The growing sophistication of investors, the prominence of international funds, the pressure on boards of directors and developments in corporate governance rules are changing the communication needs of listed companies. In this context, financial information remains essential. But it is no longer sufficient. The markets demand an understanding of strategy, an assessment of the consistency of management teams, and the ability to anticipate how companies will respond to an increasingly uncertain economic and geopolitical environment.

This transformation requires closer ties between three areas that have traditionally operated at different paces and with different priorities. On the one hand,requires strategic senior management; on the other, investor relations (IR) departments; and, thirdly, the corporate communications and media relations departments. Coordination between them is no longer limited to a mere exchange of messages prior to a significant announcement. In today’s climate, it must take the form of an ongoing dialogue, capable of linking business decisions with the expectations of investors, analysts, business journalists and other stakeholders.

Communication, across each of these dimensions, is moving away from its traditional objective of being the final step in the corporate strategy. Now, it has taken on a challenge of greater substance. It has become an indispensable tool for business management.

The market demands a dialogue, not a schedule of announcements

The evolution of investor relations departments illustrates this conceptual shift. Spanish IR professionals have achieved levels of specialisation comparable to those in Anglo-Saxon markets, with growing influence within their organisations. So much so that their role is shifting from strictly financial areas towards corporate strategy and business development.

This is no coincidence. International capital accounts for around 50 per cent of the shareholding in Spanish listed companies and is increasingly shaping the requirements for disclosure, transparency and good governance. Institutional investors are not content merely to know how revenue or profits are performing. They want to understand investment decisions, operational risks, capital allocation, the composition of boards, and the consistency between stated objectives and actual results. In short, the stakeholders are becoming increasingly demanding, and their channels of communication with the companies in which they hold interests are IR.

This requirement also changes the nature of external communication. A company may post satisfactory results and yet fail to convey a convincing investment case. It may have a sound strategy but find it difficult to explain its implications. Or it may take financially sound decisions which, if poorly contextualised, create uncertainty amongst investors and the general public.

The response to these scenarios requires the development of a shared corporate narrative capable of integrating financial information, business strategy and reputation. The so-called equity story should not be seen as a commercial analysis for investors, but rather as a coherent explanation of how the company creates value, what sets it apart from its competitors and why its decisions are sustainable in the long term.

This ecosystem of market issuers places strategic consistency at the very heart of market confidence. A company that repeatedly fails to meet its financial forecasts ultimately erodes its credibility with investors, even when its business fundamentals remain reasonably sound.

Accuracy and reliability, therefore, do not depend solely on communicating forecasts effectively, but on maintaining a verifiable link between what the company announces, what it does and what it ultimately achieves.

To achieve this, communications professionals need to work closely with those responsible for strategy, finance, operations and corporate governance. It is not enough simply to receive ready-made information and turn it into public messages. They need access to the reasoning behind decisions, to contribute alternative perspectives, to identify possible interpretations, and to be able to prepare explanations before doubts arise in the market.

In the same way, the teams responsible for relations with the media must convey to management the concerns that they identify amongst journalists, analysts and other stakeholders. Strategic communication works in both directions. On the one hand, it must engage with and explain the business decisions; on the other hand, they must help their audience or their interlocutors to understand them.

Activism makes reputation a matter for the board

The ever-increasing prominence of shareholder activism underscores the need for coordination. General meetings can no longer be viewed merely as formal gatherings to approve resolutions. They are moments of particular scrutiny, where financial interests, corporate governance requirements and reputational expectations all converge.

The analyses of the ecosystem of issuers in the market describe an activism that is increasingly more selective and specialised. In an in-depth analysis of the sector relating to 2025, the industry accounts for 23.7 per cent of this growing demand for investment due to access on an ongoing basis to the deliberations of companies, followed by technology, at 16.4 per cent, and the finance sector, at 15.8 per cent. The stakeholders are looking for companies where they can influence strategic decisions, improve operational efficiency or drive changes in the bodies of corporate governance.

Shareholder pressure does not follow a uniform pattern either. In Spain, a more constructive and private form of activism prevails than in the US, focusing particularly on the composition of boards and the alignment of remuneration with market expectations, as explained in reports such as that by Sodali, a global corporate advisory firm. Many disagreements are raised in private meetings, before they reach shareholders’ meetings or the media. Hence the importance of anticipating conflicts and coordinating responses between IR, communications and senior management.

