective.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted Revolut preliminary approval for a national US bank charter, a milestone for Europe's most valuable fintech as it pushes into the American market. Revolut, valued at $115bn with 80mn customers globally, applied for the charter only in March — shortly after finally securing its full UK banking licence following a multi-year process with the Bank of England.

Revolut had reportedly considered simply buying a US bank with an existing charter, the faster route. It chose to apply directly instead, partly betting on the Trump administration's openness to new entrants. That is a deliberate positioning choice as much as a regulatory one: “built it the hard way” is a more differentiated story for a fintech to tell than “bought our way in”, and it is one Revolut can keep telling long after the charter itself is granted.

Note the word doing the work here: provisional. Revolut's own comments to the FT are careful to call this conditional approval, not a licence. If your firm is mid-process with any regulator, match that discipline in your own communications — overstating where you stand is a fast way to damage the relationship with the regulator you still need.

Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong lays out five fixes for what he calls the AI industry's public-reputation “dumpster fire”. Gallup finds just 9% of Americans think AI will do more good than harm, against 39% who think the opposite. His prescriptions: behave like an accountable institution rather than a founder-led cult, stop assuming public goodwill will forgive disruption the way it eventually forgave Uber, and focus messaging on what AI is doing today rather than the distant future Silicon Valley prefers to talk about.

The most useful idea here for any marketer sits in the middle of the piece: Armstrong's distinction, borrowed from Oxford's Rupert Younger, between a reputation for character and a reputation for competence. A character problem — the wrong person in charge — is a relatively quick fix. A competence problem — a product doing something nobody can control — takes far longer to repair, because no apology substitutes for proof the thing actually works.

Before writing the crisis-comms plan, diagnose which reputation has actually been lost. A character problem needs an apology and a change in personnel. A competence problem needs repeated, demonstrated proof — and until you can show that, no amount of press coverage buys the trust back.