Bye buy
If you have to buy new clients, the problem might be your marketing not your product.
Issue № 169 | London, Sunday 14 June 2026
Read on to learn why:
① Challengers earn their customers; incumbents buy them.
② Marketing should be deployed instead of M&A lawyers.
③ When it comes to wealth creation, undignified beats apathetic.
④ Your relationships, context, and access can create competitive advantage.
⑤ Marketers have to work harder to earn trust from sceptical prospects.
⑥ Generating return on AI investment depends on culture not technology.
⑦ AI’s real value to marketers is in leveraging synthetic data for planning.
🚨 What's new
Barclays has bought GoHenry, the youth banking app, for £180m, reports City AM.
GoHenry, acquired from its US parent Acorns, has 500,000 active UK users and over two million all-time members. The deal is expected to close in Q4 this year.
The price tag comes with a sting in the tail: GoHenry lost £21.9m in its last financial year, narrowed from a £48m loss the year before. So, by my maths, it looks like Barclays paid £360 per active customer for a business that has never made money. Someone at Canary Wharf knows something I don’t.
Barclays framed the acquisition as accelerating its push into two fiercely contested segments: younger customers and the mass affluent. It follows its failed bid for wealth manager Evelyn Partners earlier this year, which went to Natwest for £2.7bn (Natwest also purchased Roostermoney in 2021). The big banks are shopping. My question: why do they have to?
💡 Why it matters
I might now reveal how little I know about retail banking — my career has predominantly been in wholesale banking, marketing to institutional clients — but, on the other hand, I have been a GoHenry customer. Which is to say my kids were GoHenry customers. They had a prepaid card, a spending dashboard, pocket money automation, and some interactive tutorials in the app designed to teach them about money — useful, but hardly defensible technology. Nothing that a bank with Barclays’ engineering budget couldn’t have built in 12 months if they’d put their minds to it. So why pay £180m for it? Because Barclays isn’t buying a product. It’s buying customers.
① The challengers didn’t get here the same way. Monzo grew to 15 million customers — one million of them under 16, roughly one in eight of Britain’s entire Gen Alpha — without acquiring a single competitor. Revolut built its youth presence through a lifestyle ecosystem that young people actually want to belong to. The challengers earn their customers. The incumbents buy them.
② That gap isn’t a product problem. It’s a brand, voice, and relevance problem; it’s a marketing problem — so acquisition isn’t necessarily the answer. Barclays now owns GoHenry’s 500,000 users. But it doesn’t own my kids. Because as soon as they were old enough, I moved them over to HSBC Premier because…well, because I’m a sucker for aspirational brand. Will the GoHenry users who remain now think of themselves as Barclays customers?
✅ What to do about it
Take action
If you’re an incumbent trying to win younger customers or the mass affluent without writing nine-figure cheques, the playbook is straightforward, if not easy:
Speak like a human being. Monzo’s growth among under-16s wasn’t accidental — it was built on plain-spoken, empathetic communication that treats its audience as intelligent adults. Ask yourself honestly: does your communications output sound like something a person would actually say?
Build identity, not just utility. Young customers don’t choose a bank — they join one. Revolut understood this and wrapped its product in a lifestyle. Your brand needs to stand for something beyond the transaction.
Own a life stage before they need you. GoHenry was worth £360 per customer to Barclays because of lifetime value — catch them at 12 and keep them through the mortgage, the ISA, the pension. You don’t need to acquire a fintech to do this. You need a proposition that earns trust early.
Get help
I am currently pursuing senior marketing and communications leadership roles — ideally a permanent position, although I'm also taking on a small number of fractional and interim engagements. If you need help growing your business’ recognition, reputation and revenue — or know someone who does — let's talk.
🗞️ Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Wall Street’s undignified SpaceX mania
③ When it comes to wealth creation, undignified beats apathetic.
🚨 The SpaceX IPO has Wall Street behaving in an “undignified” manner — banks decorating lobbies with rockets, issuing revenue projections that strain credibility, accepting 0.75% fees just to be in the room. Citigroup, meanwhile, has launched a blockchain platform giving institutional clients tokenised exposure to the private companies the public markets can’t yet touch. Across the Atlantic, UK investor confidence has quietly hit a decade high — 115 against a pre-Covid benchmark of 100 — and yet the London Stock Exchange and the FCA are locked in a public row over tape architecture while the most exciting companies in the world list elsewhere.
💡 US capital markets are throwing themselves at the future with an enthusiasm that borders on embarrassing. The UK’s are arguing about plumbing. Retail investor confidence at a record (everything’s relative) high is good news, but only if there’s something worth investing in and an institutional culture willing to back it. I’m no fan of ‘undignified’ but, when it comes to investing, I choose it over apathy every time.
✅ Marketing can help with this problem. Capital markets are the most powerful wealth creation tool ever built, and too few people in the UK are told that story with any conviction. Our communications have a role to play in making participation feel urgent and worthwhile — not just for retail investors, but for the policymakers, issuers, and institutions whose appetite for ambition shapes the market’s direction of travel.