This coordination is essential in the event of disputes regarding remuneration, corporate transactions, regarding the independence of the directors or in matters of sustainability. The response requires strategic sound arguments, knowledge of the expectations of the shareholders and awareness of reputational risks. It also requires an ongoing relationship with the economic specialist journalists that enables the contextualisation of decisions business decisions beyond the press releases and the crisis situations.

Regulation also sets out this modus operandi by establishing new communication responsibilities. European Directive 2024/2810, on structures involving shares with multiple voting rights, makes it possible to reconcile certain forms of market access with the preservation of corporate control, whilst incorporating safeguards for minority shareholders.

These structures raise questions about the distribution of power, shareholder representation and transparency, although their legal legitimacy alone does not guarantee investor confidence. Companies must explain their economic rationale, their safeguards and any potential drawbacks. This task requires communication to be integrated from the earliest stages of corporate decision-making.

From information to strategic intelligence

Companies need, therefore, a stable architecture of relationships between those who make decisions and those who interpret their consequences. Rather than simply reacting to announcements after decisions are made, communications teams should participate continuously in the decision-making process, ensuring context and public perception are integrated from the start. This premise implies overcoming the separation between corporate communication and financial communication, maintaining a dialogue on a daily basis with management and developing an ongoing dialogue with investors, analysts, journalists and other stakeholders.

Specialist communications consultancies bring expertise in the media landscape, the ability to anticipate developments and the experience needed to translate complex decisions into clear, understandable arguments. Their value therefore lies in identifying risks, preparing spokespersons, listening to concerns and maintaining a consistent narrative – even when there are no relevant announcements to make.

Financial reporting is moving towards strategic intelligence methodologies. This is because the markets will continue to assess profits, cash flows and risks, but also companies’ ability to explain their decisions and respond to their stakeholders.

Although results are presented periodically, board meetings are held only once a year, and corporate transactions take place on specific dates, reputation is built every day. This is why the communication that underpins it cannot operate on a quarterly basis.

La entrada Trust isn’t measured in quarters. Investor relations embraces this principle of financial communication. se publicó primero en Agencia comma.

“If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said”. Few phrases have better defined an era of monetary policy than that boutade – an extravagant and witty remark – by the recently deceased Alan Greenspan: “If I have seemed too clear to you, you have probably misunderstood me”. But the phrase was no mere quip. It was the philosopher’s stone upon which the Fed has built its communication strategy. This is no trivial matter, given that its explanations have ended up being far more significant than market participants could ever have imagined.

The remark was made in September 1987, just five weeks after he took the helm of the Fed, during a hearing before the US Senate Banking Committee. It was offered, with an undeniably ironic tone, in response to the senators’ questioning regarding the traditional reticence of central bankers to explain the monetary policy decisions being debated by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) – the ‘engine room’ where the price of US money is determined. But also, and paradoxically, Greenspan used it in the run-up – specifically, four weeks earlier – to Black Monday on 19 October of that same year, when there were already signs on Wall Street of a stock market crash. All of this earned him a reputation from which he never strayed.

For much of the 20th century, the Federal Reserve regarded ambiguity as an integral part of its authority. A central bank should not anticipate every move, because uncertainty was also a tool of monetary policy. In a way, a sort of dogma took hold, asserting that its credibility rested on its decisions, not on its explanations.

Nowadays, it might seem as though that way of exercising control over interest rates belongs to another world. After all, over the last two decades, the Fed has set out the positions and approaches of its executive board in its minutes. In doing so, it has explained, anticipated, guided and, at times, almost dictated market expectations.

Less transparent, and less sovereign?

But the world – and the Fed is no exception – is always full of surprises. Kevin Warsh, its newly appointed chairman, wants to change that paradigm. Since joining the central bank par excellence – the guardian of the gold standard – he has advocated simplifying official language, reducing the emphasis on forward guidance – guidance on the future direction of monetary policy – and has comprehensively overhauled its entire communication strategy. Warsh’s assessment makes it abundantly clear that the Fed talks too much and makes excessive commitments to a future that the economy frequently contradicts.

