There are many reasons why marketing professionals join and benefit from The Financial Services Forum. And nobody is better placed to express them than the Members themselves.
That’s why we recorded a small selection of our Members to describe the benefits they get from their membership.
Simply click on the name and jobtitle to see a clip of their views.
The story begins …
The Forum is a unique space for financial services marketors because first of all it is independent; it’s by invitation only and it attracts the practitioners who really do run and are responsible for the marketing strategies for their businesses. It provides a space where marketors can discuss their individual marketing issues and also market issues as well.
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
There are three reasons why the Financial Services Forum exists I think. One is that financial services is a very big sector- it’s one of the biggest. Two is that it is constantly changing, there are always new things happening and there is always a need to find out what is going on but third is that financial services is genuinely very complex and financial services marketing is difficult. It’s more difficult than most other marketing segments and for that reason the Financial Services Forum exists to continue to train and develop and educate practitioners in all aspects of financial services marketing - it’s what makes the Forum unique.
Andrew Porter, Managing Director, The Financial Services Forum
Making the Forum distinctive
I think that the Forum stands for a broad landscape of marketing. It’s not just about marketing communications, it covers areas like product design, it covers areas like brand positioning, it looks at the sales effectiveness of marketing campaigns which makes it quite distinctive and it also covers a vast area of channels which are becoming more important in marketing.
Patrick Waldron, Chief Executive, Post Office Financial Services
What I really like about the Forum is the fact that it is independent so it doesn’t have to concern itself with politics, it doesn’t have to concern itself with the responsibility of being a trade body and I think that’s a real value because it allows the Forum to stick to it’s core purpose which is to help people like me understand marketing, understand the effectiveness of the marketing spend and that is really really important.
Robin Bulloch, Managing Director, Branch Banking, Royal Bank of Scotland
The other thing I like about the Forum are the use of the Chatham House Rules. It allows me to learn from other people, get their experiences and their wisdom and it also allows me to feel relaxed about giving my knowledge and my experience to others within the Forum.
Robin Bulloch, Managing Director, Branch Banking, Royal Bank of Scotland
Real reasons to join
When I started my career in financial services, which is a long time ago now, there was very little marketing done actually and it’s always been a key issue for me to ensure that we get best practice marketing in financial services. We’ve too often been the poor relations of marketing and I think financial services marketing is one of the toughest areas to work in. We are dealing with intangible long term products and trying to sell those effectively, trying to communicate those effectively to consumers is a really tough thing to do. So for me the Financial Services Forum is in a very special place because it is one of the very few bodies that can really help people develop their best practice for themselves, for their people and for the market as a whole.
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
I personally joined the Forum because I guess for a couple of reasons, one to network with other CEOs, and particularly in the marketing space and then secondly, most interesting, from the Forum’s perspective because it campaigns on industry issues and I think that is an increasingly important area in this whole era of transparency and trust and the FSA treating customers fairly.
Patrick Waldron, Chief Executive, Post Office Financial Services
By the members, for the members
What’s unique about The Financial Services Forum is that it is an organisation that is for the members by the members. Nowhere is that better reflected than in the Advisory Board. The Advisory Board comprises of a number of industry leaders from major companies within the financial services community and their role is to ensure that we set the agenda that reflects the issues and the challenges that face our members.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
I have been involved with the Advisory Board since day one from launch and the role of the Advisory Board is, first of all, about ensuring that we have the right members and so it selects the members and it is by invitation only. Secondly, it is about setting the content and making sure that the content is absolutely relevant and thirdly, there is clearly a role in terms of creating the awards for marketing effectiveness and making sure that those are of the highest possible standard.
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
Networking opportunities
Event content is clearly critical but one of the things that our research tells us time and time again is that the opportunity to network is very important to our members. It is an opportunity to meet their contemporaries, sometimes their competitors in a relaxed environment and talk about the key issues that they see facing them.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
In my experience the content of the programmes that The Forum provides is of a very high calibre as, indeed I have to say, are the venues that have been used, I have been very impressed; I’ve even been to the top of the BT Tower. However, I think that is very clear to me that what the Forum tries to do is to create time for people to network and, of course, this is a very important element of business success in the modern era and I thoroughly enjoy the time I have with colleagues with other businesses and from other disciplines where I can learn a bit of their experiences.
Robin Bulloch, Managing Director, Branch Banking, Royal Bank of Scotland
The right people
Membership is really a broad church from literally A-Z, Abbey to Zurich. The thing that binds all of our members together is their commitment to marketing effectiveness.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
Dealing with your issues – Special Interest Groups
Well at one level The Forum works for all financial services marketers in dealing with problems we have to face but at a deeper level the differences between, say, a pensions marketer and someone working in general insurance are quite marked and so the special interest groups allow members of a particular persuasion dealing in a particular area of financial services to get together and deepen their knowledge and understanding in that particular area.
