At an FP Live! roundtable hosted by media agency The Kite Factory, senior financial services marketers came together to explore a tension that feels increasingly central to modern marketing leadership: are we truly driving growth, or are we optimising around what is easiest to measure?
It was a conversation rooted in the realities of the sector. Financial services marketers are operating under intense scrutiny, from boards, regulators, commercial teams and the wider public.
At the same time, expectations of marketing have risen. It is no longer enough to be a support function. Marketing is expected to demonstrate commercial impact, shape growth strategy and justify investment in an environment where capital is tight and every line item is examined.
As Kyle Seeley, co-CEO at The Kite Factory, framed it, financial services marketers are under “more scrutiny than any other category”, while also facing greater pressure to prove that marketing is “a driver of business”.
That dual pressure sat at the heart of the discussion.
For many around the table, the challenge is not simply measurement itself, but the systems and behaviours that measurement can create.
The more pressure businesses place on proving short-term ROI, the more likely they are to prioritise the visible, immediate and easily attributable, often at the expense of the long-term work that builds brands, trust and future demand.
One attendee described the challenge of rebuilding an international marketing function while trying to show results quickly across markets at very different stages of maturity. Another highlighted the complexity of operating within an asset management structure spanning multiple boutique brands, geographies and inconsistent data environments.
Running through both examples was the same tension: how do you balance long-term brand building with the need to prove marketing’s value now?
That question becomes even harder when marketing is treated as an isolated function rather than part of a broader commercial system. One of the clearest themes from the discussion was the need to move away from a culture of finger-pointing and towards one of shared accountability.
As Anne Vigouroux, global head of marketing at Charles Taylor, put it: “I’m not in competition with commercial. I’m not in competition with finance. I want a partnership. I want us to have common challenge.”
That idea resonated strongly around the table. In complex B2B and financial services environments, marketing rarely “owns” outcomes in isolation.
It can generate awareness, shape consideration, warm audiences and create opportunities, but conversion depends on sales follow-up, client relationships, operational readiness and market context. To ask marketing alone to deliver revenue in a neat, linear way is often to misunderstand how growth actually happens.
This was especially evident in the debate around attribution. Several participants pushed back on the idea that every investment, particularly events, content and brand-building activity, should be judged by immediate or last-touch return.
As Leanne Barnham, managing director and chief marketing officer at iM Global Partner, noted, there is rarely a single moment of conversion, particularly in B2B environments where journeys can stretch over months or even years. Instead, growth is cumulative, built through multiple interactions that gradually build familiarity and trust. Marketing’s role is to ensure “the door is half open by the time the salesperson gets there”.
As another attendee put it, “just because something is measurable doesn’t mean it’s important” – a reminder that the industry’s growing focus on precision risks overlooking the harder-to-quantify drivers of growth.
That shift in language matters. It reflects a broader move away from simplistic lead generation narratives and towards a more realistic understanding of influence, contribution and nurture.
Still, no one around the table was suggesting that marketers can afford to ignore data. Quite the opposite. Credibility in the boardroom still depends on showing up with evidence.
“The KPI is your help now,” Anne Vigouroux said bluntly. “Unless you come to the table with some form of numbers… you will still not be taken with credibility.”
But the discussion also made clear that numbers alone are not enough. Marketing leaders need to understand not just marketing metrics, but business metrics too, including how the company makes money, where the commercial priorities sit, and which parts of the business truly matter most.
As Emma Hill, head of marketing and communications at Local Pensions Partnership Investments (LPPI), put it, “we constantly have to really prove at the table… that we also understand the business metrics very well.”
That commercial fluency is becoming just as important as creative instinct.
The conversation also highlighted the practical barriers that can prevent good measurement from happening in the first place.
Legacy CRM systems, fragmented Salesforce instances, poor data hygiene, underinvestment in technology and inconsistent usage across teams all make it harder to build a clear view of impact. In that context, marketers are often expected to produce highly measurable campaigns without the infrastructure needed to measure them properly.
And yet, despite those frustrations, there was a strong sense of momentum in the room.
Many of the marketers present are finding ways to work around imperfect systems by using audience research to validate channel choices, building internal stories around long- and short-term value, improving collaboration with sales, and sharpening how they articulate the role of marketing within the wider business.
As one participant noted, “you can do everything all at once, but then everything becomes urgent and everything becomes important,” highlighting the growing challenge of prioritisation in an increasingly complex landscape.
There was also a useful challenge to the category itself. Financial services has often been accused of sameness, with the same language, colours, claims and caution repeated across the sector.
Breaking out of that requires more than surface-level differentiation. It requires genuine clarity on who the brand is, what clients need and where marketing can add distinctive value.
For some, that means rooting everything in client insight. For others, it means building stronger case studies and making star employees less central than the brand itself. For Emma Hill, it begins with getting the “brilliant basics” right before trying to do anything more ambitious.
If there was a shared conclusion, it was this: the core challenges are not new, but the way marketers are responding to them is evolving. Financial services marketers are becoming more commercially fluent, more intentional about prioritisation, more rigorous about measurement and more confident in reframing marketing as a growth engine rather than a cost centre.
Or, as the roundtable made clear, the real opportunity is not just to measure what is easy, but to build the internal confidence, evidence and partnerships needed to invest in what actually drives growth.