InMarketing Today

Citi has received approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission to set up Citigroup Securities (China) Company Limited, a wholly owned securities company headquartered in Shanghai, Securities Finance Times reported today. The licence covers equities brokerage, underwriting, research and principal trading for domestic and foreign clients. Citi says it serves 70% of the Fortune 500 companies operating in China and first established a local entity there in 1902.

Citi leads with its history, not its product list. The statement opens on longevity and backs it with a coverage figure and a founding year specific enough to test. Heritage persuades when it comes with numbers; without them it is decoration. It is also the one asset a newer rival cannot buy.

Before you enter or expand in any market, write down your own proof: how long you have served it, how many of its leading companies you already work with, and a start date someone can check. Put the strongest of the three in the first sentence of the announcement, ahead of the product.

HSBC has launched RedCoin, its first stablecoin, for public use in Hong Kong, Finextra reported today. It is denominated in Hong Kong dollars, licensed and regulated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and available through PayMe, the bank's peer-to-peer payments network, whose 3.3 million users can pay friends and merchants with it. HSBC plans to add stablecoin wallet functionality to its Hong Kong mobile banking app and to offer tokenised investments, starting with a new share class of its Hong Kong dollar money market fund.

HSBC has put its own name on a stablecoin, with the regulator's licence beside it. Maggie Ng, who runs its Hong Kong business, describes the product as "backed by the trust and security of a global bank", which is the whole pitch in a phrase: for a payments instrument, the issuer's reputation does the work the technology cannot. Launching to an existing base of 3.3 million PayMe users also removes the hardest marketing problem, which is getting anyone to try it.

If you launch a regulated product, name the regulator and the licence in the first line, then name the channel your customers already use. Publish the next steps with it. HSBC's "only the beginning" carries weight because wallets, tokenised funds and corporate use are named alongside it.

Frans Riemersma, a marketing technology researcher, argues in MarTech today that dashboards measure promotion while chief executives ask about revenue, growth, margin and profit. His example: a campaign can show higher attributed revenue and a better return on advertising spend while discounts, product costs and returns leave less profit on each sale. He separates fast data, which optimises campaigns, from slow data, which links customer needs to revenue, margin and profit, and says artificial intelligence raises the stakes by accelerating execution.

Marketing, he says, has lost much of its mandate: product has moved to product management, price to sales and place to channel teams, leaving the chief marketing officer with promotion. A report built on clicks and conversions invites exactly that outcome in a boardroom, where the question is about money. The same trap exists in financial services: a new account that costs more to serve than it earns still registers as a conversion.

Add one line to your next report that the finance director would recognise, such as margin, retention or profit per client, and set it beside the campaign metrics. Then change the brief you give your artificial intelligence tools. Riemersma's example is to ask it to "help customers understand the product's value and increase full-price purchases", rather than to increase conversions.