From press cuttings to advising on strategic business objectives, financial services comms has been on an evolutionary journey – and the destination for some is the very highest level.
When Amy Butler joined marketing and communications agency Marketforce in 2004, her role – among many other things – included posting paper press releases to journalists.
In the twenty or so years that have followed, the role of a communications professional has developed just as quickly as the technology it now relies on.
Today, the role demands a broad skillset – including significant stakeholder management – while expectations and measurement of success have also been set much higher.
But, while the development of both agency and in-house comms has happened at pace, the evolution is far from over.
“I started out doing something that was called PR, but in reality, was media relations,” says Butler, now vice president of corporate communications at online investment platform eToro. “My first agency was all about content creation, and it was very much issues-driven PR. It was about identifying the problems and challenges facing the clients that the companies I was representing were looking to solve.”
A Cambridge history graduate, she had been courted by management consulting firms but found the idea of a 21-year-old advising globally recognised household names somewhat perverse. With a role in communications, however, she was able to apply similar analytical skills and techniques as would be needed to deconstruct a company but use them to create a different output.
“From day one, I had to really understand businesses from the ground up,” she says. “I had to become a subject matter expert, translate the complex into the simple.”
For Butler, fresh from a self-funded gap year in Australia that was intended to give her career path some direction, this first role gave her the grounding she needed to build a life in comms – and a taste for being close to the action.
“I also had to understand the power of content and relate that content and those client challenges to what was going on in the wider world.”
It’s those elements that are the key to effective comms, says Butler, but, of course, there’s much more besides.
“It’s not just about a product, but about a solution, and, critically, about relationships with investors or regulators or anyone who is relevant to the message you want to get across.”
It was at Lansons – now part of Team Farner – where she learned the power of media relationships and entered the world of financial services, which also piqued her interest about moving in-house.
“I remember sitting in reception at one of my asset management clients,” she says. “The CEO walked past and said, ‘I’ve just seen you say hello to 20 people. How many people in the company do you know?’.”
In fact, she knew the department leaders and their teams across the whole firm, “but it doesn’t matter how close you are as an agency, it’s never quite the same, because you’re not inside the building, understanding how comms actually works within an organisation”.
The chance to be “inside the building” came with a UK head of media relations role at Axa Investment Managers. But in joining an established brand – outside its Paris headquarters – she faced challenges to make comms a more central and effective team and department.
“When I arrived, the role was old school style PR,” she says. “Putting Journalist A into contact with Stakeholder B, sit there and make sure all the points we wanted covered were raised.
“The reality was, I could do all the interviews that my spokespeople were doing myself; the journalist just didn’t want to talk to me, they wanted to talk to the person ‘in the business’.”
Internally, too, Butler was striving to impress on colleagues the value the team she was building could bring. With a self-confessed Cambridge-shaped chip on her shoulder, she wanted to prove that she – and the role of communications – was more than just organising drinks parties
and accompanying fund managers to lunches.
“Some people can do that through the force of their personality and showing that they are an expert in their field, i.e. storytelling, reputation management, et cetera,” she says.
“If you can show that you understand then you earn the trust of your internal stakeholders.”
She learned that to have real credibility, understanding what the business does and what it is trying to achieve is vital and, in turn, bolsters the standing of the team internally.
“It’s about delivering value and helping the business understand what communications actually is – and isn’t – then demonstrating that very value it produces,” says Butler.
And the evolution – urged on by hundreds of comms professionals around the world – does seem to be happening, she notes.
Pastures new
After Axa IM, Butler switched from B2B to B2C and joined online investment platform eToro as global head of PR and comms in 2018.
Founded in 2007, eToro exploded onto the investment scene as a significant catalyst within the movement to ‘democratise finance’. It has shaken traditional retail and wealth management with 0% commission trades and offered crypto investment options since 2013.
It has also made its presence felt with campaigns running online, through traditional media and significant sports sponsorship, and now boasts more than 35 million registered users across 100 countries.
When Butler started out in 2016 as a team of one, however, her first job was to assess the assets at her disposal.
