InMarketing Today

Berkshire Hathaway has named Howard Buffett — the 71-year-old second of Warren Buffett's three children and a company director since 1993 — as its new chair. Warren, 96, becomes chair emeritus, eight months after Greg Abel took over as chief executive, completing the succession at a $1.1tn conglomerate Warren built from a failing New England textile mill in 1965. In his letter to shareholders, Warren wrote: "Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values — both worth more than anything on our balance sheet."

That's a communications decision as much as a governance one. Rather than simply announcing who is arriving, Warren named the specific division of responsibility — operations to Abel, culture to Howard — which tells the market exactly what is changing and, just as precisely, what isn't. A vague promise of continuity invites scepticism; a named mechanism for protecting it doesn't.

When you next hand over leadership, resist stopping at the announcement of who's in charge. State, specifically, which part of the organisation the incoming person is there to protect — and which part belongs to someone else. A title tells people what changed. A mandate tells them what didn't.

TreasurySpring has been approved as a "super validator" on the Canton Network, the institutional distributed ledger used for tokenised assets. Through a process called the canton improvement proposal, the firm will record ownership of its fixed-term fund shares on the ledger, with the first phase upgrading TreasurySpring's back-end infrastructure at what the company calls "zero impact" on the client experience — no wallet, no cryptographic keys, no change to existing subscription or settlement processes. "Institutions are looking for ways to mobilise high-quality financial assets more efficiently without compromising privacy, control, or legal certainty," said Matthew Longhurst, TreasurySpring's co-founder and chief innovation officer.

Infrastructure announcements like this one are easy to lose a non-specialist reader in — and TreasurySpring's sequencing is the fix. It leads with the operational promise (nothing changes for you, yet) before it explains the ledger underneath. That order matters more than the technology itself: a reader who doesn't understand "canton improvement proposal" can still understand "you won't need a wallet."

When you're communicating a platform or infrastructure migration to clients, put the answer to "what do I have to do differently" in the first line, not the last. Save the architecture for readers who ask for it.

Rathbones has launched its first major brand campaign and first TV advert, "Invest well. Live well.", built around the firm's compass as a central brand asset representing direction and long-term thinking. The campaign follows Rathbones' rebrand after its combination with Investec Wealth & Investment, and supports its ambition to become "the best wealth manager in the UK, by far." Independent testing by System1 gave the campaign a 5.9-star rating out of 6 among high-net-worth audiences — well ahead of category norms — with a Spike Rating of 1.45, according to chief client officer Simonetta Rigo.

The campaign's discipline is what makes it work: it deliberately avoids market movements and financial jargon in favour of the outcome clients are actually buying — confidence and reduced uncertainty at life's financial milestones. And Rathbones published the proof alongside the launch rather than waiting for a retrospective case study, pairing the emotional pitch with a specific, sourced effectiveness score.

If you're building your next campaign, lead with the client outcome, not the category conventions — returns, market commentary, jargon — and commission the effectiveness data before launch, not after. A number published on day one is worth more than a claim made on day one.