Celebrating our 30th year with our 30 Series, this month we take a look at the stories that mattered.

Since Teamspirit launched in 1995, the UK’s financial services sector has been transformed. Not only are ways of working almost unrecognisable, accelerated by technology and changes in attitude, but the industry landscape has been shaped by headline-grabbing events, regulation, and product innovation.

As our timeline across the three decades shows, the journey to today has been quite remarkable.

[View the timeline here](/30-years-timeline)

To celebrate our 30th birthday, we're looking back at some significant financial moments over the last 30 years. Which stand out to you?

30 Series - 30 Events: 30 Years

While Spotify’s fascinating annual reveal of our music habits, or food retailers’ nudges of what we might enjoy next demonstrate how personalisation of communications and experience  creates win-wins for brand and customer, why is financial services late to the party?  

Over half of consumers state they’re more likely to repeat buy after a personalised experience[1]. Equally, 80% of financial institutions view personalisation as essential to meet the required Consumer Duty led standards[2].

So what do we need to do to play catch-up? That was the crux of our breakfast event, run in partnership with The Financial Services Forum, with three leaders in the field:
- David Conner, Head of Experience Design at Scottish Widows
- Simon Ripton, Director of Propositions at Open finance platform Moneyhub
- Richard Sullivan, Financial Services Lead, LinkedIn
- Chair - Fiona Couper, CMO, Teamspirit

Key take-aways from the event held at Mintel were:

- __Moments of truth.__ The importance of interacting with customers at key moments in their journey was critical - not just when providers wanted to sell to them
- __Enriching existing data was essential__ to deliver meaningful customer understanding. And how Open Finance enabled improved tailoring of solutions on dimensions including vulnerability, behaviour and risk
- __More creativity is required to achieve cut through.__  The panel discussed how personalisation needed to think bigger and go beyond the traditional
- __The need for a value exchange.__ How there was a need to provide value in terms of rewards, decision-making information and entertainment through content and gamification in exchange for customers’ data,  time and loyalty.
- __Generational tailoring.__ The meeting discussed that given given Gen X and Gen Z's preferences and expectations of channels, tech and communication, tailoring now needed to work at these levels too
- __The need for companies to  now deliver customer personalisation at Total Experience (TX) level not just UX__, spanning all customer touchpoints
- __‘Continuous engagement' as a marketing strategy.__ Speakers discussed how the impact of different engagements, nudges and interventions could and should be tested continuously to create learnings for later roll out and incorporation into experiences

Personalisation is just one of the emerging trends explored in our recent Signals report which you can view/download [here](https://www.teamspirit.co.uk/news-insights/2025-signals-report)

![FSF Feb Event](//images.ctfassets.net/sxw14dxmazhg/8yzOfsf3nVFljfjyNU1qb/cc45d9380b3a50f08a13626370a56d06/FSF_Feb_Event.png)

## Sources:

1. [https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-state-of-personalization-2021](https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-state-of-personalization-2021)
2. [https://www.dynamicyield.com/personalization-maturity-report-for-finance-2023/](https://www.dynamicyield.com/personalization-maturity-report-for-finance-2023/)

With high impact personalised customer experiences and communications on the rise, financial services is one of the slower sectors to the party.  What do experts from Scottish Widows, LinkedIn and Moneyhub feel FS needs to focus on?

How can financial services provide more personalised experiences?

While winning any award is great, winning for marketing effectiveness has got to be what matters most to marketeers. After all, exceeding KPIs, historic outcomes and delivering strong ROI have got to be the ultimate arbiters of campaign success.

Better still if your marketing effectiveness win is against the biggest names and most innovative brands in financial services.

We were delighted this week, therefore, to win no less than five at the 2024 Financial Services Forum Marketing Effectiveness awards. 

- We won Gold in the Global category for our ‘Invest in the heart of everything’ Biodiversity campaign for Fidelity International. And were also Highly Commended for this in the Most Effective ESG category.
- In the Earned Media category we struck Gold for our ‘Hidden Gems’ campaign for specialist mortgage provider Together, which gained nationwide coverage by mapping and shining a light on the UK’s empty properties and the opportunities they represent.
- We were awarded a Special Judges Award for Most Effective Use of Data and Analytics for The Mortgage Lender, helping them generate coverage and leads in a crowded market.
- And were Highly Commended as Agency of the Year.

### Integration

With effectiveness invariably achieved through the scientific integration of earned, owned and paid-for media, we were also delighted to win six further awards for clients in the international MarComs awards; for Integrated Marketing (for both BUPA and Fidelity), for Advertising (Fidelity), for Media Relations (BUPA) and in both the Social and YouTube video categories. All of the work created and produced by our in-house teams.

### Competing against UK and overseas agencies

To our delight, we also struck Gold again twice last week in the New York based Gramercy Institute Asset Management awards; one in the Public Relations category for our ‘Reaching the Undeserved’ campaign for Charles Stanley, the second for Fidelity international in the Branding category for our innovative ‘Suitably Individual’ strategy, impacting on both investors and their advisers.

With budgets across the board needing to do more, it’s been a great month for being recognised independently for having delivered on the effectiveness clients most crave.

Some awards simply matter more than others

Let’s get real about AI was the subject of our second event this year, in conjunction with the Financial Services Forum.  While our earlier event in March discussed the ethics and challenges involved in the use of genAI for marketing and product dev, this second event was focused on actual use cases.  

With thanks to our amazing panel who provided a range of perspectives:
- Ben Lee, Head of Data & AI, Bidwells
- Michael Jung, CFO and Head of Global Business, DeepBrain AI
- Danielle Moore, Digital Marketing Manager, Lifesearch
- James Maxwell, Executive Creative Director, Teamspirit

Setting up the conversation, Chair Fiona Couper, CMO, Teamspirit, outlined the transformation expectations that generativeAI will have on financial services brands and their communication remain high.

