FinanceWriter

Case studies of your customers’ or clients’ experience not only helps marketing to new clients; existing clients see the follow-up and feedback they can give as good customer service

FinanceWriter received a commissioned from a major global bank to interview some of their trade finance clients. We were asked to write up the clients’ experience of the bank’s services in the form of case studies that the bank planned to use in their marketing.

The bank had requested their clients put forward someone to speak to FinanceWriter and we conducted interviews with clients around the world who had used a range of the bank’s services.

Case content

The case studies covered a wide assortment of sectors, countries and trade finance services. Besides asking interviewees about the quality of the service, FinanceWriter looked at ways the bank’s sector knowledge, technology and the alignment of the bank’s technology with the clients’ systems contributed to the transactions.

The examples in the case studies built an overall picture of what facilities the bank offered in sometimes, highly-specialised services; how processes worked and how the bank integrated with the clients’ systems and requirements.

Feedback on feedback

This blog does not name the bank so it is quite fair to report that its clients were overwhelmingly satisfied with the services offered by the bank in foreign exchange, trade finance, insurance, export credit guarantees and other services mitigating risk and expediting funding for trade deals.

The standard of their service as reported by their clients didn’t altogether surprise the bank – they wouldn’t have embarked on the project without being confident of a positive response from clients.

However, the bank were surprised by the unsolicited comments from their clients during the case study interviews, about how much they appreciated being asked to offer their views through the case studies.

Feedback takes time and effort. That is why many firms rely on an emailed form asking customers for a review of the service the company has received.

The problem is that such feedback usually comes from the self-selecting few who can be bothered to reply or those who have a beef about the service they didn’t get.

Looking at case studies based on interviews in a different way, in the way the bank did, they could be said to have paid for themselves in the positive reaction clients’ gave simply about being asked to contribute.

Through the case studies the bank was able to connect with and engage with those in the front line, those interacting with banks staff and systems; those with first hand experience of the service and the potential pitfalls.

British politicians are having a spot of bother at the moment because Remain’s messaging received an unforeseen, response.

Regardless of the side you backed, a legacy of the UK referendum on whether to stay in the EU represents a stark failure by the Remain camp to convey a clear, consistent and convincing message.

Messaging is intended to stimulate feedback: in financial writing and copywriting the right messaging should result in sales, enhanced reputation by inspiring, persuading and motivating your chosen audience.

The expected response to companies annual reports, marketing material, websites or the speeches delivered by its executives can be carefully planned and anticipated.

The words, the structure, the tone of voice are all engineered to elicit the desired response: to buttress existing support and to win over those with doubts.

The Remain camp seem to have achieved the opposite.

The massage is the message

As an exercise in communications the Brexiteers messaging was unambiguous. The reaction they received from their targeted section of the electorate is exactly as they would have hoped for, planned and expected. It was unequivocal.

While the Brexit messaging could be described as visceral, it could be argued that the Remain message was cerebral: they rolled up with the big guns of the Bank of England, the IMF, the IFS, OECD and all the Uncle Tom Cobleys who put the case for banks, fund managers and corporations who considered “Brexit” a threat to the British economy.

The question posed in the referendum was, “Do you want Britain to leave the European Union”? The question was binary. But the reaction from the electorate (outside London, Scotland and Northern Ireland) was less a rejection of the EU represented by Brussels, and more a challenge to the politics of Westminster and its "let's-pretend-they-are-not-there" attitude to those who live beyond the "M25 Island.

Wallets not Wall Street

Adopting Bill Clinton's apparently sure-fire, presidential election pitch that, “It’s the economy stupid”, the Remain camp message not only failed to ignite passion, they blundered entirely down the wrong street.

Bill Clinton was not talking about Wall Street’s economy, but the Main Street’s economy. Stupid!

Brexiteers achieved nothing less than precision in targeting their messaging to the intimate, personal concerns of voters. Instead of targeting the grassroots, Remain kicked (controversial) issues, about which the electorate felt passionate, into the long grass.

Spin unspun

When banks, asset managers and corporations have bad news or have to address difficult issues there may be a desire to spin their way out of it, confront it or simply ignore the issue in the hope that it goes away. In corporate communications choosing to do nothing is also a decision.

