InMarketing Today

The London Stock Exchange's Pisces platform, launched to give private companies periodic access to public-style share trading, marked its first birthday this week having signed up just three companies — AI firm Wayve, fintech Moneybox, and a vehicle tied to Oxford Science Enterprises — running four share auctions between them.

Pisces' predicament echoes Goldman Sachs' GSTrUE, a nearly identical platform launched in 2007. GSTrUE landed two marquee names, Apollo and Oaktree, who raised over $1bn between them — then the platform folded within four years once, as one participant put it, shares "traded by appointment." Building the infrastructure was never the hard part. For anyone marketing a new venue or category, thin early adoption is a communications problem as much as a commercial one.

Address weak uptake before commentators do it for you. Publish real usage numbers, however modest, and treat early members as proof points to court the next cohort — three companies with a story to tell beats three companies and silence about why more haven't joined.

GlobalData forecasts the global AI market growing from $131bn in 2024 to $642bn by 2029, with financial services AI spending rising from just over $18bn to at least $87bn over the same period. A Bank of England survey found 75% of UK financial firms already use AI, and some fraud-detection systems now intercept up to 92% of fraudulent activity before a transaction clears.

The article's real question — where's the return — is one every fintech marketer should be asking of their own function, not just the technology budget. Spending on a capability and proving its worth are different exercises, and the second is harder. The useful test on offer: whether a deployment can be linked to a line in the profit-and-loss account — a standard most marketing spend doesn't meet either, and rarely gets asked to.

Apply that same discipline to your own AI and technology spend: name the P&L line each tool is meant to move, and track it from day one. If it cannot be tied to cost saved, risk reduced or revenue protected, call it a pilot, not a strategy — and say so plainly to your board.

New Content Marketing Institute research, reported by MarTech, finds 89% of B2B marketers now use AI for written content and 87% say it has improved productivity — but only 39% say it has improved content performance. The piece argues most content still follows a publish-and-move-on rhythm, while a smaller set of "reference assets" — calculators, benchmarks, templates people return to — earn a lasting place in the buyer's process instead.

That productivity-performance gap is the real story. AI has removed the old constraint: teams could not produce everything, so they had to choose what mattered. Now they can produce everything, so choosing well matters more, not less. The stakes are real: Forrester finds the average B2B purchase pulls in 13 internal and nine external stakeholders, and 6sense finds the first seller contact now lands 61% of the way through the buying process — by which point the already-preferred vendor wins roughly 80% of the time.

Before commissioning anything new, find out which existing pieces buyers already return to, share internally, or ask sales for — and invest there first. One well-maintained calculator that a buying committee circulates will do more for a pipeline than another AI-assisted article nobody reopens.