It is not a question of style. It is a debate about how monetary power should be exercised. And it comes at a delicate moment, when the nightmare of a White House seeking to control the Fed’s every move has resurfaced with a vengeance. The parting words of Jerome Powell, spoken as he handed the reins of this sovereign institution over to Warsh, hint at the gravity of this change of course: “From now on, the Fed will be subject to a constant stress test regarding its degree of independence.”

From Volcker’s silence to the narrative of expectations

The Fed’s contemporary history is defined by its last six chairmen. All of them played a part in transforming the US central bank into the institution we know today.

Paul Volcker, appointed in 1979, never believed that credibility could be shaped by speeches. He took office with inflation running at over 13 per cent, raised interest rates to unprecedented levels, tackled two consecutive recessions and ultimately brought the surge in prices caused by the oil crisis – triggered by the then newly formed OPEC – under control.

The way he expressed himself was consistent with that view. He spoke little because he believed that a central bank derived its legitimacy from its actions. In those days, the Fed did not even officially announce its interest rate decisions. It was up to market participants to deduce them by observing the central bank’s manoeuvres. Volcker was the embodiment of an era in which authority stemmed from silence.

Alan Greenspan inherited that culture, although he refined it with a jargon of his own. The famous Fed Speak was not a gamble for its own sake on intellectual opacity. It was a way of preserving flexibility. The less explicit he was about his future intentions, the greater capacity he would have to react to events that were unforeseen. Paradoxically it was also Greenspan —nicknamed ‘the Maestro’— who began to dismantle that model. In 1994, still in the first phase of his long tenure (which lasted until 2026), it was announced officially, for the first time, that a decision on interest rates had been made. That move marked the beginning of a revolution that went unnoticed. The Fed acknowledged that transparency strengthened its legitimacy.

But the chief architect of this new paradigm was Ben Bernanke. An academic before becoming governor and a Nobel laureate, he realised during the 2008 credit crunch that conventional monetary policy had reached its zenith. With interest rates close to zero, words took on enormous economic significance. If households, businesses and investors were confident that interest rates would remain low for a long time, they would immediately adjust their spending and investment decisions.

Communication ceased to merely explain monetary policy and instead became an integral part of it. Alan Blinder, Professor of Economics at Princeton, former Vice-Chair of the Fed and author of The Quiet Revolution: Central Banking Goes Modern – an essay regarded as the bible of US monetary strategy – shares this view. He argues that the crucial shift in central banks over recent decades has not merely been about gaining greater independence, but about realising that communication had ceased to be a public relations exercise and had instead become a “strategic and sovereign instrument”.

Janet Yellen, who pushed for the regulatory clock to be reset to zero in 2009 and for rules to be imposed on the banking sector to prevent another credit crunch caused by the accumulation of toxic assets on their balance sheets, and who later served as Treasury Secretary in the Biden administration, consolidated her predecessor’s approach. Her contribution was less spectacular, but perhaps more profound. She made transparency a daily exercise in economic education. Explaining decisions was no longer a concession to the markets; it was a democratic obligation of an independent body.

Jerome Powell took this model to its logical conclusion. Press conferences began to be held after every FOMC meeting. Economic projections and the famous dot plot – an infographic showing the interest rate levels envisaged by each of the 19 members of its governing board – lent rigour to the direction of its monetary policy. During the pandemic and the subsequent bout of inflation, managing expectations was just as vital as the interest rate decisions themselves.

Has the Federal Reserve spoken too much?

That is precisely the question Warsh raises. For years, Trump’s current representative at the Fed has argued that the institution is held hostage by its own words. By offering too many clues, it has narrowed its room for manoeuvre and accustomed the markets to interpreting any nuance as a commitment. He says he does not wish to return to Volcker’s secrecy. But he remains determined to move away from the idea that he must continually anticipate the path his monetary policy will take. The economy changes too quickly to promise on any given day what will happen in six months’ time, he explains.

This view is echoed by leading economists. Some, such as Mohamed El-Erian, President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, warn that forward guidance can become an obstacle when the economic environment becomes uncertain again, as each statement can be interpreted as an irrevocable promise. Others, such as Otmar Issing, chief economist at the ECB, emphasise that excessive explanation can convey a false sense of precision in a world – the investment world – where uncertainty never disappears. And Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England (BoE), warns that monetary authorities may end up promising a degree of foresight that no think tank can honestly offer.

