Jackanory
No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.
Issue № 168 | London, Sunday 7 June 2026
Read on to learn why:
① Prospects don’t weigh the evidence and then feel something; they feel something, then reach for the evidence to justify it.
② You should lead with the story and have the numbers ready to back it up.
③ Your compliance stories should be shared in good times as much as bad ones.
④ Retaining clients is less visible but just as valuable as attracting new ones.
⑤ If you want to understand which tactics are working, measure less not more.
⑥ Whimsy is far too often overlooked in B2B financial services marketing.
⑦ Europe shouldn’t be intimidated by Silicon Valley.
🚨 What's new
‘Can the stock market swallow SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI?’, asks The Economist.
Three of the largest stockmarket debuts in history are arriving almost at once. SpaceX hopes to begin trading on the Nasdaq on 12 June, with Anthropic having filed draft paperwork on 1 June and OpenAI expected to follow. The two AI labs are rumoured to be seeking around $60bn apiece, and together the three listings could add as much as $4tn to the value of listed American companies within months.
On SpaceX itself, the Financial Times reports a target valuation of $1.78tn — which would make it the world’s seventh most valuable company — and a raise of as much as $86bn. Demand from small investors has been striking: more than 35,000 UK savers have registered interest through Hargreaves Lansdown, with Musk setting aside a quarter of the float for individuals in the largest retail allocation ever attempted in a megacap IPO. UK investment trusts holding SpaceX stock have swung to rare premiums.
What investors are buying is less clear than the price suggests. The FT notes that SpaceX is now, in effect, an artificial-intelligence company: Musk merged his xAI venture into it only in February, and AI now drives most of its spending. On conventional measures the valuation looks stretched to say the very least — The Economist puts it at more than 90 times revenue, while Morningstar values the business at no more than $780bn, less than half the actual asking price.
💡 Why it matters
Has the world gone mad? I don’t think so. This is marketing doing exactly what marketing does. Investors are not buying a spreadsheet, they’re buying a story — and, whatever you think of the man-child, Musk tells a better one than most. The FT’s Richard Waters calls his real genius mythmaking rather than rocketry, and the gap between the narrative and the numbers is vast: SpaceX put a little over 2,200 tonnes into orbit last year, yet Musk says it needs to launch a million tonnes a year to build the data centres the whole story depends on.
① This is the oldest lesson in marketing and it holds even at the most rarefied end of the market. Despite what ‘best practice’ will tell you, people don’t weigh the evidence and then feel something; they feel something, then reach for the evidence to justify it. As Michael Lewis records Daniel Kahneman observing: “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” If a rocket company can list at 90 times revenue on a vision of orbital data centres, the instinct that grips so much of financial services and fintech — to lead with the figures, the features and the regulatory credentials — has the order backwards.
I’m not saying the story is everything. Far from it. A story can carry a valuation, but it can’t sustain one. The Economist cites Jay Ritter's study of listings from 1980 to 2024, in which stocks priced above 40 times revenue went on to lag the market by 58 percentage points over the following three years. Or, as Waters puts it in the FT, “real cash flow has a way of winning out”. So, storytelling can paper over a weak proposition for a while but, more importantly, it gives a strong one a reason to be believed and acted on.
✅ What to do about it
Take action
② The lesson for your CMO is to put the story first and have the numbers ready to back it up.
Lead with meaning, not mechanics. Open with what changes for the client, not what your product does or which standard it meets. The specification is the proof, not the pitch.
Cast the client as the hero. The firms with the best marketing make the customer the protagonist and themselves the trusted guide. The ones that put the product centre stage are the ones that blur into the crowd.
Anchor the story in something true. Musk’s narrative will eventually meet his cash flow; yours should be built to survive the same test. A story you would not be comfortable defending in front of a sceptic is not positioning, it is a liability.
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🗞️ Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Wise investigated in Brussels over money-laundering claims
③ Your compliance stories should be shared in good times as much as bad ones.
🚨 Wise is under investigation by Brussels prosecutors over concerns that its accounts were used for money laundering, with more than €500 million of transactions under scrutiny. The case, opened last year, alleges weaknesses in how Wise identified clients and their activity. Wise notes the inquiry is incomplete, that no findings have been shared, and that a law-enforcement request is not in itself evidence of wrongdoing. Its shares still fell as much as 19 per cent, the steepest one-day fall since its 2021 listing.
💡 Notice what moved the price: an investigation, not a finding. The market knocked nearly a fifth off Wise’s value on an inquiry that has reached no conclusions. I feel for Wise. Their response was calm, factual and cooperative, and the shares fell anyway. I feel for the Belgian authorities. They’re doing their important job correctly. Unfortunately, the investigation hits this brand more than most. Wise is built on the premise of moving money quickly and simply, yet anti-money-laundering controls are friction by design — the very thing the brand exists to remove. A laundering headline does not just dent the stock price, it questions the business model. Wise will be fine though - not least because they’ve spent years making their compliance rigour visible and credible.
✅ Treat financial-crime controls as part of the story you tell in good times, not a line you reach for in bad ones. Compliance is a reputational asset, not just a back-office cost: explain in plain language how you fight fraud and laundering before anyone forces the question, brief analysts and journalists on it when there is no crisis to manage, and resist the superlatives — “the world’s most sophisticated systems” becomes a hostage to fortune the moment an investigation opens. Do that, and when the difficult headline eventually arrives your audience already has reason to give you the benefit of the doubt..