They can choose to differentiate messages, segment audience or address varied messages through different channels. But whatever the communications strategy even the most sophisticated and well-funded messaging can fall far short when the response to feedback fails, action on interaction falters and the full spectrum of reactions is not properly anticipated.

Despite their growing volume of words, banks’ annual reports remain “ ...communication among the financial elite in the language of the financial elite”

Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist of the Bank of England, argues that “indigestible and unfathomable” communications are perpetuating a “Great Divide” between the perceptions of producers and consumers of financial services”.

Mr. Haldane made newspaper headlines when, in the same speech, he said that, while he considered himself reasonably financially literate, he could not make the remotest sense of pensions and that financial advisers didn’t have a clue either!

It made good media copy but, regrettably the main thrust of his speech about public trust in bankers is reflected by the low esteem bankers, and others in the financial services sector, are held by the general public. The consequence, of course, is an unwillingness of investors to break their unshakeable confidence in property and allocate their assets across a portfolio of investments that includes the wide range of pensions, funds, bonds and equities available to them in order to reduce their risk.

Financial sector fissure

Mr. Haldane concludes that the inaccessibility of communications and annual reports produced by banks, and indeed his own central bank, has helped create the “Great Divide”; a fissure of trust between financial insiders and outsiders the healing of which is retarding the financial sector’s progress in regaining its social license with the public.

Haldane accepts that the reason so many members of the public find finance difficult is - because it is
difficult! Although he also suggests that it is sometimes made deliberately so, it is more likely banks neglect of financial writing, that undermines its accessibility and impact. He concludes, “Words matter”.

His evidence that banks’ annual reports are unlikely to be accessible to the vast majority of the general public is the more compelling for being objective. He subjected his own speeches, Bank of England communications and banks’ annual reports to tests based on the work of Claude Shannon, the author of A Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Financial elitism

The tests concluded that banks’ annual reports ranked high on the scale of linguistic complexity, well above the language of broadsheet newspapers that he implies is a reasonable level of accessibility.

This led to Mr. Haldane’s conclusion that bank annual reports are, “...communication among the financial elite in the language of the financial elite”. And a chest-beating mea culpa that, “…the vast majority of the Bank’s (Bank of England’s) publications may be inaccessible to the vast majority of the general public”.

But Mr. Haldane does not believe that resolving linguistic issues through the careful drafting of financial documents is the end in itself. He goes further: he maintains that accessibility of language leads to the renewal of trust with those who financial institutions serve. And thus, by building this elusive, “social capital” (“brick by brick, bank by bank, policy by policy, word by word“) banks can narrow and eventually closing the “Great Divide”.

Banks, financial institutions and corporations devote huge resources to building their brand; making it accessible, appealing, ensuring it conveys trust and supports their reputations. Yet, their verbal branding, the words and the system of language behind the brand are frequently neglected.

For a lot of people a brand is a logo, which of course it isn’t. Words are the components. The writing, language, tone of voice that sustains a brand are the tools. The way they are used is the brand strategy that can mean the difference between mere brand recognition and a brand being embraced by the public.

Past news from “The "Dark Continent” has indeed been dark: dominated by war, famine and pestilence. But now Africa has become a source of good news

Democracy has been taking root Africa's politically arid soil, economic growth has been blossoming and some of its inhabitants have been reaping a harvest of better incomes and business profits.

That is not to dismiss the problems of severe drought and ungovernable places like Somalia and Libya, but the continent as a whole has seen a respectable annual growth of 5.5% in recent years.

Much of Africa’s growth has piggybacked on the global commodity "supercycle" which, sadly, now looks well and truly spent. But for Africa that is a temporary set back: developments like Guinea's massive iron ore reserves, Mozambican coal mining potential and plans to exploit oil discoveries in Tanzania have all fuelled recent growth. But with about 30% of the world’s total mineral reserves and even a higher share of deposits of diamonds, vanadium, manganese, platinum, cobalt and gold Africa will still benefit from what lies beneath – in the long term.