However, the debate ceases to be purely technical when one considers the political context. Over the last decades, the Fed’s communication has served, above all else, to safeguard its independence. The more transparent its decisions were, the more difficult it was to question that they were based on economic criteria rather than on partisan pressures.

That is why the coincidence between Warsh’s media silence and Donald Trump’s attack on the Fed’s independence is causing concern. In such cases, perception matters. This is the view expressed by Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist of the IMF and adviser to the Indian Prime Minister. In his view, monetary sovereignty is not a permanent privilege, but a legitimacy that must be constantly renewed in the eyes of society and which demands explanation.

History will tell whether this shift strengthens the Fed’s capacity or undermines one of its key assets – its official discourse – which it had built up over forty years and which was designed to explain clearly how and why its decision-making would affect savings, employment, investment and, ultimately, the daily lives of millions of people.

But, meanwhile, it is worth not forgetting that communication has never been a mere exercise in public relations. Rather, it forms part of the exercise of power. So that the real risk may well not be so much that the Fed stops whispering to the markets, as that, when lowering its voice, other market participants end up speaking on its behalf.

La entrada When the Federal Reserve stopped ‘whispering’ (…) to the markets se publicó primero en Agencia comma.

The workings of economic cycles can be compared to drinking alcohol at a party: there is a blood alcohol level that can facilitate social interaction, lower our inhibitions and even give us good ideas, as can be seen in David Vinterberg’s film ‘Another Round’. But once that level is exceeded – which, once the party gets going, is bound to happen – almost everything becomes a problem. Among these, getting up the next day.

We can also liken credit to a good drink. The easier it is to grant loans, the higher the blood alcohol level. And, although we are relatively rational creatures, when alcohol starts to take effect, it always creates a certain sense of euphoria. If we equate alcohol with money, we arrive at the concept of financial euphoria: there is always a moment when we are convinced that our investments, our financial gambles, will yield the best results, as if the scenario we construct in our minds were to play out exactly as we imagine in reality. And that is precisely when we are at our most dangerous – to ourselves and to others.

From this feeling of being delighted to meet each other, we move on to the financial bar and get more money (or more drinks). With these financial drinks, we snap up shares, property and foreign currencies that can only go up in value. We win, those who sell win, and the barman wins too – the employee of the ‘alcoholic bank’ who, for the moment, is offering an open bar for everyone. The night stretches from midnight to four in the morning. And the body begins to show signs of exhaustion. And intoxication.

Only those who know how to drink, whether by nature or through experience, will leave the party on time. Those of us who stay will keep partying on. When a lot of people have already left, the disco begins to take on the look of an after-party. The investors least informed, those drinkers who are reckless or naive, continue to drown in alcohol, and the financial assets acquired, those drinks of more, no longer feel the same as good.

There comes a point when the alcohol-fuelled bubble bursts and you’re no longer dancing as you’d initially imagined. You might even wake up next to a stranger who, just a few hours earlier, was the conquest of your life. The sun shines right in your face, filtering through a rickety blind in a shared flat. Everything you did in that state of euphoria now seems like utter nonsense. A sense of shame sets in: many investments were based on overly optimistic decisions and forecasts of financial results that are no longer looking so good.

To continue with the analogy, all those in debt who bought things that were not actually worth that much are now in a great deal of pain. They have become impoverished and cannot offload the houses, assets or currencies they acquired during the boom. They are no longer winners but poor investors. In this case, the side effects will last more than a year or two, often for a lifetime. This is what happened, for example, following the 2008 financial crisis, which made it clear that many of the investments and loans were of very poor quality. The hangover is still being felt today, with a sullen Parliament full of hatred and poor responses. A democratic headache.

Regulating alcohol has led to almost always negative consequences. Prohibition strengthened the mafia and the criminal trade in the United States. So the solution should go in another direction: it would consist of telling people that getting rich quickly is like a street party, an event which only a minority of elected representatives can survive successfully. And that one must tread with great care when night falls, because the shadows cast on the ground deceive us if we are prone to it.

Political courage should consist of this: being able to burst the bubbles, and thereby break the self-destructive tendencies of society, whatever the electoral cost; limiting the banking sector’s lending capacity during periods of euphoria in order to bolster it during periods of depression, when loans are most necessary and urgent; and in not being seduced by periods of easy growth, but rather seeking to encourage investment in the economic fundamentals that are most likely to yield returns in the long term.