FINTECH
UK finance apps face widening retention gap as neobanks dominate acquisition
④ Retaining clients is less visible but just as valuable as attracting new ones.
🚨 AppsFlyer’s State of Finance for Marketers – Europe 2026 reports that the UK finance app market has reached a turning point: new-user acquisition is plateauing and the battle for retention is intensifying. Neobanks continue to dominate acquisition while the incumbents hold a decisive retention advantage, with Day 30 retention running 1.5 to 2 times higher. Across the sector, session growth is now outpacing install growth, a shift from acquisition-driven metrics to engagement-driven value.
💡 As any marketer knows, acquisition gets the applause because it’s visible — sign-up numbers, growth charts, launch noise — but retention does the quieter, cheaper, more profitable work. Neobanks have built superb machines for winning customers; the incumbents have quietly mastered the harder discipline of keeping them. Most marketing budgets lean the way the headlines do, heavily towards chasing strangers and lightly towards the people who already trust you. Both feed the bottom line, but one does it at a fraction of the cost.
✅ Look at where your marketing money actually goes. If most of it chases new customers while existing ones are handed off to product or service teams, you have a structural blind spot worth closing. Treat retention as a marketing discipline in its own right: identify the moments a customer is most likely to buy more or walk away, and put real budget and creative behind both. The cheapest revenue you book this year will come from someone who already knows you.
MEDIA & MARKETING
Marketing measurement is breaking under its own complexity
⑤ If you want to understand what marketing is working, measure less not more.
🚨 A new Bitly report finds the average marketing team now runs six tools to measure performance, yet only 18% of marketers say they can see what’s actually working. Across 250+ respondents, organic social was both the most-used channel and the one with the worst visibility. The conclusion is blunt: marketers aren’t short of data, they’re short of any connection between the piles of it they already hold.
💡 Your instinct might be to buy a seventh tool to stitch the other six together. Don’t. The problem isn’t measurement, it’s measuring everything — a dashboard crowded with metrics tells a board nothing, because attention is finite and every number competes for it. “What gets measured gets managed” cuts both ways: measure everything and you manage nothing. In financial services, where boards crave assurance and reach for more reporting by reflex, the discipline is to measure less, and to measure what the business has actually decided matters.
✅ Start from your business’ strategic objective, not channels. Agree with your CMO the two or three commercial outcomes marketing exists to move — qualified pipeline, cost of acquisition, client lifetime value — and make those the only numbers that reach the board. Everything else stays diagnostic: useful to the marketing team for tuning campaigns, never dressed up as a headline for the ExCo.
WILDCARD
Cash App launches contactless wand
⑥ Whimsy is far too often overlooked in B2B financial services marketing.
🚨 I love this story. Cash App has launched a $25 “magic wand”: an NFC-enabled accessory that lets users pay with a tap, without reaching for a phone or card. It clips to a keychain and is the first of a new form factor Block calls “Cash App Tags”, activated by linking it to a Cash App Card in the app. The launch follows a TikTok trend of people making their own wands with embedded contactless cards, and Block is hoping it taps into the way Gen Z expresses style and identity.
💡 Everyone in payments is racing to make the transaction invisible — frictionless, one tap, gone. Block went the other way and made a charm of it, because an invisible payment is one nobody can feel anything about, and you can’t build a brand on a feeling nobody has. This story is a reminder we all need of the value of whimsy. That’s a lesson B2B financial services keeps dodging: we excuse our own blandness by insisting our buyers are too serious for any of this, when the person signing off a custody mandate is the same person who’d happily pay for festival merch with a wand. Serious and human are not opposites.
✅ Don’t bolt whimsy on as decoration — people smell it instantly. Watch what your clients actually do with your product, your onboarding, your renewal process, and find the one moment where a touch of humanity would land, then have the nerve to use it. The aim isn’t to be funny; it’s to remind both sides there’s a person at the other end of the transaction.
✂️ Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
🇬🇧 UK banks and fintechs join forces to launch new payment scheme
💷 NatWest to pump £50m into branches after shuttering over a thousand
🦓 Investec shares rise amid takeover speculation
FINTECH
📈 Fintech firms grew four times faster than traditional banks in 2025
🤖 AI can mimic Bloomberg. Replacing the Terminal is another matter.
🇺🇸 Major US banks to launch tokenised deposit network in 2027
MEDIA & MARKETING
🧑🏼⚖️ Google must allow publishers to opt out of AI search results
💦 Struggling to make a splash on LinkedIn? Here’s what to do
✂️ S4 Capital cuts jobs as Sorrell predicts ‘fewer people’ in advertising
🎤 The last word
⑦ Anton Osika on a new push for European tech sovereignty:
“There has never been a better time to build from Europe than now. The talent is here, the capital is here, the ecosystem is here.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Aspire to InMarketing.
Wishing you an influential week,
Really super pieces this week Andrew on both story-telling and on marketing complexity (which I think is having lots of data but not being able to prove causation as opposed to correlation). On the 'nearly made it" stories, the US banks tokenization news and the UK Payments Initiative are both of course going to be big (and not quite formally announced when you commented).