InMarketing Today

Deutsche Bank has rolled out an artificial intelligence platform across its investment banking and capital markets teams in Europe and the Americas, FStech reports today. Built with the technology company Farsight, it runs on the bank's own infrastructure and lets bankers draft and refine presentations and client documents through a conversational interface that learns from user feedback. George Tierney, the bank's global chief operating officer for mergers and acquisitions, said: 'Our teams have very specific standards for what goes in front of a client, and those standards vary from group to group.'

The message is in the architecture. The bank has published no usage figures or productivity claims, so the story it tells is control: sensitive data stays in its own environment, and the tool is shaped to each group's standards. For a regulated audience that is the stronger pitch, because it answers the question a client's risk team asks first, which is where their information goes. The limit is that this is a launch announcement; there is no evidence yet of how bankers use the platform or what it saves them.

If you sell to financial institutions and use artificial intelligence in your service, put your data position in the first line of the pitch and write it so a client's risk team can check it: where data is processed, who can see it, and what leaves your environment. Then add the second half of Tierney's argument and show how the tool follows each client's own standards, because customisation is what makes control worth paying for.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said on the bank's third-quarter earnings call that it is 'not going to allow just any...outside agent to come in inside the company, because it's just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan', Finextra reports. A bank spokesperson confirmed that external agents are blocked from operating on behalf of retail customers, and that the bank does not let third parties log in with customers' banking credentials. It supports customer-authorised data sharing through open banking providers instead, and Dimon warned that anyone using new agents such as Meta's Muse should understand that 'there's a liability transfer'.

The communications win is the liability line. Dimon framed a restriction as customer protection and told customers who use outside agents that responsibility moves to them, which turns a competitive gate into a safety message. It also leaves the bank with a promise to keep: it says it is 'building tools' to protect customers and is committed to 'enabling agentic connections securely', and customers will judge it on how soon that arrives. A block that outlasts its alternative starts to read as protection of the bank's own position.

Decide your position on outside agents before a client asks, and write it in plain terms: what you allow, what you block, and who carries the risk in each case. Then publish the secure route you offer instead, because a refusal with no alternative leaves the story to your customers. If you sell to banks, expect questions about agent access in your next security review.

Mike Pastore writes in MarTech today that business-to-business influencer marketing needs a different playbook from consumer campaigns, with longer sales cycles, niche audiences and no direct-response model. Larissa Williams, managing director of communications at the agency Directive, says programmes increasingly look like long-term partnerships. Directive's five-step framework starts with employee and customer advocacy, then moves to creators, analysts and advisory councils. Her rules of thumb: never start a new channel with less than $20,000, and run a programme for twice the length of the sales cycle. 'Your employee programs are the No. 1 resource that you can activate quickly,' she said.

The cheapest credibility sits with people you already have: employees and clients who know the product and have a stake in it. They are also the group your compliance team can brief and approve most easily. Treat the advice with care, since Directive is an agency that helps firms run these programmes; but its assessment of where most business-to-business firms stand is blunt: 'They are in the basement, up to their waist in water.' Ownership is part of the problem. Williams has yet to meet a dedicated, full-time influencer role in these organisations.

Name one owner this month, in brand or communications, and start with a pilot of employee and client advocacy that compliance has approved in advance. Measure it as Williams suggests: the share of your total addressable market you have had a conversation with, before and after, and not clicks. Budget at least $20,000, and plan for two sales cycles before you judge the result.