To conclude, let’s imagine a night out that allows us to have fun and get home before two in the morning. It might not be what the films show, but it would let us enjoy a good night out without overdoing it to the point of regretting it the next day. It’s not the most exciting option, but perhaps it is the most sustainable. We need political and business leadership that seeks exactly that. And, unfortunately, everyone is currently shouting, glass in hand, gazing at the moon as if it were there 24 hours a day.

*Article written by Andrés Villena, lecturer in Applied Economics at the UCM

La entrada Communicate to prevent drunkenness se publicó primero en Agencia comma.

Fintech communication: regulated markets and competitiveness

A few weeks ago Silvia Albert summarised for us five of the most important communication challenges in 2023, that are highly applicable to the financial and fintech industry; However, in this industry there is a particularity: it is a regulated market. But it is alsohighly competitive and new actors are arriving daily;

Traditional companies – already operating in the market and already quite intensive with their corporate communication (investment banking, private banking, commercial banking, financial advisory firms, fund managers, insurers…) – are joined by new fintech and insurtech players (neobanks, brokers, roboadvisors, financial technology services, open banking, brokers, digital asset companies, data aggregators, savings solutions, etc.), who are eager to present their brands, business models and (supposedly) disruptions..) who are eager to showcase their brands, business models and (supposed) disruptions; The attention cake is getting smaller and smaller , but there are more guests competing to be the most handsome of the party and get the biggest slice.

The need to create content;

We have detected that almost all of them have in common a limiting bias: they place much of their expectations for results on rapid and massive media coverage even though much of their content is not newsworthy. For many of these firms, communication is limited solely and exclusively to appearing in the salmon newspaper of reference because they have the unrealistic belief that this will have a direct impact on increasing their sales; They take the part for the whole and on the way they miss out on the other powers that communication can bring within their reach;

To highlight: the possibility of finding that story (corporate and differentiating and building stable relationshipswith all their audiences, and then provide them with content on all the channels available to them, without forgetting the ability to devise creative campaigns in collaboration with their audiences. Media coverage should be a consequence, not a cause..

Fintech communication: beyond being in the media

We meet numerous actors navigating a challenging environment: volatility, inflation, difficulty in managing and achieving returns, distrust of society, difficulty in reaching new customers and not suffering losses from current ones, securing funding, changing regulation, budget reductions, valuation issues, corporate moves…. However, firms continue to focus their communication efforts on positive media coverage at a time when media has less and less space The new report also highlights the need to devote more time to news generated by these firms (due to reduced investment in advertising, falling readership, etc.) and increasingly tight newsrooms, where journalists can hardly cope with covering all the actions and information that are produced daily in the industry; Moreover, good journalists distinguish, and do so well, between the wheat and the chaff; One thing is news and another is to advertise the benefits of your “pioneering” “disruptive” solution that comes to “democratise” “make accessible” thanks to technology… and blah, blah, blah.

We see the need for a technical stop of management and communication teams in the financial industry to do some self-analysis, to be realistic and to think: Don’t you see how unfocused we are focusing our communication strategies only on “getting in the media”, shouldn’t we, as experts in our fields, contribute to transparency and bring our knowledge and vision to the society?

Here are some tips to take into account when designing corporate communication strategies for financial institutions and fintechs this year;

10 keys to communication for financial institutions and fintechs

1.- Without the organisation’s commitment to communication, there will be no paradise

Communication should be a strategic asset in organisations and have its place in the management committee of companies; If the communication team works closely with the strategy and business team, the foundations of the story can be better established and, from there, adapted to the different channels in which the organisation connects with its audiences: employees, customers, prospectssuppliers, journalists, investment influencers… As we have explained, differentiation is becoming more difficult than ever; therefore, we will have to be creative, but also consistent and rigorous; There are no shortcuts; it all starts with a commitment that we must pass on to the whole organisation, and by having and knowing how to count on the raw material: the organisation’s intelligence; Even if we experts have open relations with the public, make no mistake: it requires a direct involvement of the management team and key designated spokespersons. Yes, yes, it takes time and resources;

2.- Holistic, personalised and beyond media strategy

Companies are advised to take a long-term approach to their strategies, though the action plan changes often based on the results, the needs of the environment and how current events move. Let us not forget that our competitors are also launching their own actions; Getting media coverage will be a consequence of the activity, campaigns and content we are able to generate together, as long as it is newsworthy for the different media audiences; It is not new that it is essential to coordinate with all areas and experts of the company as in an orchestra..