According to Gartner[1] by 2025, 30% of marketing messages will be AI generated, up from less than 2% in 2022. While over 70% of consumers expect AI to negatively impact social channels, so much so that by 2025 50% of consumers are expected to significantly limit their use of major platforms due to a decay in the quality of social media sites - which for marketers, means creating new search and channel strategies for lead gen.

In financial services specifically, use of genAI is widening across operations, with banks’ spending on genAI, as estimated by Juniper Research, set to rise from the current estimate of £4.5bn in 2024 to hit £64.3bn globally in 2030[2].   

Chipmaker NVIDIA’s State of AI in Financial Services report found that 46% of respondents reported an improved customer experience as a result of using AI[3].  The same report found:
- 26% of fs companie are using Natural language processing (NLP) or large language models (LLMs) 
- 23% are utilising recommender systems / next-best action 
- 12% are using AI for their environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
- 12% use it for fraud detection across anti-money laundering and know your customer.

Headline makers in the past few months include:
- NatWest’s AI chatbot, Cora, handled 10.8m queries in 2023 and the bank is rolling out Cora+ with IBM which promises to deliver a more seamless ‘human’ experience’ using the latest AI innovations[4].
- In May this year JPMorgan Chase launched IndexGPT, a ChatGPT-like A.I. that builds thematic indexes currently for institutional clients[5], which they believe will result in an increase in client engagement and broader adoption of quantitative techniques applied to thematic indexes.
- Bunq, the EUS 2nd largest neobank, is expecting to automate 90% of operations with the help of AI and leading to new hires in areas such as AI management and compliance and predictive analytics. 

The panel began by sharing a topline on how AI is being used in their respective businesses, with both Bidwells and Lifesearch building on use that began either during or coming out of Covid.  Repetitive tasks have been sped up, such as note taking, outlining case studies, content brainstorming, creative concept ideation and business development.  

For all, despite early concerns around usage in the businesses, the benefits have outweighed concerns and the challenge is more around ensuring its use and implementation is used well.  Human direction and judgement remains vital.

Conversation then turned to discussing how to create better tailored communications and ensure consumer confidence/trust.  Counteracting the risk of AI homogenisation the panel agreed on the need to use AI as a helpful tool rather than the finished product.

For DeepbrainAI who specialise in creating AI Avatars the business is wholly focused on helping to scale businesses and at a reduced cost.  Michael Jung shared a couple of examples from retail banks in Asia where avatars deliver an improved and more personalised experience.  

Ben Lee, Bidwells talked about how AI is helping across multiple areas of the business especially internally and could see how the use of avatars would be hugely beneficial in onboarding inductions for new employees, and in bringing key policies to life.  How much more engaging to watch an avatar of the Chief People Officer than wade through the dry text manual.  He also talked about the ability to start to interact within the text which will make life even easier.

Danielle Moore, Lifesearch, shared how she is focusing on the impact of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) on search engine results pages (SERPs), exploring how this evolving technology reshapes digital marketing landscapes and enhances user interactions - particularly as google is no longer the search engine of choice for the younger generation who are happy to use social platforms such as TikTok.

From an agency point of view, James Maxwell, Teamspirit spoke of AI helping inform strategy, concepting and as a helpful copywriting tool to build on.  But reinforced that human guidance and differentiated brand personality are even more vital in an AI underpinned world.  Particularly for financial services where trust is so fundamental.

Questions from the floor ranged from how to ensure AI imagery and avatars still met Consumer Duty requirements (achieved by ensuring clear supers), distinction in a world of AI (by using AI as a helpful tool rather than the whole answer) to whether there remained some fear around its usage and giving ‘the machine’ too much power (reality is that careful trial is required).

In conclusion, the panel all felt that AI was a helpful addition that made their jobs easier and freed up time to allow them to focus on the more strategic and creative requirements.

If you’d like to discuss how to use your brand's personality to ensure a more distinctive brand experience in a world of AI, you know who to contact [hello@teamspirit.co.uk](mailto:hello@teamspirit.co.uk).

## Sources:

1. Gartner 2024 CMO Priorities
2. [https://www.cityam.com/theres-little-room-for-caution-banks-and-fintechs-gear-up-for-ai-revolution/](https://www.cityam.com/theres-little-room-for-caution-banks-and-fintechs-gear-up-for-ai-revolution/)
3. [https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-state-ai-report/finance-survey](https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-state-ai-report/finance-survey)
4. [https://www.cityam.com/theres-little-room-for-caution-banks-and-fintechs-gear-up-for-ai-revolution/](https://www.cityam.com/theres-little-room-for-caution-banks-and-fintechs-gear-up-for-ai-revolution/)
5. [https://www.pionline.com/money-management/jp-morgan-chase-launches-indexgpt](https://www.pionline.com/money-management/jp-morgan-chase-launches-indexgpt)


AI Applied. Let’s get real

In many respects 2016 won't go down in history as a great year, with uncertainty, disruption and the loss of so many wonderful people. But for us it was a year of transformation, helping our clients to achieve their ambitions, be it winning awards, IPOs, challenging the market or transforming more established brands.

Now it's your turn to transform with a little festive fun...

Ever wondered what you'd look like with a fluffy white beard? Well, now's your chance. Simply upload a photo of yourself and decorate your face with a whole host of Christmas items from antlers, to bright red noses to giant Santa beards.

[Create your festive face now!](https://www.teamspirit.uk.com/festiveface)

Get your festive face on

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