Banking on Information with Jacob Howard Founder of Financial Marketing Insights

In this episode of Banking on Information, Heather Xiao, Founder and CEO of Horizon Zero, discusses the transformative potential of smart data and open banking. She emphasizes the importance of customer-centric frameworks and the need for alignment among stakeholders in the ecosystem. Heather shares insights from her experience working with various sectors, including banking and airlines, and highlights the value her clients gain from her expertise. Looking ahead, she envisions a future where open banking and smart data significantly enhance customer experiences and societal benefits, while acknowledging the challenges that lie ahead in standardization and collaboration.

Keywords

open banking, smart data, data sharing, customer experience, future of finance, technology, innovation, ecosystem, regulatory standards, financial services

Takeaways

• Smart data and open data sharing will transform lives.
  
  
• Frameworks are essential for understanding open data.
  
  
• Alignment among stakeholders is crucial for success.
  
  
• Customer experience should drive product development.
  
  
• Emerging technologies will accelerate open banking evolution.
  
  
• Collaboration across sectors is necessary for innovation.
  
  
• Practical solutions are key to addressing customer needs.
  
  
• The future of finance will be more equitable and efficient.
  
  
• Standardization is vital for the success of smart data.
  
  
• Incremental progress will lead to significant outcomes.
  
  

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Smart Data and Open Banking
02:30 The Role of Frameworks in Open Data Sharing
05:59 Client Success Stories and Value Creation
09:56 Future Vision: Open Banking and Smart Data in 2035

Transcript

Rutger van Faassen (00:01.406)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Banking on Information. Today, my guest is Jacob Howard, who is founder of a Financial Marketing Insights. Welcome to the podcast, Jacob.

Jacob (00:14.616)
Thank you Rutger very happy to be here.

Rutger van Faassen (00:18.333)
Thanks for being here. always start off with this really important question based on the book by Simon Sinek. Start with WHY. Why, Jacob, do you do what you do?

Jacob (00:29.262)
So the why for me really comes down to two different aspects. One is for my family, everything that I do is really centered on my family and looking after my family. And the second one is really about kind of creating supportive communities. So I've got two lovely children, a lovely wife.

grew up in a very happy and supportive family. My family were kind of entrepreneurs and both of my brothers are entrepreneurs. So I finally got the bug, but they really inspire me. And they're the reason that I do what I do. And then on the more professional side, really, I think I've been on a journey now towards kind of building this community, but for financial services marketers with my new business.

But really, I've always been a helpful, friendly guy that's trying to get the best for people.

Rutger van Faassen (01:31.421)
Yeah, So you like to build community both in your personal family space as well as in the industry. I think that is a great driving force to what you do. Now, what is it that you do, Jacob?

Jacob (01:46.073)
So I am the founder of Financial Marketing Insights. So I started the business midway last year after a 20-year career in financial services. So I worked for New York Stock Exchange, Swift, LiquidNet, and then most recently a couple of years at Deutsche Bank, and always in a marketing role, so a number of senior marketing positions.

At the time that I left Deutsche Bank last year, I was thinking what to do next. And I'd been volunteering as the chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing's financial services group. So the Chartered Institute of Marketing, you might know, I mean, it's mainly in the UK, but they are going international. So it's really the body, the chartered body for marketers. And so I had thought to myself as I was working at Swift and Deutsche Bank,

There must be a great community out there for financial services marketers like myself that want to learn and meet and so on. And I couldn't really find it. There was like bits and pieces here and there, but not really particularly for me. It's like on the institutional side. So I've worked for stock exchanges and investment banks and there wasn't really any community around that. So I approached the Chartered Institute of Marketing. They did have a group called the finance group.

But the finance for me is like the accounting team in any company, right? So I immediately suggested they renamed it to Financial Services Group. before you knew it, I was the chair and did a number of things for them because Chartered Institute of Marketing again is about like training marketers really. And for me, was more that I wanted to connect senior level marketers.

Rutger van Faassen (03:13.362)
You're right. You're right.

Jacob (03:34.499)
So I said, alongside my busy, busy job at Deutsche Bank, perhaps I'll do one thing for you well, which I said would be an annual summit for financial marketing leaders. So the first one was at Bloomberg in London in 2019. And apart from the COVID disruption, I've been doing it ever since. So when I left Deutsche Bank last year, I thought maybe there's a business idea there. So I spoke to the Chartered Institute of Marketing. They were very supportive.

I spoke to my other two partners, World Media Group and EI Advisory that does like events, intelligence advisory. And all three partners were backing me to make it my own business. So rather than one event in London a year, it's now going to be international. So the first international one was last month, December, 2024, where I met you in person. And this year we're doing London, New York,

Rutger van Faassen (04:27.494)
Yep. That's right.

Jacob (04:33.834)
Singapore and I've just announced Dubai so yeah it's kind of rocketing fast now.

Rutger van Faassen (04:42.742)
Very exciting. Yeah, that was a great event here in New York. Very, very insightful, great speakers. And yet to your point, right, it's good to bring marketing people together in financial services. So I think I'm very happy to hear that you've taken on that task and are creating that community. Now, when you talk to your customers and attendees to the events, how do they get value out of it? What did they tell you about that when they attended one of your events?

