JP Morgan Chase is one of a handful of truly global players in financial services. With $3.9 trn in assets, the business is one of the largest banks in the world, and the biggest in the US.
For its marketing teams, this presents an enormous challenge and opportunity. While financial marketers working elsewhere might generate commercial interest, reinforce brand familiarity or work to engender trust,
the ask for this Wall Street titan is simply bigger.
The bank’s history can be traced back to 1799 when an early iteration of Chase Manhattan was founded.
As a result, its marketing operations are designed to reinforce a position as an industry leader that leads on innovation and supports clients in an empathetic and responsible manner.
Within this sprawling organisation, there are multiple lines of business including Asset & Wealth Management, Consumer & Community Banking and Commercial & Investment Banking. The bank’s payments business – which sits in the latter group – is a goliath in its own right, processing more than $10 trn in payments daily, in more than 170 countries.
Strategic responsibility for driving growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) sits with Ruya Niazi in her capacity as head of payments marketing, EMEA.
Niazi has worked in the payments business for the past two years, having previously worked as head of acquisition marketing for the group’s private bank, and as global business manager to the chief marketing officer (CMO) of JP Morgan Asset & Wealth Management prior to that.
Reporting to Katherine Fergusion, MD and head of product and regional marketing for payments, she has responsibility for a cross-functional team of marketers who are led by the organisation’s business objectives when devising the region’s marketing plans. Her primary objective is to drive growth in the EMEA region. Her
boss’s boss is Dustin Sedgwick, the CMO responsible for global payments.
Under Niazi’s leadership, the regional marketing team work with the functional teams of the business and brand functions such as the integrated media, business intelligence and analytics teams.
“In our 2025 planning, we are aiming for campaigns that will have a multi-year maturity. As new products and solutions come to fruition, we can add those in,” she explains. “Our business objectives are driven by client demand and the changing dynamics we see in technology, fintech innovation and the evolving regulatory landscape.”
Broad appreciation
Niazi has already clocked up more than nine years with the bank and has come to appreciate the need to deeply understand the segmented landscape of the organisation’s many customer bases. “In the EMEA region, we operate differently to the US market”, she explains. “We are not one country, speaking one language.”
For Niazi, the key to success lies in appreciating the distinct characteristics of her territory. Unlike the US, EMEA is not a monolithic market but a mosaic of countries and regulations. This diversity adds complexity, she says.
However, she is blessed with broad experience across financial services, which makes this work all the easier.
Prior to joining JP Morgan in 2015, Niazi worked for the then branded Aberdeen Asset Management, which has since morphed into the Abrdn brand. Her early career posts were at personal finance business Interactive Investor, where she worked as a reporter.
“Having had the opportunity in my career to transition from the buyside business over to payments has enabled
me to see the interconnectedness of the financial system,” she says. “It has opened my perspective to the impact we make to everyone in the world in many different ways, and critically, how dynamic the payments
business is.”
Niazi’s passion for storytelling can be traced back to an early age. Her godmother owns a London theatre school that she has been a member of since she was three years old. Originally, her career plan was not to go into banking but to attend the world renowned London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
Her creativity, too, runs in the family with her mother having worked in fashion and having grown up in a household where music and theatre was a big part of daily life. “All of us in marketing like to tell a story, that’s what we are good at! I have a passion for theatre, ballet and dramatic arts and I believe these interests support what I do in the business,” she says.
“Everyone has a skill they can bring in a company the size of JP Morgan. Some people are great at doing numbers while others can present and tell great stories with executive presence. When we come together, we can help each other grow. If you can read a room, or improvise, that’s a powerful discipline.”
Niazi explains that, while she eventually chose to study English at university, she is proud to bring her passion for storytelling to marketing. This isn’t the first time that her vision for what is possible through narrative has improved the profile of a major brand.
During her time at what has since become Abrdn, she urged key stakeholders to bring more of their personalities to client facing media interactions. This led to the installation of a GlobeLynx camera on the main floor of the portfolio managers. It led to dozens of hours of authentic coverage where clients, prospects and partners could hear from subject matter experts, directly, in their home environment.
Niazi’s eye for a good story has served her well, but it’s her broad knowledge of the interconnectivity of financial markets that will surely be critical in the years to come, as all financial businesses navigate a technological revolution, set to affect products, distribution, client needs and the regulatory landscape.
“We are cross-industry in our marketing. On the banking side, we’ve done a lot of work on cross border payments and how these can be done more effectively, aligning with the G20 goals. As the payments landscape evolves, so do the solutions available, meaning we may be able to do more for, and with, our clients.
“Our role in marketing is to position JP Morgan as a thought leader, as the industry expert on both local and global regulations and to ensure our brand values are integrated in all that we do.”
