InMarketing Today

Background-check technology company Veremark has become the third tech business to sell shares on the London Stock Exchange's Pisces private market, launching a £6m sale that lets employees cash in vested equity alongside early investors. Marcus Stuttard, head of UK primary markets and AIM at the LSE, called it another "important milestone" in the exchange's effort to keep growth companies from seeking capital overseas. The sale opens today and runs to an auction on 7 October.

Veremark's chief executive, Daniel Callaghan, gave a telling reason for the choice: Pisces "carries the credibility and connections that we were looking for from a commercial perspective." That is a marketing decision wearing a financing wrapper. For a private company with no public track record, the venue itself becomes a trust signal — a shortcut the reader takes before they have read a word of the actual business case.

Any B2B financial services or fintech firm weighing where to list, which partners to bank with, or where to host its data should ask the question Veremark did: what does this venue lend us, beyond capital or infrastructure? Treat that borrowed credibility as part of the deal, and say so explicitly in your own investor and client communications — it is a proof point, not a footnote.

ClearToken has received Gate 2 approval from the Bank of England to operate a Digital Securities Depository inside the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox, making it the first such depository cleared to settle tokenised equities, corporate bonds and sovereign debt. At launch it will handle FTSE 350 equities, sterling government debt, and corporate bonds in sterling and other currencies, usable as collateral for securities financing and round-the-clock intraday repo. It is only the second firm to clear Gate 2, and the first that is not a bank.

Chief executive Ben Santos-Stephens put his finger on the actual product being sold: "The biggest hurdle for institutional adoption of digital securities has not necessarily been the technology; it has been whether the infrastructure around that technology is sufficiently regulated, robust, and legally recognised." Regulatory approval, in other words, is the marketing. For a fintech selling into institutions, a slow, documented, supervised process becomes the asset a slicker unregulated rival cannot fake.

Fintechs targeting regulated institutional buyers should stop treating compliance as a cost centre and start treating it as the headline claim. Lead client and investor communications with what has been supervised, tested and approved, not with the technology's raw capability — the buyer's real question is never "can it work?" but "who has already checked that it does?"

Writing in CityAM, Katherine Sykes, founder and co-chair of the CIPR Crisis Communications Network, argues that boards are still failing to give communications professionals a seat at the table before a crisis hits, consulting them only once a problem has already emerged. Citing research from Deloitte, the World Economic Forum and Aon, she notes that most organisations are aware of the threats they face yet remain underprepared to manage them. The CIPR and the Institute of Directors have now published a joint handbook framing crisis response as a lifecycle — risk identification, protection, preparation, response, recovery — rather than a single bad afternoon.

This is a governance failure dressed up as a communications one. Sykes calls communication "the bedrock of effective crisis management... the golden thread" running through whether trust is kept or lost — yet most boards only reach for that expertise reactively, once the story is already writing itself. The lesson for marketing and communications leaders is blunt: if you are only in the room after the crisis breaks, you were never doing crisis management, you were doing damage control with a different name on the door.

Push for a standing seat on crisis and risk planning, not just crisis response. Use the CIPR/IoD handbook, or a version built for your own board, to get communications treated as part of resilience planning before anything goes wrong — the return on that seat is invisible until the one day it is the only thing that matters.