Issue № 94 | London, Sunday 21 April 2024
📸 First, flashback to January 2022 when we talked about the phenomenon of finfluencers. This week, an unlikely new one joined their ranks.
👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:
① Most public speaking appearances are sterile and boring.
② You should train then trust your spokespeople.
③ Being everything to everyone, everywhere is doomed to fail.
④ The money of the future will be tokenised and programmable.
⑤ In a digital age, analogue media have enduring appeal.
⑥ Shrinking public markets are a cause for concern for investors.
⑦ Customer service is getting worse and it will cost us all.
What's new
I was at Innovate Finance’s Global Summit this week. As I waited for the next session to begin, I browsed the event’s hashtag on X. That’s when I came across this tweet from former editor of FT Alphaville, Izabella Kaminska.
In short:
Kaminska has been due to moderate a panel during the event but was removed from the agenda at the last minute because she declined to pre-submit the exact questions she was going to ask the panelists.
The cancellation happened despite Kaminska having done a prep call and agreed to stick to the talking points discussed, and having offered to talk through specifics or late developments in the green room ahead of time.
According to Kaminska, pre-submission of journalists' questions is official IFGS policy for all their panels. She was only given this request for questions on Thursday before - when she told Innovate Finance that, had she known this was policy, she would have declined to do the panel, “since it defies the logic of asking journalists to moderate panels. My view is if you are an expert in your field you should be able to handle unscripted and dynamic interaction about your topic with a journalist. If you can't the whole panel is a ruse”.
Why it matters
Before I go on, it’s important to acknowledge that Innovate Finance may well have a very different version of this story to tell. I’m taking Kaminska’s tweet at face value and haven’t corroborated any of this. My lack of journalistic rigour aside though, this story matters for two reasons.
The first is that it brings to the fore the murky grey area in which so many industry conferences operate. They may hire journalists as moderators to imbue proceedings with credibility but that’s often undermined by the lineup of speakers themselves and the cosseted way those speakers are treated. Very often the panelists are chosen not because they’re the most authoritative on the subject matter but because they represent event sponsors. All too often, they’re there to regurgitate some pre-agreed soundbites rather than taking part in real debate. And real debate (or as SWIFT used to dub its Sibos conference ‘critical dialogue’) is surely what industry events should all aspire to.
① The second is as a reminder of how sterile and boring so many public speaking appearances have become - and it’s mostly the fault of marketing and comms people like me. We’re so intent on getting our carefully honed message across that we often veer too far in the direction of protecting our spokespeople - instead of trusting them and getting out of the way. We ask for questions in advance and demand rehearsals. We write talking points and session outlines. There is value in these things, of course, but it often comes at the expense of spontaneity, not to mention interest for the audience.
In the case of this particular IFGS session, relegated to sitting in the audience, Kaminska’s live commentary on X about the behind the scenes prep for the panel turned out to be far more interesting than the discussion on stage.
What to do about it
Take action
Kaminska said it best in her tweet: “If you don't trust the judgment or skill of the journalist you are inviting don't invite them in the first place!” The same goes for your own people.
② My recommendation to you this week is short and sweet: train then trust your spokespeople. Don’t shield them from journalistic interrogation. Arm them with the facts and arguments to stand up to it in their own words. It will make them more credible, more compelling and ultimately more trusted.
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Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time.
FINANCE
Citigroup, Wall Street’s biggest loser, is at last on the up
③ Being everything to everyone, everywhere is doomed to fail.
“A remarkable turnaround now appears under way. On September 13th Ms Fraser announced a restructuring. She later laid out plans to sack 20,000 people by the end of 2026, some 7,000 of whom have already been shown the door. Investors seem to be rediscovering their faith in the firm. Citi’s share price rose by more than 50% between September and March, meaning that Ms Fraser now appears to be on the path to an accolade far more elusive than ‘first woman to do something’. She may become the banker who turned around Citi.”
“Sandy Weill had bought and merged financial institutions to form a ‘financial supermarket’. In 2000 Citi was the largest bank in the world, as measured by its capital base. In 2008 Citi required more bail-out money than any other bank. It laid off 75,000 people, a quarter of its workforce. Its share price, which at over $500 in 2007 had valued the firm at $270bn, had fallen to less than a dollar by 2009. After the financial crisis, Citi’s bosses promised to simplify the firm. Assets were sold.”
“Ms Fraser wants a bigger crown jewel. Because Citi is a global bank, it has an advantage with corporate clients that operate across borders. The bank now hopes to gain smaller mid-market customers. Ms Fraser would also like to turn around the two laggards—banking and wealth management—for which she has brought in new blood. Andy Sieg, who ran wealth management at Bank of America, joined in September. Vis Raghavan, the head of JPMorgan Chase’s investment-banking business, will join in the summer.