Tigers versus lions

Africa needs more than one string to its bow and a former deputy governor of the Nigerian central bank recently said it is time for Africa to "industrialise" to balance the primary sector. It is unquestionable that the roar of the African industrial lion has been muted next to the tigers of Asia; nowhere in Africa can compare the technological take off in South Korea, with China setting in train an exporting behemoth and Bangladesh going literally from rags to riches by sewing its way to prosperity.

But Africa has been there before: in the 1980s and 1990s the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) promoted its "Industrial Decade of Africa" to little avail. Today Africa represents a mere 1% of global industrial output. Africa has undoubted industrial potential, not least in the beneficiation of the raw materials that are currently exported without any value added.

Africa's inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), are not directed to manufacturing. The 2015 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Development Report shows only 21% of inflows were into the manufacturing - ten per cent less than the primary sector.

Always something new out of Africa

But the overriding trend in foreign investment in Africa in the services sector at 48% of the total. And, notwithstanding Barclays decision to withdraw from Africa, it was the financial services sector that attracted a lion’s share of FDI.

Much of the investment in financial services was in Morocco and South Africa, investments by the likes of BNP Paribas, AIG, Boston Consulting Group and China’s largest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China herald the groundwork for the delivery of financial services, not only in those countries, but spreading out to their regions and the continent.

Anyone who remembers the trickle of banks, investment managers and professional services firms into Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall may see the beginnings of a trend.

The fact that foreign investment in infrastructure including transport, storage and telecommunications is second to investment in financial services could be suggesting the makings of an African economic renaissance.

“Please hold, your business is important to us. You will be put through to the first available agent”

Anyone in the United Kingdom familiar with that heart-sinking message from the customer service department of their energy, mobile phone or bank will perceive there is a service deficit in the country.

But Britain has a thriving services sector and one that helps to redress the international trade balance of a country where it is too expensive to make things; as the possible demise of its steel industry testifies.

Patience-testing experience dealing with customer services maybe the front line of the services sector in the UK. But its hinterland of banking, financial services, legal services, professional services and a wide range of other “invisibles” constituting the services sector, is both vast and valuable.

Warning minefield!

As the heat in the debate on whether the UK should remain part of the European Union increases in the run up to the referendum on 23^rd June it is a risk to nail ones blue and yellow or red, white and blue colours to the mast!

But perhaps raising as a question, an issue that has not been sufficiently debated, may provide some protection in the minefield.

Brexiteers argue that the EU needs the UK more than the other way around on trade. The Bremainers counter with by pointing to the 500 million-person market for goods.

Single minded

By focussing on the “trade gap” both camps are ignoring services and the potential for the growth in trade in services, in particular, the level of productivity that would be multiplied by increased cross border transactions in the services sector.

A single market in products has been largely achieved – a widget made in Greece can be sold without tariffs or taxes in any member state. However, liberalisation of services is still described to be, “a work in progress”.

“Services make up 70% of Europe’s economies and generate over 90% of new jobs, but account for only 20% of intra-EU trade”, says a UK government report. It concludes, “Where the single market is most obviously failing to fulfil its purpose is in services”.

Britain, with 78% of GDP derives from the sector has a comparative advantage in services, the benefits of which would be multiplied as barriers to cross border services activity fell. India and China’s services sectors are, respectively, 48% and 52% of their GDP. Doubtless there is huge potential, but with the single market of the EU having been tardy in developing cross-border trade in services, it seems unlikely the market for cross border services in emerging markets will open up any time soon.

Invisible barriers

A manufactured Greek widget has currency throughout the EU because it meets EU and industrial standards and to that extent is commoditised.

FinanceWriter’s Continental European clients are international banks, fund managers and corporations whose medium of communication in a globalised market is English.

FinanceWriter is fortunate that our clients require annual reports, marketing materials, websites, thought leadership papers or speeches for their senior executives written in English.

Our knowledge and experience in international financial markets and the language in which we work are global currencies that facilitate the export of our services.

Indeed it is to our benefit that the currency of language creates a barrier to those writing about financial services domestically in the countries these firms are based.

Ironically it is language and the domestic nature of most other services that have so far restricted the development of cross border trade in services in the EU. But Britain would be unable to profit if it excluded itself from participation in the break down the barriers.

Choices based on brand recognition are no less worthy than endless “evidence-based” decision-making

To some, being asked whether a proposal is "evidence based" is the sound of middle managers covering themselves against being out on a limb if the idea goes pear-shaped.

