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Practitioner Group Membership

Agencies and consultancies from across all marketing and communications disciplines are welcome to join The Financial Services Forum via our Practitioner Group membership.

We respect the contribution that agencies regularly make to our events. Quite often leaders from the agency community are invited to speak at our conferences and seminars to present their insights, techniques and case studies. Sharing your experience and expertise is valuable to our members.

But ad hoc appearances as a speaker do not, on their own, help you become a valued member of the financial services marketing community. Yet, if your agency or consultancy has financial services clients, and wants to develop a genuine capability in these markets, being a regular and visible member of the community is no better place to start.

At meetings of The Financial Services Forum you don’t just meet other agencies; you meet the leaders who are driving marketing strategy for their financial services businesses, and the marketing managers who are helping them to deliver it.

Raising the bar

Financial Services Forum events are much more than just a networking opportunity.

They offer a genuine forum to exchange ideas and learn from other experts in the financial services industry. Our agendas are chosen by our members, to cover the topics that concern them most as they address the challenges of marketing in the sometimes complex, often highly regulated and always shifting financial services landscape.

Because of its complexity and diversity, financial services marketing is genuinely difficult. There is also plenty of scope and opportunity to improve marketing professionalism, and effectiveness.

Together our aim to help raise the bar : to provide Practitioner Group members with a better knowledge of the issues and challenges facing financial services marketers, and greater understanding of key aspects, such as product design, distribution, regulation and consumer attitudes. We also aim to cover both B2C and B2B marketing and communications agendas.

In this way, our Practitioner Group Members share similar objectives to our Full and Associate Members: to use their Forum membership to improve their personal effectiveness in financial services marketing, and thereby provide their clients with more insightful advice and more successful marketing outcomes.

The calendar of events

As a member of The Financial Services Forum Practitioner Group, you will be entitled to attend up to eight events each year, including our two full-day Members’ conferences.

All these events are open to our Full and Associate Members from client-side companies, and we plan the agendas and speakers to cover as broad a range of topics as possible. Our aim for these events is to provide maximum appeal to senior marketers from across all financial services sectors, relevant to client-side members and agency practitioners alike, across all marketing and communications disciplines.

On-line Knowledge Centre archive

Practitioner Group membership also gives you access to our online Knowledge Centre archive.

This resource is a goldmine for anyone looking to research issues, trends and best practice case studies in financial services markets. Fully searchable by key words, it is a database of almost all the presentations, research studies and white papers contributed to the Forum by its members and at our events over the past eight years.

Presenters have given us their consent to make their content available to our members, on the understanding that if you wish to cut and paste a slide into one of your own presentations, you always attribute them as the source.

Free subscription to Argent, our quarterly journal

Practitioner Group members also receive a free subscription to our respected quarterly journal, Argent, edited by Lorna Bourke, the iconic personal finance journalist. (An annual subscription to Argent would normally cost £300).

Argent contains thought leadership articles, especially commissioned on important topics of the day, and authoritative commentaries on the latest industry trends and statistics.

Who can join?

Practitioner Group Membership is available to the Principals and Directors of marketing services agencies, with a limit of two memberships per agency.

We are keen to ensure a balanced representation across all marketing and communications disciplines: creative, direct marketing and digital agencies, branding and design consultancies, PR and public affairs consultancies, sponsorship consultants, media planning and buying agencies, research consultancies, data and marketing services software providers.

We will currently limit the size of our Practitioner Group community to 100 members, in order to maintain a balanced ratio between our Full and Associate member communities.