David Dunn, Director, The Retirement Institute
Of course, a lot of our members have very different issues, financial services isn’t an homogenous sector, it's highly heterogeneous, so there are those in asset management have very different challenges to those in say mortgages. To reflect that we have a number of special interest groups, each with their own steering committee who ensures that the agenda addresses the real day-to-day issues faced by those members.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
The future of financial services marketing – Associate Membership
Since we launched the Associated Membership in 2006 it has grown to about 150 members. These are people who are responsible for the delivery of their marketing strategy. We recognised a couple of year’s ago that The Forum was very good at addressing strategic issues but that was only half of the picture the delivery of the strategy is equally important and the Associate Membership group was about helping the people who were responsible for the delivery just get better at it and at the same time help prepare them for their next level of growth within their organisations. These people are probably the next level of Marketing Directors.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
For the first six years or so of its existence the Financial Services Forum membership consisted of senior marketing practitioners, marketing directors and chief marketing officers, those people responsible for the marketing strategy for their business but in 2006 we decided to extend membership to a new body, Associate Membership. Now this is for the people who deliver marketing within their organisations typically the people who report into those marketing directors. This is a fabulous place because it is a breeding ground for the next generation of marketing directors in UK financial services.
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
The Associate Membership level was launched in 2006 and now has over 125 members it is a great forum for marketing managers and leading marketing entrepreneurs across the industry to get together and share ideas it’s also a chance to progress to the next level of membership which is a full member.
Sasha Webster, Vice President, European Marketing, BNY Mellon
Completing the circle – Practitioner Membership
I think that it is a great opportunity for agencies to be part of The Forum and we can be part of this senior level debate that goes on in the Forum and the hundred agencies that have been invited represent a really diverse range of agencies. I think that we all come with very different points of view and I think that we all really add a fresh perspective to The Forum as well.
Jo Parker, Chief Executive, Teamspirit
We have been playing with this issue of practitioners marketing agencies, if you like, for some time now and the membership, thus far, has been restricted to marketing practitioners on the client side but when we extended the group into Associate Membership, so we had Financial Services Forum members, people responsible for strategy then was extended to Associate Membership, people responsible for delivering marketing, it almost felt like we were missing out on that third segments with the marketing practitioners, the people that run agencies, Marketing agencies, PR agencies, Strategic agencies, people involved in research and so on and that really for me completes the circle, we now have all three bodies who deliver marketing in financial services represented within the Forum
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
The Practitioners group is a new community within the Financial Services Forum but it is a vital one because there are so many providers of services and marketing communications services from creative to digital to PR to research to data. The financial services industry depends on its relationships with key consultants and vendors in this area and we want to make sure that they are well represented in a part of this vibrant community.
Andrew Porter, Managing Director, The Financial Services Forum
Probably fair to say that it’s a win-win situation for both parties. Agencies get exposure to a category which they found complex over the years and so they will develop a deeper understanding of the intricacies of that category. Clients will equally be exposed to some real leading edge best practice within marketing communications and that can only be of benefit to them. I suppose the other point worth making is because we are focusing on participation at the board or partner level within organisations and we are capping the membership at a maximum of 100 should elevate the quality of level of debate within this group above the typical new business feeding frenzy one so often encounters.
Neil Scaife
The right events
We run about sixty events a year - about forty of these are for our special interest groups, the balance are of general interest to all of our members. They range from half-day workshops, literally around a table for maybe a dozen people through to our one day conferences where we would typically have about 150 people, through to our three day events in the south of France where we endeavour to take around 50 people away to get them out of the day-to-day urgent issues to focus on the things that are really important to them.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
One of the very special things that The Financial Services does is an Annual European Executive Summit. Now this is three days away in the south of France but believe me it is really hard work and the point of these meetings is to get people out of their normal office environment to give them room and space enough to think which is very difficult to find in our very busy lives. So this summit brings together some of the leading practitioners in marketing across the world of financial services and it is a time and a place for us to really begin to delve into some of the important issues the real crushing strategic issues in our industry.
Mike Tildesley, Marketing Director, RBS Insurance
Argent is the word
We have our own journal, Argent, the journal of The Financial Services Forum. It too has it’s own editorial board that ensures that Argent is reflecting the key issues and challenges that our members are seeing in their everyday business.
Anthony Thomson, Chairman, The Financial Services Forum
Rewarding effective marketing
I think the awards are very important aspect of what The Financial Services Forum does. What I really think is interesting is that they are about marketing effectiveness not about the look and feel of an individual campaign or do people respond to an individual ad. What is more important is we look at, did it result in an increase in sales, did it increase the brand positioning for an individual company and we are very focused on the positive outcomes that came from an individual campaign and that makes them, for me, quite distinctive.
Patrick Waldron, Chief Executive, Post Office Financial Services
Online and on time – www.thefsforum.co.uk
The Financial Services Website has been developed in two key areas. The first is an on line archive fully searchable with all the Argent material that we have developed and the event presentations over the last ten years and the second is an extension of the networking opportunities that we provide at events and that allows members to communicate with other members with similar interests and both of those are fabulous membership benefits.
Richard Nolan, Operations Director, The Financial Services Forum
The website has a special members area where members can actually trough through ten year’s worth of Forum material including Argent articles and presentations so if there is anything you remember seeing or reading and want to access again it is very easy to navigate, there is a very comprehensive search tool that you can use and so you should be able to find it and what is more if there are things that you missed first time round and a presentation you wanted to see and couldn’t get to again you’ll find it on the website. It is also very useful for actually talking to other members, you can communicate within the website with other people who have very similar interests.
David Dunn, former Director, Fidelity Retirement Institute