To others - usually the originators of an idea - it is the sound of middle managers crushing entrepreneurialism, rejecting innovation or spurning initiative. Or are managers are simply being blind to the overwhelming favourable odds generated by the "gut feel" that is, of course, the abdominal calibration of success granted only to geniuses!

Spurious evidence

Accumulation of evidence is said to reduce the risk of failure. However, some "evidence" assembled to prove the case for projects has become debased or spurious. Some project managers are required to provide evidence just for the sake of providing evidence or so a decision can be deferred.

Firms pay considerable sums to recruitment agencies to find a suitably qualified applicants for a job; the firm itself does due diligence and has the recruit on probation. Why, when all this risk reduction process has been undertaken to ensure the applicant is a good fit, do managers require "evidence" prior to a decision - particularly on a subject on which the recruit is an expert and about which the manager probably knows, little or nothing?

Seeking failure

A client of FinanceWriter, whose wealth is publicly estimated in nine figures, actively participates in risk assessment on projects on which we work. He attends new project meetings demanding to know, "Why have there not been more failures"?

He wants "more failures"? "Yes", he says, "if some projects don't fail, you aren't running the risk of successful projects"!

He trusts the people he has chosen to take decisions – even if those choices turn out to be wrong.

Evidence or Trust?

Is evidence the same as trust? When conclusive evidence is delivered we trust it in its context. But trust is ongoing, it is rolling belief in evidence that that encapsulated in branding.

New clients commissioning financial copywriting for a suite of marketing materials, a new website, thought leadership articles or case study say they choose FinanceWriter because of the “evidence” they find on our website.

Of course, blogs, websites and the artful use of social media can declare “unrivalled quality”, “superior attributes” or “unsurpassed service”. But self-promotion with no reference point is not evidence that can be trusted.

What FinanceWriter clients say is that they rely on the evidence packaged in our brand: the experience, reputation and skills they find in our list of clients, our testimonials and our track record producing thought leadership articles, annual reports, marketing material and website content for some of the world’s leading banks, asset managers, commodities companies and corporations.

The essence of a brand or a person’s personal reputation embraces the body of evidence that equips them to do a job. It allows clients or employers to cut to the chase and commission a project without repeated trials gathering new evidence.

But for a branded firm or a personal reputation that branding is only as good as the last project in which they applied and upheld their brand values.

With the West raising tariffs to stop steel imports from China, do the Chinese have an economic lesson for the West?

When asked what he thought the effect on China of the French Revolution (1789) the Chinese premier Chou en Lai, is said to have replied, "Its too soon to tell". Although there is debate about whether he misunderstood the questioner asking about the French protests in 1968, there can be no doubt that China takes a longer view than countries in the West.

China’s attitude to its currency had American leaders frothing at the mouth calling from it to be allowed to float to a level that reflected the (then) strength of the Chinese economy. The Americans wanted halt the flow of goods from China to Wal-Mart. The Chinese took their time, they allowed the markets for their goods to mature, and even turn, before they started releasing controls on their currency.

The West has been trying to persuade the Chinese to convert their economy from on which has thrived on investment in industry, exports, housing and infrastructure to one based on consumption.

"We are dong it, we are doing it", claimed the Chinese but it is not fast enough for the West. And in this case perhaps not fast enough for the Chinese whose growth in consumption has not surged fast enough to compensate for the fall in other areas of growth.

The West is a dump

The throwing up of protectionist tariffs against Chinese steel imports, as a result of the fatal impact low Chinese steel prices are having to Western steel output capacity and employment, is the latest Western attempt to deal with what is seen as a Chinese threat.

The West say Chinese steel prices constitute "dumping".

According to the US government, "Foreign manufacturers engage in the practice of "dumping" when they export products to the U.S. at prices below the established domestic market price or when they ship excessive quantities of products that cannot be explained by normal market competition."

But what is "normal market competition"?

Quarterly yearnings

Western corporations report quarterly. They are accountable to their shareholders. They are (mostly) not dependent on governments but have to rely on the banking system for credit. They amortise capital over fixed periods. The West says these are the rules of the market and everyone should adhere to them. They are the rules that make capitalism successful.

