Financial and Professional Services

Financial and Professional Services at FleishmanHillard UK

The financial services industry has experienced unprecedented change over the last two decades. Economic uncertainty, failed financial institutions, the demise of the banking sector, state intervention and bailouts, miss-selling scandals, scrupulous regulatory patterns, consumer apathy, indebtedness and volatile capital markets. All have contributed to the continued erosion of trust from investors and financial audiences.

The historical ways of doing business – relying on sheer size and political clout – no longer apply. Our report on reputation management looks at what we learned from the 2008 financial crisis and how communications recovery differs this time around. Our research, ‘The Changing Insurance Landscape and Advisory Role of the Broker‘, looks at responding to customer needs in light of COVID -19 and growing cyber disruptions. In short, to succeed in today’s environment, organisations must adapt. And they need a new approach to financial and professional services communications.

Our financial and professional services team helps organisations create value and drive growth by evolving their thinking and helping them to connect authentically with audiences. Our clients include banks, insurers, asset managers, FX and payments providers, investment and ESG managers, venture capital, private equity and FinTechs.

Whether it’s to strengthen reputation, advance policy or connect with the wide range of audiences or stakeholders that influence a company’s success, every day, we are building and protecting the reputations of the world’s leading financial, professional services and FinTechs.

Case study

Santander appointed FleishmanHillard UK to build an integrated communications and public affairs campaign to cement Santander’s place as a champion for UK first-time buyers.

Our insight revealed that while mainstream media discourse painted a positive picture for first-time buyers, beneath the headlines lay a very different story. The largely untold trend was that homeownership amongst young people was in fact falling, particularly amongst middle income households, and Britain’s property-owning democracy, created in the 1920s, was in peril 100 years after its birth.

We created The Future of the Homeownership Dream, a thought leadership campaign comprising the largest-ever study of prospective first-time buyers, which set out to examine the severity of this trend via a behavioural analysis and economic modelling, to not only forecast the impact on future wealth preservation and the health of the UK economy, but also to provide recommendations on ways in which the industry and government could work together to keep the homeownership dream alive for the masses.

The study disrupted the existing media narrative, and immediately placed Santander at the heart of the first-time buyers debate. At launch, we secured over 20 hits in national media and spokesperson appearances on Sky News, BBC Radio and talkSPORT. The report prompted substantial debate beyond media too, with both third-party experts and would-be homebuyers discussing the findings on Twitter, Mumsnet and Reddit, as well as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and HM Treasury both requesting briefings with Santander to discuss the data and listen to policy recommendations.

Services

All clients have access to our deep expertise in research, planning, strategy, execution and measurement and evaluation but we also offer in particular:

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