Niazi said JP Morgan says this by listening closely to its clients and prospects and playing an advisory role as well as a being a service provider with a reputation for security and stability.
Client amplification
The division’s marketing strategy is extremely externally focussed. Many of the campaign assets created are centred on clients’ businesses. This affords JP Morgan an opportunity to put its clients’ businesses in the spotlight while also demonstrating the use cases of its products and services.
“We are known for our ability to support clients through periods of volatility and preparing for the unknown. We think deeply about how best to solve pain points for clients so they can be the best institutions that they can be for their clients,” Niazi explains.
While some financial institutions see marketing solely as a proprietary function to support sales (aka attribution-based approaches), JP Morgan’s payments team use their marketing to support their clients in achieving commercial and operational success, too.
“Of course, in marketing there are attribution-acquisition models, but our clients see the value in having channels and partnerships that facilitate the telling of their stories,” Niazi says. “So much of what you see in marketing is where companies are spending on getting clients through the front door. But, to us, it is important to serve existing clients well, too.”
The dedication that JP Morgan affords to client relationships has previously been highlighted by Financial Promoter. Niazi says that, within payments, this is always the primary focus when structuring outputs.
“Client experience is so important to us. We think about how we can make that consistent and we know that we
need to keep pace with our clients. We spend a lot of time going through data and insights and use that information, directionally.”
The bank is one of many major blue chip brands to recognise the power of quality storytelling and invests substantially in content marketing. Its Payments Unbound initiative is a combination of a digital platform and print magazine that are designed to position JP Morgan as a thought leader in the payments industry.
This high quality, content-focused series of marketing assets offer multiple opportunities to highlight the work
of its subject matter experts, industry technicians, clients and influencers within the business. The quality is exceptional.
“Payments Unbound is a platform for everybody in the payments ecosystem,” says Niazi. “Since [CMO] Dustin Sedgwick has been leading our team, more clients have come forward saying they want to collaborate with us.
We have helped to share their stories. When clients say ‘we saw that story’, it moves the dialogue towards a discussion around the content itself. It’s all about creating talkability and differentiation.”
Niazi talks about the bank’s client relationships with a fondness that is quite unusual in B2B marketers. She
clearly believes in the work that JP Morgan does to support clients through marketing and likens it to any other human relationship.
“If you think of a good relationship, it succeeds when you can have open dialogue and are able to navigate difficult periods together, based on shared visions and ambitions. Bringing across the human side is so important though our marketing.
“Take treasurers for example, they have vendors to pay, insurance payouts to make. Our role, as a payments provider is to make their world less stressful, to give them confidence to know their transactions will succeed, securely, efficiently and with transparency.”
A team effort
With a global business the size of JP Morgan, it’s unsurprising that Niazi’s weekly schedule is punctuated with internal meetings with senior stakeholders across the business. On a weekly basis, the EMEA Payments Management Team – which includes the heads of sales, human resources, countries, sectors, client services, and marketing – meet to discuss initiatives and align priorities. This is a strategic operation that moves at scale. The marketing leadership team meet, separately, on a weekly basis while brand work is also carried out “in region”, particularly in markets where the business is still maturing.
“It’s a constant evolution, here, building relationships, staying abreast of news, digesting client feedback and bouncing ideas around,” Niazi explains. “We must understand each business line and align the marketing priorities accordingly.”
The importance of understanding the “detail” of each business line is something that was reinforced by the late Richard Chambers, the former CMO of Asset & Wealth Management, from whom Niazi learnt a great deal. Working alongside him as his business manager during the Covid outbreak in New York, she recalls it was an incredible learning experience, despite being a challenging global environment at the time.
“Having the opportunity to work with Richard and the operating committee at JP Morgan Asset Management and Wealth Management really changed my perception, and my career,” she says. “We had the operating committee really interested in what marketing was doing and they understood the need to reach our clients directly, to support them and to be calm in what was a very turbulent time.”
During her time alongside Chambers, she said she learnt the power of business intelligence and analytical tools which can support marketing in showing the impact that campaigns and initiatives are having as well as
make the role of advisors more effective.
“It allowed the business to show ROI,” she says. “These tools played a role in supporting the sales team and our advisers to become more efficient and productive in their role and to become the best they could be for their clients.”
But she also learnt the importance of other skills from the late CMO, not least the power of empathy, she says.
“Another thing Richard taught me was the power of empathy; reading the room and the people in your team. Knowing which point you should hit on at that moment, to get your message across, when to drive influence, or when to be the person that offers that bit of guidance.”
In her role these days, she says she “always tries to channel empathy”, especially in moments where meetings have the potential for differences of opinion.
“Empathy is one way to find a positive path forwards. Adding that can go a long way.”