The Chinese with state funding, no shareholders and guaranteed employment, don’t choose to embrace fixed costs over a relatively short period. Any if anyone says it is not a successful system the Chinese can point to their growth rates having substantially outstripped those of Western countries for years.

The Chinese could claim their longer-term out look is simply the sort of disruptive strategies for which Western companies like Uber are feted - as Chou en-Lai would say, only time will tell.

Should the possible consequences of financial market risks be weighed individually, strategically or collectively?

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is usually so level headed that its analysis borders on boring. But it finds the protectionist and militaristic tendencies of US Republican Party front-runner Donald Trump scary.

Regardless of your US presidential preferences, Trump can never be described as “boring”: one newspaper headlining the EIU’s results said, “A Donald Trump presidency could be as damaging to the global economy as jihadi terrorism...”

Despite the EIU’s presentation of the risks as discrete we are drawn, or perhaps have a responsibility, to assess the eventuality of one risk coming to pass and its impact on the other risks posed or to estimate the strategic threats of each risk in relation to others.

Contingent Risks

Some risks are contingent: if one occurs, there is a risk or an additional risk that another will follow. Does that compound the original risk or make the second risk, in effect, part of the first?

Some risks are strategic: there is not “cause and effect” but one risk coming to fruition may create risks, or indeed opportunities, in the revised scenario.

The EIU’s number one risk is China’s possible hard landing. In that event, the EIU’s number ten risk, a collapse in the oil sector prompting a future oil price shock, would loom large.

Oil and other commodities have fed China’s boom, the tapering of which has already seen deferral of major infrastructure investments in the oil sector. Tapering has also exposed extreme vulnerability among iron ore, copper and coal majors weighing heavily on stock market indices. The crystallisation of one risk, it seems could, create the conditions for the second.

Hubble, bubble, oil and rouble

What if we stir into this pot of gloom-mongering the perfect storms of one, or more, apparently unrelated risks, colliding in the same time scale? In unrelated events, in June British voters could steer the country out of the European Union. In 8 November US voters could elect Donald Trump.

A possibly resentful EU could stall a revised trade pact with the UK and the rest of the world may be less receptive to Britain’s new trade overtures than Brexiters supposed. A Trump presidency already promises protectionism. Could we anticipate trade barriers being erected world wide faster than Mr. Trump’s wall to halt the flow of Mexican immigrants? Or could Mr Trump’s supposed militarism colliding with Russia’s foreign adventures provoking a new “cold war” (EIU risk 2), trade sanctions or worse?

Runes ruined

In banking, asset management and corporate boardrooms, equity prices and bond yields are scoured, like the runes, to foretell the future direction of markets overshadowed by such risks as the EIU articulates.

Value at risk is calculated, hedging and derivatives strategies divined and papers written anticipating potential outcomes. But how realistic is it to calculate and put a price on the eventuality of a series of sequential, strategic, multiple or collective risks?

The EIU has spelled out individual risks, but not the knock-on effects of one risk coming to fruition triggering one or more of the others in the list.

Perhaps, in the current, volatile economic and political environment, the most important hazard markets face is being frozen in the headlights of the oncoming pantechnicon of risks.

“Restructuring of the Global Economy”, the title of a conference being held in Oxford later this year is ambiguous: it isn’t clear whether it will record current trends of ongoing global economic restructuring or advocate solutions to problems that require the world economy to be restructured.

The desired focus of papers being called for by the Academy of Business & Retail Management (ABMR) can be assumed to be on business and retail themes or solutions: issues of management, logistics, supply lines, online shopping etc. rather than the financial backdrop that might be said to create the environment in which business and retail prosper or not.

But is improving supply side structure is enough to resolve current business and retail problems? Or are the underlying monetary, financial, economic and perhaps most pertinently, demand dynamics, as, or more influential in determining where the global economy goes from here?

Primark shopping

Massive leveraged investment preceded the 2007 financial crisis. Borrowing to invest fed on itself by disproportionately inflating asset prices thus encouraging a circle of credit expansion and investment. And central bankers and politicians said it was good as businesses and retailers appeared to flourish in the supposed “wealth effect” generated in that synthetic atmosphere.