FINTECH
Stears wants to be Africa’s Bloomberg terminal
④ Your relationships, context, and access can create competitive advantage.
🚨 Stears, a nine-year-old Nigerian data company, is positioning itself as the Bloomberg terminal for African markets. Founded by two Nigerians who studied in London, the firm combines bespoke research projects — charging clients up to $100,000 a time — with a subscription platform covering financial data across the continent. Dollar revenues doubled in 2025, now accounting for 70% of total licence fees, up from 18% in 2023. Average annual fees from fund managers have risen from $2,500 to $9,500 — still a fraction of a Bloomberg terminal’s $30,000-plus price tag.
💡 Stears has built something Bloomberg cannot easily replicate: genuine local knowledge. To get ownership data on a Nigerian company, one of its team members literally befriended the stock exchange librarian and invoked God to get hold of a USB drive. That is not a scalable Western platform play — it is the kind of access you earn through years of presence, relationships, and cultural fluency. The lesson for financial services marketers is not about Africa specifically. It is about what happens when you own a niche that nobody else has bothered to serve. Stears is not competing on price or technology; it’s competing on irreplaceability.
✅ Where does your firm have the equivalent of Stears’ local knowledge advantage? The relationships, context, and access that a well-funded competitor could not simply buy. Build the narrative around what only you know, who only you know, and why that matters to the client sitting across the table.
MEDIA & MARKETING
Wealthy warned over Coutts copycat scam
⑤ Marketers have to work harder to earn trust from sceptical prospects.
🚨 Fraudsters have cloned Coutts — the King’s bank, founded in 1692 — creating a fake “Coutts Wealth Management” firm using spoofed email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses and FCA reference numbers to target wealthy victims. The FCA has issued a warning and directed anyone contacted directly by a financial firm to use its Firm Checker service.
💡 Brand equity is now a double-edged sword. The more trusted and prestigious your brand, the more attractive a target you become for fraudsters who want to borrow that trust. But the damage doesn’t stop with the scam victims — every clone firm erodes confidence in the real one, because in an AI-saturated world where synthetic content is indistinguishable from genuine, the default setting for your prospects is scepticism. Coutts will survive this; a smaller, less established brand might not.
✅ Your CMO needs to treat brand protection as a marketing priority, not just a legal or compliance one. Audit your digital footprint — domains, email patterns, social handles, and any assets that could plausibly be spoofed. Publish clear, proactive guidance to clients on how you actually communicate with them: what you will and won’t ask for, and through which channels. Make it easy to verify you’re real. In an environment where trust is already in short supply, the brands that make themselves legible will earn a measurable edge.
WILDCARD
Why employees aren’t transparent about their AI usage
⑥ Generating return on AI investment depends on culture not technology.
🚨 Talk about damning with faint praise. New research shows that 57% of employees hide their AI use at work, and nearly one in three have deliberately withheld AI workflows or techniques from colleagues. A doctor built a prompting template for his organisation’s approved AI tool that he knew would help his struggling colleagues. He kept it to himself. The reason, it turns out, isn’t weak governance or the wrong tools — it’s trust. Employees in the lowest quartile of organisational trust were nearly four times as likely to withhold AI knowledge as those in the highest.
💡 Financial services firms have spent the past two years investing in AI governance, approved tool lists, and usage policies. Are they targeting the wrong problem entirely? The productivity gains employees are generating through private experimentation — prompt sequences that cut three-hour tasks to 20 minutes, workarounds the official process hasn’t caught up to — aren’t scaling because employees are making a rational calculation: share what you know and risk more work, reduced standing, or being made redundant by the method you just documented. Who can blame them? Historically, that’s how many firms have handled employee productivity gains.
✅ Look at your culture before your toolstack. Create explicit norms for how time saved by AI will be used — not absorbed into more work. Attach contributors’ names to workflows others adopt, so disclosure builds standing rather than erasing it. And pay attention to how you react in the 30 seconds after an employee shows you their AI methods. That reaction might be a decisive trust signal.
✂️ Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
🤑 Apollo executive says private equity got ‘a little out of whack’
🇮🇹 A bidding war erupts for the world’s oldest bank
🇪🇺 UK Finance calls for closer UK-EU ties
FINTECH
👏🏻 Coutts appoints senior lead to drive digital assets strategy
🦓 Lloyds partners with Stripe to launch payments platform for small businesses
🇯🇵 Top Japanese banks plot stablecoin roll out
MEDIA & MARKETING
🔦 HSBC Innovation Banking unveils brand refresh championing tech pioneers
👩🏻💻 Gartner finds CMOs spending more on digital and acquisition
📰 Times close to ‘cresting the hill’ as digital revenue set to overtake print
🎤 The last word
⑦ Mark Ritson on where the real value of AI in marketing is:
“The two places AI will have a material impact on marketing are in synthetic data - most of the big B2B companies are all over it - and, coming up for 2027, AI brand and marketing planning.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Aspire to InMarketing.
Wishing you an incisive week,
P.S. Are you following Archie on Bluesky?