InMarketing This Week: Trust

Why financial services marketing will always ultimately be about earning and retaining trust.

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector,?InMarketing This Week?is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday to give you a head start on the week. Read it here , or subscribe to?have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.

This week

?????Read on?to learn why:

①?We still need banks and branches,?if only to maintain trust.

②?Brands are promises?that must be lived up to every day.

③?Running a universal bank?takes decades to master.

④?The future of investing?is integrated.

⑤?GDPR is likely to remain?the data-privacy standard.

⑥?There’s a battle looming?for the soul of Silicon Valley.

⑦?I urgently need?investment advice.

What's new?

Financial services provocateur Chris Skinner?asked?‘why do we need banks and branches?’ ?this week.

In short, Chris writes:

• “For years, people have argued that you need branches to serve customers for more complex transactions; to serve people who are uncomfortable with digital access; to serve young people getting their first mortgage; to serve retailers and small businesses with their cash needs; and so on and so forth. Baloney.”
• “We need banks for storing and exchanging value with trust. We need banks because they are regulated to guarantee they won’t lose our money, unlike the wild west of online schemes and scams. The challenge then is how to guarantee the bank won’t lose our money if we can’t see them?”
• “Branches are there to provide comfort and trust. It’s marketing. It’s branding. It’s about a physical presence to show you the money. It’s about being there.”

Why does it matter?

Chris is thinking specifically of physical bank branches but his article matters in broader terms too because it reminds us of how vital trust is throughout financial services. You might take a punt on a T-shirt brand you don’t know because it’s trendy; you might overlook a car salesman’s lack of reputation because his stock is cheaper than the rest; you might even choose a plumber you haven’t used before because they’re able to come straightaway to fix your leaking pipes; but when it comes to your money, trusting your financial services provider tends to be a non-negotiable.

This is perhaps why Chris concludes that we do need banks and branches. But I’m not convinced that’s necessarily true. This begs the question, how do we build and retain trust?

I believe trust is earned through consistency. Building trust means - day after day, interaction after interaction - living up to the promises you’ve made as an organisation. It is inexorably linked to your brand because your brand?is?those promises, it’s what you stand for, it’s your raison d'être. I’m not saying that having a bricks and mortar presence isn’t the answer for some financial services brands, but the success of app-only banks like Starling and Monzo show us that there are alternative ways of doing it.

What's next?

Take action

Spend some time with your head of marketing this week to check that your purpose, your brand and your tactics are all aligned.

• If you’ve claimed to be the ‘straightforward bank for straightforward people’, make sure your communications are plain spoken, devoid of industry acronyms and free of small print.
• If you’ve claimed to be the ‘wealth manager for the digital age’, make sure your digital channels - particularly your mobile app - are not just best in class for your sector but as delightful an experience as Apple or Google provide.?
• If you’ve claimed to be the ‘boutique private bank for the elite’, make sure your relationship managers have the same deft touch that you’d experience from the Hotel George V’s manager.

And remember, this goes beyond marketing tactics. Every contact a client or prospective client has with your brand must be consistent - whether it be the welcome they receive at your offices, the on-boarding experience, or how client reporting is presented. Does each touchpoint bolster your brand’s promise? Will every interaction provide the consistency you need to earn and retain your clients’ trust?

Get help

I’m looking for a full-time, in-house role?but in the post-Covid age of depleted marketing budgets and remote teams with skills gaps, many organisations need marketing and communications support that’s agile, flexible, and risk free. That’s why I founded?WhatsNext Partners .

Whether it be as a permanent member of your team or with on demand support, just hit ‘reply’ to let me know if you need my help.

Share

Can I ask you a favour??If you found this post useful?or know someone who would, please like, comment on, or - best of all - share it with your professional network. It really helps me to grow the readership. Subscribe here .

What else?

Three other articles?that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Wall Street embraces the ‘forever CEO’

③?Running a universal bank is now so complex and political, it takes decades to master.

