Welcome to our weekly digital spotlight!
This week’s edition of Kurtosys Spotlight features customer experience pointers, banking futures, the state of UK sales, BNY Mellon’s Anne-Marie McConnon, a podcast with the Wealth Mosaic, and 2019’s Stackie Awards.
Digital Leader Spotlight: Anne-Marie McConnon, Chief Marketing Officer at BNY Mellon
With over 15 years of experience in the marketing game, Anne-Marie McConnon is a leading expert for asset management, having worked for companies including M&G Investments, Barclays, and now BNY Mellon.
Specialising in B2B Marketing, Anne-Marie has been an award-winning marketeer in her tenure at BNY, having won Investment Week’s Marketer of the Year 2015, and even the Most Innovative Event 2015 for the BNY Mellon/Newton Womenomics event launch. In the realm of digital, Anne-Marie has led initiatives that have become industry-first, including the first financial blog in asset management. Technology has become a key instrument in marketing BNY Mellon’s multi-boutique model; innovation in content publishing and distribution is high on the agenda for BNY to best benefit staff, investors and clients.
You can read our interview with Anne-Marie here, and to check out the full digital leaders in asset management gallery, follow this link – we’ve just updated it with more names! Get in touch with us with your nomination and reasons why.
Featured Paper: State of Sales UK
Not so much an extensive white paper this week, the featured paper is from LinkedIn; a fairly overlooked source for surveys aplenty. This time around, LinkedIn Sales Solution presents the results of a study into the state of the sales profession in the United Kingdom.
From surveying 500 salespeople and over 500 other B2B buyers in the UK, the report intended to discover more about the sector and how it is being assisted or transformed by others – from tech teams to marketing to a younger customer base and workforce. Much like a correctly thorough psychological investigation, the writers list their methodology, listing their description of ‘top performing salespeople’ and the buyers used for the study, outlining each of the factors for participation: those surveyed had to have at least two years experience in a B2B company, for example.
The resulting document to present the findings is in a neat one-page PDF, which can be downloaded over at this link by filling in the form with relevant contact and working information. The sales industry trends found here are arranged into subsections looking into sales technology, networking (platforms), the perspective of B2B buyers and, very importantly, alignment with marketing. One of the biggest takeaways from the study is salespeople’s continued targeting of orchestration with marketing teams to better the process of converting prospects into leads into deals; 75% of respondents believe marketing still has a huge role to play in this.
There’s plenty more findings into how salespeople are adapting to technological change, so this document is well worth a look.
Podcast: Connecting the Dots
Stephen Wall
In the latest edition of our Connecting the Dots Kurtosys Podcast, we chat to Stephen Wall, co-founder and head of marketplace and content at The Wealth Mosaic. It’s a resource for wealth managers to better understand their market and find valuable solutions for the needs of their clients.
Stephen elaborates on his career as an industry analyst, telling how his experiences within the wealth management industry highlighted the need for a company such as The Wealth Mosaic. With a clear focus on bringing quality content to his audience, Stephen explains how to perfect a great video marketing strategy, ways to not convolute content marketing with technology, and put forward his views of the ‘quantity vs quality’ debate.
Reflecting on the rapid driving change in wealth management, Stephen notes that the industry is being influenced by many factors from within and outside the sector, with The Wealth Mosaic acting as a support system to narrow the knowledge gap between the buyers of wealth management groups and the marketplace of vendors. He also outlines what’s next for the relatively new company in terms of content creation and market reports.
Head over to our SoundCloud page, iTunes library or Spotify for all of our podcasts featuring digital professionals in asset management.
Video in Focus: FinServ’s Successes
Many publications often deal with the industry’s female workforce in a negative light, and there’s certainly a way to go before financial services gets recognised as fully-inclusive. However, Gregory FCA has looked into how 2018 can be seen as a huge stepping stone for female empowerment in the financial space in this video, hosted by Marissa Foy Comerford.