“We had agencies that weren’t being managed properly – at least outside the UK,” she says. “There was a perception that they could just work in isolation, whereas agencies have to be fed.
“They need to be proper long-term partners who you help to get to know your business and then you can empower them to help you tell your story.”
Today, eToro, with reported assets under advice of $18bn as of December 2024, a seemingly hungry M&A programme and ambitious corporate vision, has a comms team of six. It has PR programmes live in 12 markets.
At the same time, the awareness and profile of comms across the business has grown significantly – and agencies have helped to achieve it.
“You’re better at managing agencies if you’ve been in an agency yourself. Because you know how they work, you know their excuses (and when something is genuinely a problem),” says Butler. “You also need the right agencies in place so you know what’s going on and keep hiring new people to get new elements into the team, so you don’t just keep on repeating what you did the year before.”
Getting the right people in place, supported by the right external partners enables the evolution of comms, says Butler. It is evidenced when colleagues from all departments come to them for a range of new and important business questions and challenges that fall well outside of contacting journalists.
“At first sight, a lot of it has nothing to do with communications per se,” she says. “It could be advice on giving gifts to senior clients in Asia – we are often asked to be a sense and sensitivity check – or if the company wants to do a partnership with another one, I’ll have an initial conversation then pass it on to the relevant internal party.”
Butler conveniently moved from London to the US around the time eToro was working on a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation (SPAC) that would have seen it publicly list on New York’s Nasdaq. The deal didn’t come off, but Butler’s proximity – both corporate and geographical – to the activity speaks to how far both she and the role of comms has come.
Rather than just present journalists to ask questions and send out company missives, Butler says her team increasingly acts as internal bridges connecting different departments, which is a testament to the links they have made across the business.
“We are increasingly being seen as a strategic partner and the team you can rely on to get stuff done – but also to challenge,” says Butler. “On the other hand, I couldn’t do my job without collaboration with marketing.”
The same goes for compliance and eToro’s business intelligence team.
“I need to understand what’s happening on the platform,” she says. “I need to have access to data to be able to tell good stories, so it’s about investing in those relationships to make sure I can it,” she says. “But that’s also part of the reason why I think it’s one of the best jobs in the world because you work with every single part of the business.”
External visibility and validation
As a B2C business run on a social platform, the team also receives plenty of unfiltered and immediate feedback from clients – very different from operating within a storied institution serving traditional investment markets through a range of intermediaries.
“What’s a crisis is so completely different,” she says. “Urgency is so completely different because you’ve got that individual consumer there, now. Especially once you become a well-known brand, which we have the privilege of being in the UK, if you make mistakes, there is nowhere to hide.”
Journalists – including some on this title – are also clients, so experience firsthand the good and the bad.
“We’ve really got no excuse not to know what’s on the minds of our clients the whole time,” says Butler.
“Trying to never forget about them; trying to listen to them has to be paramount. Everyone talks about being client-centric, but actually doing it is very different. Having relationships and keeping in touch with people is important and having great agencies who continue to challenge you.”
One of her biggest fears about leaving agency side was that she was going to become “a terrible in-house person who wasn’t up to speed with what’s going on,” she says.
“That’s where you have to try and lean on your network and go to events like Financial Promoter Live!.”
Tech-driven change
This immediacy, brought to all companies through the advent of technology, has also led to
massive shifts in the comms role.
“There’s much less day-to-day media relations,” she says. “Media relations for me nowadays is pure crisis communications and senior corporate comms.”
Notably, the media landscape has also shifted significantly over two decades, with a hollowing out of dedicated trade titles and a shift towards online and social media journalism clearly taking hold of national and international news organisations.
This means the profile of candidates to build comms teams has shifted too.
“It’s less about the relationships that people have and more about their intelligence, their hunger for knowledge,” says Butler. “The hardest thing for me to assess at the interview stage, which sadly is the most important, is comfort with change and an ability to adapt.”