Setting that common goal and harnessing all the organisation’s resources is essential; Again, each company will have different priorities this year and will have to adapt its strategy to them; More traditional financial firms, such as fund managers, have a lot of room for improvement and many opportunities to communicate through other channels such as their websites, newsletters, podcast, digital channels…. Recently a well-known financial journalist claimed that his biggest competitor was not the media but LinkedIn; For fund managers, an appropriate strategy will allow them to segment their messages in order to meet the different requirements of their regulation; Therefore, it should make us think that it is not just about being;

It is curious how many fintechs, even though they dominate digital channels, are not able to access the intelligence of their employees to produce content that truly contributes and, therefore, is newsworthy; Moreover, their spokespersons are often under-prepared and this shows (as well as producing disastrous results). It could certainly be the medium for B2B communication in 2023 but managed in a professional and truly useful way;

3.- It all starts with knowing yourself (and knowing what others think of you)

Who are you? Who would you like to be? Does what you are saying you are match what your audiences – employees, customers, suppliers, competitors – perceive you to be? What are the dynamics of the conversation? What territories do your competitors embrace? Do you know exactly what information your audiences are looking for? My grandmother used to say: to communicate well, you should listen before you speak;

To have a strategic positioning map® communication and sectoral listening are the tools we use in comma to define our content territories and, in this way, correctly adjust the communication strategy to that reality and not to mere intuition or unrealistic expectations;

4.- In communication, the story must be the umbrella of the strategy

The cornerstone of the communication strategy of any company, entity or brand is to extract that corporate story from which everything will start: the background; From there, side stories will emerge and we will descend into the different channels in various formats: the form;

Thus, the story must be the thread that connects organisations with their audiences and it will advance with the business and with the evolution of the ecosystem in which we operate;

But to have a consistent narrative it is necessary to work directly with the management of companies which, in many cases, are being created on the fly; In organisations with a longer track record, you have to be willing to break the script; Having an expert team to look after your multichannel and transmedia storytelling is more essential than ever; In the fintech universe it is very common to start a business model and then have to change mid-game; The challenge is not to lose the thread of the story;

5.- Let’s accept the crisis as the natural environment in which we operate (or live) and anticipate it!

The dot coms, the 2008 financial crisis, bird flu, preferential shares, stamps, the pandemic, wars, crypto-winter… Although the alarm bells are often sounded well in advance, a lack of listening, perspective or self-criticism can catch you off guard and you end up managing the emergency exit in a very unprofessional manner;

Companies operating in the financial system always face a challenging environment; indeed, many of them owe their existence to it (asset managers); Low yields, rising interest rates, inflation, problems of access to finance, mergers, takeovers… So, you have to stop and think: what could happen in scenario A, B, C… with your business? And get ready;

But crises are not only caused by negative issues; Sometimes they are also caused by inordinate and incoherent growth that leads to duplication of tasks, functions and positions at times when, in the case of fintechs, they move from start ups to unicorns or scale up and face the challenge of maintaining the corporate narrative to an internal audience; In such cases, internal communication becomes a priority, as employees will be the first brand ambassadors and potential new spokespersons;

6.- Machines and people, the equation of success

I’m sorry but yes, many of our functions will be replaced by technology (in some of them, by the way, welcome! clippings, reporting bye,bye). In communication they will also come to take (part) of the work away from us; Don’t panic! Marc Vidal has been saying for some time that “people urgently need to be trained to work with machines”. Who will dominate whom? We’ll see; it’ll make for a Netflix series;

What is clear is that those of us who are experts in communication we will have to learn new skills and processes to apply technological innovations to our function, to optimise processes, to scale, to become more efficient and to multiply our innate capabilities. Everything is going very fast: blockchain, web3, AI, etc. We should not be afraid of the machine learning. What should scare us is that we consultants, journalists, writers, creators… in short, humans, abandon continuous learning as a way of life. Creativity, critical thinking, asking questions, telling stories and connecting dots, people, ideas, businesses… is what we need to master. This year we will test hundreds of technologies, some of which we will take on; some of which we will not; Many changes, new spaces, new professions are on the horizon; As with the first, second or third industrial revolution; If it’s really just the eternal return, sit tight and carry on;

7.- Beware of the new regulation

This is nothing new, the financial and fintech sector, as we said, is one of the most regulated sectors in existence; It is true that nowadays innovation is so fast that we are sometimes out of step; And that, by protecting, we sometimes achieve the opposite. In any case, we will take new regulations and requirements into account in our strategies; This is why it is essential to collaborate with our colleagues in the legal departments and compliance.

