Schroders may have begun as a partnership between a founder and his elder brother, but it has expanded into an asset management titan. While it is still majority family-owned, the firm now lists on the London Stock Exchange and spans 38 locations around the world, blending heritage with international reach.
Expanding on such a global scale presents a unique set of challenges. Growth must be carefully balanced with authenticity: how can a company extend its reach into new markets and business lines while staying true to the values that have defined it for centuries?
For a brand such as Schroders with a legacy stretching back over 220 years, the stakes are even higher, and, in an era defined by rapid technological change and digital innovation, staying on the same course is no longer optional. Instead, it is essential to remain relevant and at the forefront.
As such, brands like Schroders must strike the balance between modernisation and tradition.
Beth Saint, global head of marketing and communications at Schroders, has embraced this challenge. In role since 2019 and overseeing significant transformation – including a new ex-co – Saint has demonstrated that it is possible to evolve boldly while remaining true to values that trace back to 1804 and that starts with marketing with purpose.
Bridging global and local
In businesses that span many continents, marketing teams face the delicate task of balancing global brand consistency with local relevance. The challenge is to speak with one voice but also finding the common threads that can resonate across different regions and allowing for local adaptation.
For Saint, the key to managing hubs across Schroders’ global markets is to create the core proposition once and then adapt it as needed, rather than recreating campaigns multiple times. This approach keeps messaging consistent while ensuring it remains meaningful and relevant in each market.
To achieve this, Saint emphasises the need to identify the common threads across the various client segments being targeted.
“If you’re looking at the pension segment, you can find commonalities. If you’re looking at the wealth segment, and inside wealth at the independent IFA and registered advisor market in the US, or the financial bank market in APAC, you can find commonalities,” she says.
The trick is to distinguish which parts are universal and which are shaped by local nuance, often around regulatory context, she says. By separating the two, it is easier to maintain relevance without duplicating marketing efforts, while also identifying the areas that require targeted communication to ensure impact – effectively addressing both challenges.
“If you’re selling to pension funds, 75% might be the same of the proposition and 25% will be very specific to a regulatory, tax and preferences context of that client base,” she notes.
Beyond helping maintain relevance without overloading marketing, Saint notes that this approach significantly boosts efficiency. She explains that by segmenting the client base, developing a single core proposition for each segment, and then allocating resources to address the roughly 25% that requires local nuance, teams can work far more efficiently than relying solely on a global footprint and recreating 100% of the proposition in every country.
Innovating without losing trust
Building on the approach of maintaining a single, relevant proposition across regions, Saint sees Generative AI (GenAI) as a powerful tool as it enables teams to deliver personalised experiences at scale with efficiency.
“In the past, you would rely a lot more heavily on people to do that [personalisation at scale]. You would think about how to organise teams to do that faster. But GenAI is truly a game changer,” she says.
While some companies may shy away from embracing new technologies, Saint notes that Schroders has long fostered a culture of embracing innovation early.
The key to doing that effectively is to understand whether these new technologies will genuinely transform the business landscape or if they are simply passing trends, according to Saint.
Once that understanding is in place, the next challenge is execution, she notes. The focus shouldn’t be on following fads, but on identifying which aspects of these new technologies can genuinely transform how marketers work in their day-to-day roles.
Saint acknowledges that many companies are exploring or already using tools like GenAI to boost productivity and free up employees to focus on higher-value tasks. But she stresses that this is just the starting point. Beyond efficiency, GenAI can help create client propositions that are distinctive, uncover white-space opportunities and accelerate time to market.
This speed to market is particularly crucial in today’s fast-moving investment and economic environment, where global developments can affect the value of investments daily – or even hourly – potentially altering the outcome of an entire portfolio, she adds.
Against this backdrop, marketers can no longer afford to take 12 weeks to deliver a campaign as the message may already be outdated by then, she says.
Saint adds that timely campaign delivery is also crucial because, in financial services and investment management, trust is a cornerstone of the brand and how it positions itself.
While she acknowledges that trust is built gradually over decades – meaning a 12-week campaign might not seem long – delays can result in missing trust-building opportunities to highlight the relevance of a fund or service amid changing market conditions.
“The White House could make decisions overnight, so you need flexibility of a team that can act with that agility and bring things to market in a much tighter time frame,” she says. “Then you need to have a team that sees the big picture and looks at how to build the brand over the next three years.”
She emphasises the need to balance speed to market, so campaigns remain relevant, with a longer-term, two- to three-year perspective to ensure alignment with the brand. She adds that AI can help achieve this, enabling campaigns to respond quickly to global developments while allowing the team to assess how each initiative fits into the brand’s evolution over time.
All these decisions, Saint adds, must be guided by the goal of maintaining trust. She highlights the importance of trust in investment management because managers like Schroders are entrusted with clients’ money – a resource that represents more than just numbers. It is a means for customers to live the lives they aspire to.
“It goes beyond a transaction in a current account or daily ins and outs, it’s the savings that people made and the things that they have forgone in their life so that they can plan for a longer or bigger or different future,” she says.
When customers entrust their savings to an investment company, whether for a pension or long-term returns, they want reassurance that their money has been carefully managed and has grown over time, she adds. Achieving that requires a deep level of trust, she says.
A legacy of confidence
Trust is vital for a company like Schroders, with its 220-year history, because its longevity and heritage rest entirely on the confidence of its customers, Saint says.
