InMarketing Today

JP Morgan is seeking approval to become a registered auction agent on the London Stock Exchange's Pisces market, joining Bank of America and Rothschild in brokering deals on the private share-trading system the Financial Conduct Authority introduced last year. The move follows a summer of sizeable private sales: AI call-handling firm Wayve saw staff sell around $85m of shares in July, and savings app Moneybox ran a £45m staff sale that valued the company at £800m.

For this audience, Pisces is a quiet trade-off dressed up as a growth story. The London Stock Exchange has hosted just one sizeable IPO this year — Uzbekistan's UzNF, which raised $600m — and several advisers have warned that Pisces could let companies stay private, and less scrutinised, for longer. Every big bank that joins lends credibility to a market with lighter disclosure obligations than a public listing.

If your business is weighing a private auction over a public listing, treat lighter scrutiny as a liability to manage, not a convenience to enjoy. Volunteer the disclosure and stakeholder reporting a listing would have forced on you — the trust you bank now is what the market will ask you to prove later.

FNZ, the New Zealand-founded wealth management software group spun out of Credit Suisse, this week raised a further $425m to shore up its balance sheet — its third capital raise since 2024. The firm, whose software runs the savings of clients at Barclays, Santander and Aviva, reported a $2.4bn pre-tax loss last year, almost double the year before, even as operating income rose 9 per cent to $2.6bn.

This is a communications problem as much as a financial one. Chief executive Blythe Masters and UK chair Dame Alison Rose have spent a year telling investors and clients a turnaround story — cost cuts, board changes, a push into the US — while FNZ's own employee shareholders allege in a New Zealand lawsuit that their stakes were diluted, in one case by up to 80 per cent, as institutional backers took control. A leadership narrative of “strong momentum” only survives as long as your most invested internal audience believes it too.

If your business is mid-turnaround, audit the internal story with the same rigour as the external one. Employees and minority shareholders who feel misled will say so — in a courtroom, in a lawsuit's public filings, or on LinkedIn — and that version will travel further than any investor update.

Storytelling consultant Bryan Adams, who spent two decades building the culture and talent stories of Nike, Apple and American Airlines at Ph.Creative, argues in his new book Sell The Truth that most leaders already hold a truth worth telling and have never been taught how to shape it into something an audience will believe. He built the book's five-step framework on conversations with figures including Seth Godin and Jonah Berger.

His argument lands hardest in financial services and fintech — sectors built on regulatory disclosure yet chronically associated with the opposite of candour. Adams draws a careful line: this is not spin, but the deliberate, evidenced shaping of what is already real about an organisation. “The most powerful way to move an audience is to tell them a truth they can feel,” he says — a direct challenge to any brand still hiding behind hollow superlatives instead of proof.

Before your next campaign or leadership message goes out, run Adams' implicit test: can every claim survive being said aloud, backed by evidence, in front of the people it concerns? If not, the problem is not the message. It is the proof behind it.