This finalist spotlight has been provided by Adclear, celebrating its double shortlist recognition at the Financial Promoter Awards UK 2026.
Adclear is proud to be recognised alongside its clients at this year’s Financial Promoter Awards, shortlisted twice, in Digital Campaign of the Year with InvestEngine for ‘Less Is More’ and in Marketing Campaign of the Year (Retail) with Yonder for ‘Pointless’.
Both campaigns moved faster and went further than regulated marketing usually permits.
In financial services, the compliance question tends to get answered at the brief stage, long before anything reaches a compliance team. Someone decides the ambitious version of an idea will be difficult to approve, so the safer version gets written instead. That cost never appears in a report, because a campaign that was never made doesn’t produce any data. It is among the largest hidden costs in regulated marketing and the hardest to measure.
Neither of these campaigns was shaped that way.
InvestEngine built a brand argument around Less Is More and took it into digital channels, putting hundreds of assets into market inside 60 days and reaching 30.5 million people.
The platform closed Q1 2026 as the fastest-growing investment platform in the UK on Fundscape’s numbers. Yonder ran their first brand campaign, Pointless, across London commuter routes before taking it nationwide through creators, PR and paid social, finishing on their biggest signup quarter to date.
Output at that pace depends on approvals keeping up with it. Every asset in both campaigns cleared through Adclear at the rate the marketing teams produced it, while the compliance functions at InvestEngine and Yonder retained control of every approval decision.
That distinction matters, because responsibility for a financial promotion sits with the firm and its approver, and any system worth using is built on that basis rather than around it.
Doni Hoti, Adclear’s CEO, said: “The FCA had 19,766 financial promotions withdrawn or amended last year, almost double the year before, and the instinct that follows a number like that is usually caution.
InvestEngine and Yonder both went the other way, and they’ve ended up on a shortlist beside firms many times their size. We’d rather point at that than at anything we could write about ourselves.”
Both shortlistings sit in in-house campaign categories rather than agency ones, so the work is being judged as marketing rather than as technology. For a company of Adclear’s age, being read as a peer of the other firms in those categories carries more weight than any claim it could make for itself.
The Financial Promoter Awards treat marketing in financial services as a discipline with its own craft and its own commercial consequences, which is rarer than it should be in a sector that often files marketing under support. This year’s shortlist makes that case on its own.
The credit for both campaigns belongs to the teams at InvestEngine and Yonder, who chose the ambitious version and carried the risk of it. Adclear’s contribution was to make sure the compliance step was never the reason to scale it back.