We also believe that both the asset management and digital asset sectors require a review of their conversation; It is one thing to comply with red lines, but it is quite another to be misunderstood; In this sense, the approach to a clear communication that Prodigioso Volcán has launched and with which we collaborate from comma, is a huge opportunity. Sometimes we will have to approach legislators or society to explain our innovations more and better; Different regulations around digital assets, taxonomy, financial and non-financial reporting, etc. are coming;

In any case, we will be able to innovate on them in both form and substance; There are many medium-sized companies entering secondary markets and they will have to adapt their communication; Here again, a new variable comes into play: communication with your investors; In addition, SMEs will have to produce their non-financial reports and these can become not only a powerful loudspeaker for the brand, but also a sign of identity, innovation and contribution to society;

8.- Communication with ESG criteria

Applyenvironmental, sustainability and governance criteria not only in your organization, but also in your communication. words create realities. Your messages have an impact; Are we aware of this? It is not about strutting around with greenwashing messages but about being an organisation with clear EGS criteria that is also reflected in your communication;

How do you communicate with your employees, with your suppliers? How do you make your corporate presentations and your events? Do you print without any rhyme or reason and produce things that you throw away? Do you give away objects manufactured without sustainable criteria? Are you transparent? Do you have clear criteria for corporate governance? How do you treat your collaborators/consultants/suppliers? How do you interact with journalists when they ask you about something you don’t want to talk about? What impact do your messages have on the conversation in the sector, in society? What are your ethical criteria? Do you know your biases?

How far are you willing to go to achieve the longed-for virality? Recall the Mundo Crypto communication campaign, which by the way is now on the brink of bankruptcy. It is important to be clear that communication does not work miracles; It should simply be consistent with who you are; Don’t be obsessed with telling things you don’t do, things you are not, things you don’t think; Do first; then communicate;

9.- KPIS vs. expectations

A huge obstacle we will continue to encounter this year is obsessing over KPIs without aligning them with what the customer expects to receive; Let’s not forget that communication is about intangibles and, even though these can certainly be assessed, follow other criteria than those of, for example, marketing; To avoid disappointment, it is important to define the firm’s expectations and the criteria for measuring the results of the strategy from the outset; Sometimes it is better not to not work on a project than to force it if the firm expects results that will never be achieved; It burns the firm and burns the team; Moreover, it is not sustainable over time; Intangibles such as reputation and notoriety are difficult to measure; They are certainly not measured by the weight of the cover (which, by the way, can now be bought very easily); We need to be creative and establish different indicators; and even go one step further: could we measure, for example, the impact of our voice on the conversation in the industry in which we operate?

10.- Creativity and collaboration for solutions to common causes

Stop navel-gazing and come up with collaborative creative campaigns that provide solutions to common causes; May this be the year when we understand that there is room for everyone and that there are causes worth embracing together; Since we started working in financial communication, all actors talk about the need to increase trust in their work, improve financial education, democratise investment… Only the union of different companies in the sector in a common objective to create communication campaigns that change realities, shake up and cause a positive impact related to the financial and technological world can be the solution to common causes; Continuing to work on our own territories, each one separately, sounds more like opportunistic initiatives than a clear vocation to change perception, knowledge and improve the performance of all; Can you work for a cause even with your competitors? Creativity is connecting the dots;

As Heraclitus said: “Nothing is permanent except change”; The same goes for our strategies; What works this year may not work the next; If the business objectives or the sector move, so do our action plans; we have to be aligned, anticipate, be coherent, agile and flexible; Hence the importance of surrounding yourself with communication experts who live in continuous learning, who are not afraid to collaborate with machines and even with your competitors for the common good; A multidisciplinary team, with passion and ambition, able to inspire, advise and be proactive in helping you to navigate resiliently and adapt your story to a changing, challenging and very exciting environment; How does it sound?

La entrada Challenges for financial communication and fintech in 2023 se publicó primero en Agencia comma.