• “This month Brian Moynihan signalled that he intends to stay at Bank of America until 2030, joining JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon in seeking a CEO term of at least two decades. Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman has also indicated a desire to remain at the company he has led since 2010 for at least another three years.”
• “Dimon, Moynihan and Gorman buck the broader trend in corporate America. The average tenure of departing chief executives at finance companies within the Russell 3000 index halved from just under 15 years in 2017 to seven years in 2020.”
• “Corporate governance experts point to the complexity of running a lender such as BofA or JPMorgan as one of the reasons tenures of big bank chief executives are twice as long as the average term for a CEO in the S&P 500. The last financial crisis prompted a wave of mergers that created universal banks with a wide range of business lines from wealth management and retail mortgages to investment banking and trading.”

TECHNOLOGY

Wise to launch own investing product

④?The future of investing is integrated?with other financial services.

• “Fintech Wise has officially launched its own investing service, Assets. It is available to all UK customers and will give users the chance to invest initially in stocks— from a universe of 1,557 of the world’s largest public companies—before expanding the new offering further.”
• “Unlike other investing platforms, users will have instant access to the majority of their money, meaning they can hold their balance in Assets and still spend and send money in real-time as and when they need it.”
• “'People are increasingly turning to a single app to manage their financial lives and improve their wellbeing,‘ Joe Parkin, head of banks and digital channels in the UK at BlackRock added.“

MEDIA & MARKETING

Red tape, innovation and the future of GDPR

⑤?GDPR is likely to remain the data-privacy standard, despite chest-thumping rhetoric of UK politicians.

• “Back in June, a group of Conservative MPs, showed their stripes as TIGRR. This Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform roared into the legislative debate by declaring that GDPR ‘overwhelms people with consent requests and complexity they cannot understand, while unnecessarily restricting the use of data for worthwhile purposes’.”
• “‘[Our] research shows that most marketers and businesses think [GDPR] was a change for the better,’ says John Mitchison, the director of policy and compliance for The Data and Marketing Association, a trade body representing data-driven marketing firms and marketers in the UK. ‘We also found it to be a huge benefit for consumers, and it has inevitably increased trust in data sharing’.”
• “Instead of seeing regulation like GDPR as a barrier to prosperity, we could conceive of ‘red tape’ as a necessary first step that innovative companies must take before using personal information.”

Quotable

⑥ Peter Thiel,?who is the subject of?The Contrarian,?a new book by Max Chafkin ?which portrays the “venture capitalist, techno-Utopian and scourge of the liberal left” as a myriad of contradictions:

“I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.”

One more thing...

During IMTW’s summer hiatus, sitting in Pain Quotidien one morning having breakfast with my sons, my iPhone rang, then Saxo Markets UK’s exuberant CEO?Charlie White-Thomson ?delivered some unexpected good news. For the first time in my life,?I had won a competition .

A couple of months earlier, the trading platform had cooked up?a way to encourage people to comment on one of their LinkedIn posts about moral hazard : provide a sizeable prize for the most thought-provoking reply. I took part not because I dreamt I stood a chance of winning but because I thought it was such an innovative way of building a dialogue on a critical area for all investors. This is the best kind of marketing: providing value to your audience by informing or stimulating debate on a topic of great interest to them.

⑦ But now I have a problem: how to manage my winnings? I opened my trading account this week (simple and painless on-boarding) and am now staring at their comprehensive dashboard of investment tools wondering which button to press. How hard can it be? Buy low, sell high, right? Any other bright ideas, dear reader?

Off cuts

The stories that?almost?made this week’s newsletter.

MONDAY

???Coinbase abandons lending product after SEC pushback

???Revolut pays for new US office in Bitcoin

?????Thunes hires chief marketing officer

TUESDAY

???Finance industry warns against ‘unnecessarily restrictive’ crypto capital rules

???Slack is trying to replace meetings with an Instagram Stories-style feature

???How including links in LinkedIn posts affects engagement

WEDNESDAY

???Marketing your advice business 101

???Klarna mocks ‘outdated’ credit model in marketing campaign

???Net Zero Financial Services Providers Alliance launched

THURSDAY

???Twitter starts accepting Bitcoin

FRIDAY

?????China says all cryptocurrency-related transactions are illegal

About

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector,?InMarketing This Week?is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday evening to give you a head start on the week. Read it here , or subscribe to?have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.

InMarketing?is a broader celebration of marketing that innovates, interacts and influences. It's available?on Twitter and on LinkedIn .