InMarketing Today

The UK Payments Delivery Company is launching a £50m equity raise backed by 19 of Britain's biggest financial firms — including Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC, JP Morgan, Wise and PayPal — as it moves toward becoming a shareholder-backed alternative to Mastercard and Visa under the Bank of England's new payments model. Barclays UK chief executive Vim Maru chairs the project as chair designate while the PDC searches for a permanent chief executive; the Bank of England's Retail Payments Infrastructure Board is due to deliver its first blueprint in the first quarter of 2027.

The only voice attached to this launch is "a spokesperson." For an organisation asking 19 competing banks and two card networks to back it, and eventually asking merchants and consumers to trust it with their money, that's a communications gap the fundraising alone won't close. Every payments rival worth watching — Stripe, Revolut, Wise — built credibility on a founder or chief executive willing to put their name to the pitch.

Before the PDC's raise closes, someone senior — Maru, or an interim spokesperson given real authority — needs to go on record, by name, about why this entity deserves the market's trust. A quote attributed to an organisation, not a person, tells everyone watching that nobody's yet accountable for the outcome.

Takis Georgakopoulos, the former JPMorgan payments chief once seen as a long-shot to succeed Jamie Dimon, took over as Fiserv's chief executive after predecessor Mike Lyons lasted barely a year — undone when he revealed more than half the company's organic growth had come from Argentina's hyperinflation rather than genuine demand. Fiserv's market value has fallen from almost $90bn to below $30bn since Georgakopoulos joined in 2024, and Wolfe Research's Darrin Peller says investors will know within nine to twelve months whether the company needs to sell assets or break itself up.

Georgakopoulos's response, in his first interview since taking the job, wasn't a polished turnaround narrative — it was restraint. He told the FT the strategy is "pretty straightforward," that execution is "the most important thing," and that fixing client complaints comes down to "picking up the phone." After two chief executives who oversold the story, that's itself a communications strategy: Peller calls it a "see-it-to-believe-it" market, and a leader who under-promises has more room to over-deliver than one who doesn't.

Watch what Georgakopoulos does over his next two earnings calls, not what he says on them. A market this sceptical won't be won back by a confident narrative — only by results, delivered by someone who has already shown he'd rather admit a hard truth than sell a soft one.

LinkedIn's newest guidance on Thought Leader Ads confirms what its own research has shown for a while: 71% of decision-makers find thought leadership more persuasive than conventional advertising, and B2B marketers see 1.6 times higher engagement, and up to double the click-through rate, when a promoted post comes from a named individual rather than a company page. LinkedIn's advice: keep content fresh, refresh ads every four to six weeks, and let the individual's point of view lead.

This is the same lesson Fiserv and the UK's new payments body are learning the hard way elsewhere in this issue: a name attached to a message earns more trust than an institution attached to the same message. LinkedIn didn't invent this insight — it just has the engagement data to prove it.

If your fourth-quarter plan still routes every important announcement through the corporate page first, test the same message from a named leader's own profile instead, and compare the response.