Investors are delighted. Citi’s share price has risen by almost twice as much as those of America’s other large banks since September.”
TECHNOLOGY
Barclays, Citi are among banks testing tokenised deposits in UK
④ The money of the future will be tokenised and programmable.
“Industry body UK Finance is expanding its pilot of an experimental shared ledger to track banking payments, hoping to join some of the dots in the nascent world of digital assets. Banks including Barclays Plc, Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Citigroup Inc. as well as card networks Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. are involved in this phase of the pilot.”
“The trial is the latest stepping stone to creating a viable commercial system that all banks can use for tokenised deposits and securities. With more assets recorded as a token on a unified blockchain, the goal is to make transactions across borders and systems easier and faster, and to reduce the chance of error and fraud.”
“The pilot is one of a handful of efforts chasing a similar goal. The Bank for International Settlements has launched multiple projects in recent years seeking to understand how tokenised forms of money such as central bank digital currencies would work in practice, most recently including a pilot with seven central banks on international payments. Meanwhile, financial regulators in the UK, Singapore, Japan and Switzerland teamed up last year to explore fund and asset tokenisation use cases.”
MEDIA & MARKETING
Graydon Carter opens Air Mail Newsstand in New York’s West Village
⑤ In a digital age, analogue media have enduring appeal.
“Graydon Carter […] chose a stretch of Hudson Street near Perry Street in the Village as the site of a new retail venture, Air Mail Newsstand, which is an extension of the digital newsletter, Air Mail, he started in 2019 with Alessandra Stanley. The shop arrived in Manhattan after Air Mail opened others in London and Milan. Its merchandise, like the newsletter it is named after, is meant to appeal to an urbane crowd.”
“He sees retail as an inevitable adjunct to publishing, a symbiosis that has also been recognised by brands like Monocle, which had a shop in the West Village, and by Highsnobiety, a sneaker blog that evolved to include an online store and a twice-yearly publication that won the National Magazine Award for general excellence this year.”
“He acknowledged that it seemed counterintuitive for a digital publication to open a newsstand-style shop — especially as both print magazines and traditional newsstands have been on the decline. But Mr. Carter is undaunted. ‘We love print, obviously,’ he said. Air Mail has occasionally published print versions of the newsletter and an annual or biannual print product is no pipe dream. ‘We’ll do print at some point,’ Mr. Carter said.”
WILDCARD
Why the stockmarket is disappearing
⑥ Shrinking public markets are a cause for concern - for investors, if not founders.
“The pace of company listings is slower this year than last, and last year was already a slow one. This means that equity issuance net of stock buy-backs so far this year is already negative, at minus $120bn—the lowest such figure since at least 1999. Companies including ByteDance, Openai, Stripe and SpaceX have valuations in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, and remain private.”
“The disappearing stockmarket is a side-effect of something more positive for company founders: they simply have more options. Private-equity funds managed $8.2trn by the middle of 2023 - more than twice the amount in 2018. If founders do not want to go public, they now face less pressure to do so. There are plenty of funds that are willing to invest in them regardless.”
“People other than company founders may be worried by the trend, however. Public markets are more transparent than private ones. Thus their reduced importance matters not just for investors, but for regulators monitoring financial stability and analysts assessing the market. Stocks also still tend to be the cornerstone of portfolios for less sophisticated retail investors.”
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Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCE
🇺🇸 Bank of America’s profit hit by fall in interest income
📈 Morgan Stanley’s wealth juggernaut helps power 14% profits rise
👐🏻 HSBC further demonstrates commitment to Open Finance
🟢 BNP Paribas gets green light for fully owned Chinese securities venture
🦿 Geneva-based Pictet AM debuts AI-powered global equities fund
TECHNOLOGY
🛤️ BofE's Sarah Breeden: Modernising the trains and rails of UK payments
⛰️ What it takes to build an effective fintech board
🦾 HSBC card spend soars 15% after AI rollout
🤖 57 questions financial institutions should ask about AI
👓 Blair Institute sets out 'progressive vision' for fintech
MEDIA & MARKETING
🚀 Move over CMOs, data-driven growth marketers are taking over
🪧 Report finds that Big Tech's ad monitoring tools are failing miserably
☀️ Bluesky now allows heads of states to sign up for the social network
🎬 Adobe's new generative AI tools for video are absolutely terrifying
👩🏻💻 CMO tenure stabilising as female marketers gain ground
The last word
⑦ Claer Barrett, Consumer Editor at the Financial Times, on customer service:
“Bosses cannot and should not rely on technology or statistics to do the job of telling them about the customer experience. They should regularly be ‘on the shop floor’ (or in the contact centre or with the tech team) listening to staff and customers, asking questions and understanding precisely where they’re able to delight us, and frustrate us.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Strive for InMarketing.
Wishing you a productive week,
P.S. I was reminded on Tuesday that you should choose the right tool for the job.