But the built and half-built houses and blocks of flats from China to Spain to Ireland to Florida lying empty; piles of unsold $2 pair of denim jeans and the rise of Primark shopping testify to overcapacity. The supply of production capacity was massively expanded by credit extended on the assumption that the demand for goods was insatiable and the means to pay for the goods fathomless.

Choking production

The current downturn, described by some as secular stagnation, will prevail until that overproduction is choked off. Collapsing demand and tumbling commodity prices are a barometer for future industrial demand. Secular stagnation seems likely to be followed by a period of secular contraction or secular destruction.

Fiscal and monetary policies adopted in response to the financial crisis have, so far, failed to rebalance leverage, despite the increased capital requirements imposed on banks. The consequence has been a continued surfeit of capital. The constraints on its deployment have resulted in the boosting of asset prices and a boom in emerging market borrowing.

The absence of a sea change in retail or innovation on the scale of the computer or the internet seems unlikely to revive business and retail. The promise of “helicopter money” dropped by central banks seems to be more likely to exacerbate the problems than resolve them.

While historical parallels are dangerous we did see an extraordinary period of innovation with the development of such things as the car and the spread of electricity and things that ran on electricity in the 1920s. That wave of innovation might be said to have “run out of steam” by 1929when mass unemployment bore testimony to overproduction.

Calling for papers on the restructuring of the global economy is admirable as there is currently a great shortage of ideas of how to resolve global economic problems. However ambitious, the conference must be wished success in determining how the current momentum can avoid policy pitfalls that plagued the past.

Delivering a precious project doesn’t necessarily mean having everyone you need on the payroll as British television viewers have learned in the drama series, "Call The Midwife”!

Babies are pretty predictable: they take exactly nine months to be born so, other than light-touch monitoring during a pregnancy, a midwife's work concentrates on the few hours before the new arrival shows up.

Midwifery demonstrates it’s not necessary to have specialists in-house for irregular or one-off events whether they occur at predictable - or even unpredictable - intervals.

Midwifery also shows that, while in the past and still, in some emerging economies, women don't have assistance in childbirth - outcomes are better when supported by a professional.

Rapidly changing backdrops

The TV series has followed a team of midwives in a London community from the end of World War II to the 1960s against the backdrop of the rapid change, growing economic prosperity, medical and technological innovation.

Because they were engaged, on a daily basis, monitoring and delivering babies, the midwives were continually kept abreast of the latest procedures, risk management and best practice so could "hit the ground running" and cope with all eventualities.

But it simply wouldn’t be practical to employ your own midwife full-time. Similarly, firms don't always employ an in-house lawyer, accountant or marketing manager. Instead they commission specialists on an ad hoc basis to draw up a business plan, draft a contact or launch a marketing campaign.

A more current “rapidly changing backdrop” is that, by 2020, 40% of American workers will be independent contractors. Responding to this trend one of the “big four” accountancy firms, PwC is embracing independent professionals. It has launched what it calls “Talent Exchange”, an online platform connecting freelance contractors with PwC teams.

To market to market jiggety-gig

FinanceWriter applauds PwC’s foresight in embracing the “gig” economy of freelancers, independent professionals and contractors. For FinanceWriter the “gig” economy means when financial institutions, corporate communications or marketing departments need financial writing they come to FinanceWriter - not a recruitment agency. They know they don’t need an employee year in and year out for a three-day, three-week or three-month project whether it’s their annual report, a new web site, speech, blog, thought leadership article or new marketing material. Firms are learning the major advantages of the gig economy: commissioning an external specialist like FinanceWriter gives flexibility and saves overheads.

As external financial writing specialists we bring fresh ideas, new input and a fund of varied experience that can improve the clarity and effectiveness of firms’ published output.

Like midwives we "hit the ground running", quickly assimilating and executing the brief so as to limit the intrusion into your management time. Our job is to apply the consistency of your verbal branding to inputs, such as interviews or drafts, which may come from a variety of disparate sources with widely differing style, language and tone of voice.

You can see on this website the major international investment and private banking, asset managers, stockbrokers, insurance and commodity corporations, professional services firms and rating agencies that see FinanceWriter as a trusted third party, supervising the birth of their precious new projects!