Since launch in 2007, alongside snapping up competing and complementary businesses
around the world, eToro’s founder and CEO Yoni Assia has also created the GoodDollar Project, a non-profit riff on Universal Basic Income that gives out small amounts of digital currency
to anyone who needs it.
It is the epitome of a fast-moving, dynamic business – and that brings challenges, but also rewards.
“You may have been working on something and then priorities change, or product dev. schedules move and a product launch isn’t happening or regulatory changes have happened
and things change,” she says, which isn’t right for everyone – especially those with a background in traditional finance.
“Sometimes you get frustrated and swear a bit, but then you move on,” she says. “One of the things I say to people at interview stage is ‘I can’t tell you exactly what your role will look like in a year’s time, but I can promise you there’s going to be no shortage of opportunity’.”
People who are comfortable rolling with the punches survive and thrive within the organisation – but there are skills to develop too.
Writing skills are key, says Butler.
“Even though we have agencies, we manage both internal and external comms, so, you still need to be able to do a quick blog from our CEO on the impact of AI or the company’s crypto journey or something like that,” she says. “If you’re reviewing and editing other people’s work, you can only do that if you understand what good copy looks like.”
For a company that has been using AI to formulate and run portfolios for almost a decade, is there a place for it in comms?
“Do I use AI for my writing at the moment? No, because I still think I’m a better writer, but I will use it to avoid that blank page moment,” she says. “I use it as a source of insights and I’m excited by it.”
Butler notes how technological advancement of any kind scares people initially.
“The first person who made fire created something that provided heat and warmth, but also something that could cause an incredible amount of destruction. AI is exactly the same,”
she says. “I really believe it can be something that can be harnessed – it is about empowerment. We are very much a mission-led, empowerment business.”
Butler notes that the current chatter about AI overlooks the transformational change technology has already had – and on comms specifically – and how it is equipping us to recognise and deal with a rapidly changing world.
“Sometimes we feel our generation is a bit boring compared with others, yet there is so much going on from a technological point of view and from geopolitical change,” she says. “Every day there is something momentous that you couldn’t have guessed going on. There’s much change throughout society, and communications has to adapt to new societal norms and behaviour.”
Evolution in action
And will this generational shift have an impact on the role of comms more broadly?
“Comms is still an art rather than a science,” she says. “Technology has hugely helped. I don’t have teams of people manually logging coverage anymore or, like when I was a teenager, sticking media coverage into a physical book for my godmother. We have tools and platforms that use AI to gather it all.”
But some things don’t change.
“When a shareholder phones up the CEO and says, ‘I’ve just read an amazing interview in Bloomberg’, that feedback is still priceless,” notes Butler.
“You need to be excited by it,” she says. “That’s not unique to PR, but with PR, and marketing to a certain extent, you can see the results of what you do more readily.”
For Butler, if you only find out about an interview in the Mail on Sunday when the agency sends it through to you on Monday, there’s something wrong.
“I want my team to have work-life balance, but I honestly don’t think you should work in PR if you think it’s a nine-to-five job.”
Yet, the evolution of communications has its roots in developing partnerships with other parts of the business, with the output less instantly measurable by column inches and more about a broader visibility.
It is helping internal recognition and perception too.
“While marketing may have the budget and the spend, PR and communications more broadly has terrific value – and people are realising that,” says Butler, noting that this value varies depending on market cycle.
“When marketing spends down, it’s actually my favourite time to work in communications,” she says, “because people rediscover what great value you are, and I hope this leads to more people thinking about communications on a holistic level at management level.”
CMOs are regularly part of executive teams, alongside chief of staff, whose roles include investor relations, but it’s still rare to see Chief Communication Officers, on the board – but for
how long?
“It feels like we’ve been talking about comms getting a seat at the table for my whole career,” says Butler. “It is happening. There is an awareness that we’re not just a channel anymore, but
a strategic partner. Certainly, that’s the reason why I’m still at eToro.
“I’m hopeful this shift will continue to gather pace, because at the end of the day, in business, reputation is everything.”
Amy Butler will be appearing at FP Live! in March. For more information, visit financialpromoter.co.uk/fp-live