“Trust is something that you spend centuries building,” she says. “There are some relationships that are 50/60 years old. People have come back 20 years or 40 years on and said, ‘Are you still taking care of my family’s money or my business money?’”
With long-standing trust in the brand comes heightened responsibility. Saint says she must ensure Schroders remains relevant and resonant in an industry undergoing a complete transformation to show clients they can rely on it to deliver on its promises.
At the same time, it must also keep pace with changes in the global financial infrastructure, because companies will only continue to exist if they adapt alongside it, she notes.
“The only reason you stay somewhere for over 220 years is that you change,” she says. “Over that time, you don’t even have the same set of leaders, but you must have an agility and an adaptability that you will yourself to change.”
New lines, same trust
Maintaining trust and relevance isn’t only necessary when entering new markets and adapting to technologies. It’s equally important when developing and expanding the business’s offerings.
Saint acknowledges the challenge of expanding the Schroders brand beyond its well-known investment capabilities into a broader wealth, solutions and private markets business, while ensuring the brand can stretch to encompass all these additional offerings.
“That’s complex work, especially when you’re working with a big investment business that has lots of different capabilities,” she says, “How do you unify them under a set of attributes in the master brand?”
As a result, significant groundwork is needed upfront to identify where a truly distinctive proposition lies, she explains.
“We do a lot of work before we set off on these things to really understand where there is space that’s unoccupied, so we can position our brand there and ensure it resonates,” she says.
And throughout the process, Saint adds she will always anchor on the master brand. She considers what customers already associate with Schroders and how any brand extension should reflect that.
For example, the decision to expand Schroders’ sustainability capabilities was very deliberate. The brand worked within both the new and master brand to define what these investment capabilities meant for the firm, including participating in a major industry brand index to monitor and measure the brand’s attributes.
“Through our sustainability campaigning, we saw a real shift in how people perceived one of the fundamental aspects of the brand, helping us understand the impact of our campaigns,” she says.
Another method to ensure that the brand customers know, recognise and trust carries through brand extensions is to engage the organisation in its development, Saint adds.
When employees show up as humans within the campaign, they can stand alongside marketers and embody the attributes the campaign seeks to convey, according to Saint.
“You need to take the organisation because when building brands, it’s not just about what you say about yourself, it’s how every single part of the organisation shows up behind that idea,” she says.
This approach of integrating marketing with other teams is deeply embedded in Schroders’ operations, she notes.
“Increasingly, it’s a conversation that is had around the boardroom table. How are we understanding the impact of certain choices on our reputation? How are we building our brand to ensure that there’s more authenticity for the product that we bring to the market?” she says.
Saint adds that integration across business disciplines is particularly important in marketing and communications – an insight she has gained through her experience in both fields.
Drawing on her background in PR and communications, she recalls that early in her career, these functions sat alongside marketing – not entirely isolated, but with only a broad awareness of each other’s work. However, Schroders recognised the value of bringing these functions together much more closely at an early stage, she says.
She explains that the benefit lies in combining the marketer’s expertise in data, platforms, budgets and targeting with PR’s strength in shaping message and narrative.
“The combination of those two things creates a very powerful engine,” she says. “It’s about what marketing tells the world, how that’s then reflected back to you, which forms your reputation, and how you manage that using both PR and communications.”
Evolving with purpose
Saint says she is committed to further developing her approach of involving the organisation in marketing and branding decisions, building on what she already does today.
She notes that this collaborative approach will also support the adoption of GenAI. For the technology to be used successfully, it must become second nature in creating propositions. This goal that can only be achieved by fostering a culture that fully embraces new technologies.
While Schroders currently has individual users of AI, her ambition is to explore systematic, organisation-wide use of language models that extends beyond marketing alone.
“What about the individuals in financial organisations, like an investment director, that create content outside of marketing? How would we leverage the models that we use in marketing and apply it in a broader and more systematic manner?” she asks.
Fostering wider adoption of AI across the organisation will be easier with younger cohorts, who are typically digitally and AI-native, she believes, which is one reason why she aims to further develop Schroders’ graduate, apprenticeship, and trainee programmes. She thinks it will ensure the company stays in step with digital advances by harnessing these younger generations’ natural ability to leverage new technologies.
“As a marketing leader, how do you harness and capture that native energy?” she says. “Then, how do you shift processes so that those cohorts can actually bring innovation into the marketing function?”
She emphasises that employees not yet knowing the industry shouldn’t be a barrier as they can learn from their teams and gain experience over time. Rather than focusing on what they lack, she urges organisations to recognise what sets them apart. Often, this is a deep understanding of consumer patterns, habits and behaviour in the digital era.
This approach allows a company to combine the experience of long-standing employees, who understand client types, the industry and its segments, with fresh perspectives on today’s customers and how digital innovations and AI can be applied. This creates a “really powerful combination,” she says.
By embracing new technologies and actively exploring how they can be applied, Saint is helping Schroders keep pace with the digital world. By measuring the success of these initiatives, she continues to pursue these approaches and encourages even broader adoption across the organisation.
Yet this success isn’t just about adapting to change. It relies on clear understanding of balancing the need to evolve and grow the business with the imperative to stay true to Schroders’ values – which date back to 1804 – and to preserve the long-standing trust of its customers, which remains central to the firm’s identity.
This story appeared in Issue 13 of the Financial Promoter magazine. To be one of the first to read it, subscribe here: Subscribe – Financial Promoter