Financial services organisations have spent the past decade in a race for data advantage. Businesses have poured time, budget, and talent into structuring, enriching, and finally activating the vast datasets they’ve been sitting on. Many are still only just starting to unlock the full value of what they have.

This work remains essential, but it’s not the differentiator it once was.

As data gets cleaner, real-time, and more intelligently surfaced, it is also becoming more democratised. The same forces that are improving the quality of insight across the industry are also levelling the playing field. The edge no longer lies in having more data, but from how a brand uses it to create emotional connections.

The firms pulling ahead aren’t simply the ones extracting more insights; they’re the ones turning those insights into narratives, experiences and identities that resonate.

Stepping Off the Content Treadmill

This shift requires a fundamental rethink of the model that has dominated financial marketing for years. The industry’s instinct has been to respond to complexity with volume — more thought leadership, more explainers, more market commentary. But if information is becoming a commodity, publishing more of it won’t deliver an advantage.

Winning teams will shift their energy from education to connection, a transition the frontrunners made long ago. Instead of constantly churning to feed algorithms, successful businesses will focus on producing fewer, more distinctive assets and campaigning with them with greater intensity and intention. The content that succeeds won’t be the most comprehensive. It will be the most human.

Finding Our Edge

This new environment also elevates the role of marketing inside the organisation.

When information is abundant, differentiation depends on clarity, conviction, and narrative — and these can only be built when marketing has a deep understanding of the organisation’s true risk appetite and commercial edge.

That means tighter alignment with product, investment, and risk teams. It means moving from being a downstream function to being upstream partners, shaping how the business shows up before it shapes what is said.

If brands are to stand for something, they must first decide what they are willing to stand for. In a crowded market, safety quickly becomes invisibility.

Marketing becomes the organisation’s window to the outside world: interpreting client expectations, scanning cultural signals, and translating both into distinctive, defensible brand value.

2026 Outlook

As we start planning for the next cycle, the pressure to demonstrate ROI isn’t going away. But the metrics are changing. 

The companies that win in 2026 won’t be the ones trying to out-explain the internet. They’ll use AI to automate the functional layers of communication, while doubling down on the human layer – the brand, the experience, and the feeling of being understood. They will move from competing on information to competing on resonance, and from producing content to shaping opinion.

In an environment where intelligence has become abundant, the rarest and most valuable asset is no longer knowledge. It is connection.