InMarketing Today

Anne Boden, Starling's founder, has sold her remaining 2.7 per cent stake at a valuation of £1.7bn, City AM reports today, citing Sky News. Starling sought £4bn in a secondary share sale last year. A Starling spokesperson said she sold privately to several existing shareholders, with the company's full knowledge. The latest results show pre-tax profit down 3 per cent to £217m and revenue down 5.6 per cent to £887m, with lower interest rates the main cause. Boden is now recruiting for a new artificial intelligence project.

A valuation is a public claim, and £4bn followed by £1.7bn puts two numbers side by side for anyone to compare. They are not like for like: one was a company target, the other a founder's private sale, and the report does not say why the price is what it is. Readers will compare them anyway. Starling's statement covers who knew and wishes her well, and says nothing about the number, so the sentence people repeat will be the one the company did not write.

If your brand leans on a founder or a headline valuation, write the statement for the day that number moves, name the person who will give it, and say what has and has not changed in the business. Brief clients and partners before they read it elsewhere. Then list every valuation, growth or ranking claim your firm has made in public, because each one is now the yardstick.

HSBC, Revolut, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland are among the banks reported to have been affected by a major outage at Google Cloud today, Finextra reports. Google traced it to a power event in its europe-west2-b zone in London and said it was mitigated. Revolut said thousands of users in the UK and Ireland could not complete certain actions, that customers' money and data were safe, and apologised. Lloyds, HSBC and Bank of Scotland customers reported problems with banking access and payments. Regulators have voiced growing concern about concentration risk among a handful of cloud providers.

The cause sat with a supplier. The apology had to come from the bank, because the bank's name is on the app. Revolut is the only bank the report quotes: it named the problem, said the money and data were safe, and apologised. The report quotes no statement from the other three. An outage is a test of a brand promise of reliability, and customers will remember who spoke first and how plainly.

Write your outage statement before you need it: what is affected, that money and data are safe if that is true, and when the next update arrives. Agree with your cloud supplier how quickly you will be told, and who tells you. Then read your own marketing for words like always on and 24/7, and make sure the service level behind them is one you can actually meet.

Bloomberg journalist Kit Rees is to join Quilter as its next investment strategist, Investment Week reports today. She starts on 26 October, reports to chief investment officer Marcus Brookes, and will represent Quilter's investment strategy externally, talk to clients and advisers, and act as media spokesperson on investment matters. Rees spent almost a decade at Bloomberg, most recently as editor of its Markets Today live blog, and before that was a stock market correspondent at Thomson Reuters. She replaces Lindsay James, who left in July.

In wealth management the house view is among the most public things a firm produces, and Quilter has chosen to hand it to someone whose job has been explaining markets to a daily audience. Brookes says the role has been vital in communicating the firm's strategy since it was created three years ago. It also sat vacant after July, which suggests the firm decided the right person was worth waiting for. Rees's own comment, calling this an exciting if uncertain time, shows the tone: candid about volatility, and aimed at advisers and investors.

Name who speaks for your house view, and give that person a brief, a regular slot and somewhere to publish. If you hire from journalism, test whether the candidate can state your position to a client in two sentences, and be ready for them to ask questions your own team has stopped asking. In volatile weeks, make that voice the first thing your clients hear, not the last.