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Marissa and her guests Amy Lash and Ally Boyle look into how their clients are specifically boosting the presence of women, from funds and ETFs that are stringently targeting companies that have policies compliant with the YWCA, to initiatives that wealth managers take to encourage women to talk about their financial lives and connect and support each other.
There’s still more that can be achieved in the women’s movement, but this video certainly proves that the industry is heading well in the right direction.
Featured Event: The CX Factor: Transformation Programmes
Coming up in a month’s time (as we’ve now moved into the rainy quasi-springtime of April, unbelievable), is a new discussion courtesy of industry event experts the Financial Services Forum, this time focusing on client experience.
Cleverly titled The CX Factor, the customer-first approach is fast becoming an even greater priority for financial services firms, and as the event description notes, traditional change programmes led by CIOs and IT teams aren’t delivering the goods. Instead, this talk will take the firm belief that it is in the hands of marketers to lead growth in companies, this being achieved by putting clients at the forefront. That being said, every part of the company – from marketing through to sales and operations – are part of the effort for transformation to work.
Looking into how marketers can leverage digital tools and strategies to achieve change is the main highlight from this talk, featuring Dominic Traynor (Global Head of Digital Experience at BNY Mellon) and Marcus Oughton (Group Director of Digital at Simplyhealth).
The breakfast-time event kicks off at 09.00, finishing at 11.30 and takes place at the following address: Publicis Sapient, Eden House, 8 Spital Square, London, E1 6DU. It takes place on May 9th 2019.
You can register for the event at the FS Forum website here.
Fintech News: Challenging Challenger Banks
As we regularly dwell on the rise of challenger banks, it’s easy to omit the efforts taken by the tradition players in this advanced chess game, and in this case NatWest certainly seems to be moving its queen in the right direction (I don’t really play chess).
UK bank NatWest has become the latest high-street bank to roll out a personal finance assistance; boosting its mobile banking abilities for customers and pitting itself against the likes of Monzo, Starling or Revolut (and, eventually and scarily, Apple as we learned last week). This Tuesday, it looked to trial the app at least, following an initial run with 50 of the bank’s staff members. Named ‘Mimo’ (Money in, money out – actually true, I haven’t made that up), it looks to combine artificial intelligence, data analytics and open banking APIs to better understand the needs of customers forcing better budgeting and savings habits, and plans to give advice on such things as subscription services and insurance. The trial was conducted using a thousand of the bank’s customers on a voluntary basis.
Other banks, including Lloyds Group and HSBC are looking to overhaul their mobile apps to enable better ease for consumers, but NatWest is fairly unique in that users can view current accounts from fifteen other banks within its app, including the two aforementioned companies. Mimo, also taking a further step into unchartered waters, with the assistant planning to work for any smartphone user regardless of which bank they are with.
This news was broken by Banking Tech, offering another instalment in the ongoing stalemate of tech disruption between banks and their up and coming opponents.
Social Spotlight: Stackie Awards 2019
For the MarTech enthusiasts out there, Scott Brinker from Chiefmartec.com’s yearly celebration of the ‘Stackie’ returned, with the winners being announced this week by the marketing expert Brinker himself:
48 marketing stacks beautifully illustrated for the 2019 MarTech Stackies: Marketing Stack Awards https://t.co/9W2LyX5TXU #MarTech
— Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) April 4, 2019
For those unaware, this competition invites marketers from various companies to share which marketing technologies they use as part of their workflow in a cohesive and illustrative graphic. The judges – Brinker, Marc Sirkin and Henry Powderly – then choose their top five ‘Stackies’ based on creativity, visualization and educational value. This year, brands from outside the martech industry got involved, including four of the top five: Esri, Sargento Foods, Juniper Networks and Paychex, alongside The Telegraphs and others. It was Airstream that took this year’s top spot however. You can see the full lineup of Stackies in an accompanying presentation here.
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