Jacob (05:08.878)
The inspiration for the summit is actually when I was working at Deutsche Bank, one of our key targets was treasurers at multinational corporates, like the group treasurer at huge brands like Spotify and Microsoft and so on. And they were very busy people, but what we put together was a summit for treasurers.

where the group treasurers of all of these amazing companies would come together and network and meet and share ideas and be inspired by people on the stage. And Deutsche Bank was the, we were the ones that came up with the idea, but we had a few partners like The Economist and Eurofinance. And I think what was really good about Eurofinance, Deutsche Bank and The Economist is that they weren't pushy. None of us were pushy about pushing some product.

It was more letting those treasurers have a great time and making it all about what they would really enjoy and get value from. And we got like rave reviews from every summit that we did. And really it's because they were meeting their peers who they never got a chance to meet and sharing best practices. So they were just loving it, absolutely loving it. And so at that time I was doing the CIM role.

Rutger van Faassen (06:17.061)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jacob (06:32.142)
And I thought, well, maybe this will work for financial services marketers. So that was the kind of impetus. But indeed, for my summits, it's invite only, and it's very senior level, but it's free to attend. And then they get to network with people and get inspired and get ideas. So I've just had very, very good reviews from everyone that attends.

Rutger van Faassen (06:42.032)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

Rutger van Faassen (06:55.29)
Yeah, no, I also had a great time at the event, met some really interesting people, some really great conversations. And as simple as that sounds, right, just having great conversations, facilitating that there's a little bit of magic to that. And I think you got it down packed with your events. Now, this is one thing I like to do, which is called the Futures Thinking. So Futures, plural, because we don't know what the future is going to be. Well, we can think about possible futures. So if you think about a possible future 10 years out, so 2035.

What does marketing and financial services possibly look like? Can you paint me a picture of that?

Jacob (07:32.227)
Well, when people start to talk about future thinking, the first thing that pops into my mind is the latest buzzword AI. I mean, everyone says that AI is disrupting everything and indeed it is. It was only this week that the announcement around deep, sorry, it's DeepSeek, I believe, came out and completely disrupted all the stock markets because people didn't believe you could create an incredibly powerful

Rutger van Faassen (07:41.04)
Mmm.

Rutger van Faassen (07:45.168)
Exactly.

Rutger van Faassen (07:52.13)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jacob (08:02.1)
AI tool like that for the amount of money and amount of time that the Chinese did. So I think that's another kind of Sputnik moment of like the industrial revolution kind of leaps forward again. So 10 years from now, you've got to imagine that most things will be automated. So, I mean, again, my children are at school, I wonder how their education will be impacted. I think that the whole careers market, every company will be impacted.

I've been at events and events that I've run where we've said, how many of you are using AI at work? And no one puts their hand up and how many of you are using it at home? And they put their hand up and secretly at work. they're like, because everyone's using it, right? Everyone's using for everything. And, you know, there's adverts now on the TV about Google Gemini, I think, and chatting to your phone, just like it's a human. So.

Rutger van Faassen (08:45.036)
Right, right, right, right, right, yep.

Jacob (08:59.543)
Really, 10 years from now, think I would like to think that the human element is still valued. I think that computers will be able to fake being human quite well quite soon. that human ingenuity, I hope, will only be kind of rocket fueled by all of this technology. That I'll ask, well, even my son.

Rutger van Faassen (09:06.863)
Mm-hmm.

Rutger van Faassen (09:12.579)
Yep. Mm-hmm.

Jacob (09:28.564)
he's only eight now but when he's 18 I'm sure I'll say can you just make me a film about X and he'll just like do it immediately so yeah it'll be crazy how creative we can be

Rutger van Faassen (09:30.744)
Yeah.

Rutger van Faassen (09:36.014)
Right. Yep. Yep.

Rutger van Faassen (09:43.245)
Yeah, yeah. So AI will change a lot in the next 10 years. It's almost hard to imagine how much it's going to change because it's already changing in very short periods of time. Now, if that future that you just sort of that picture that you painted, if you think back to today, what do we need to do today to get ready for that potential future?

Jacob (10:04.216)
Well, you know, I kind of with my chair of CIMFS group hat I can speak for financial services marketers and as my events go global, perhaps I'll continue to kind of hold that role. I think the thing that marketers find in financial services is there's so much compliance and regulation and you you can't easily onboard any vendor if you wanted to, but I would encourage everyone to

wherever you can have a sandbox or a trial environment to try out all of this new technology and all of the edge cases, because everybody else is. On my website, financialmarketinginsights.com, we just posted a kind of a CMO digest of a recent Capgemini report into AI and its uses. And it says, you know, 50 to 60 % of marketing teams are actively using AI. So

It's kind of a warning clacson signing for anyone that thinks they can sit on their hands and it doesn't affect me. I think that, you know, most large banks or large institutions do have huge technology stacks like Salesforce or Adobe or Microsoft. And most of those have got AI built into them already to automate things. But you're right, it's hard to see the future, but it's just going to

improve and evolve very, very rapidly.

Rutger van Faassen (11:34.68)
Yeah, yeah, so really shout out to everyone, of get ready, get in the game, don't sit on the sidelines, right? Get used to it, even to your point, even if it's at home playing around with ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini, but get engaged with it because it's not gonna go away. right? This is the next big thing that is gonna change everything. Now that is a great point, that's a great point. any other thoughts on it?

Jacob (11:54.35)
Good

Jacob (12:03.074)
Well, for my own business, so really, as I've said, the heart of it is these in-person summits. But we have podcasts, webinars, articles. And one of the new things that I've started is kind of like a recruitment matching service. So people are looking for financial marketing roles, and then CMOs have financial marketing roles. And I'm hoping that, you know, with my close-knit community, I can kind of connect the two sides.

because if you're looking for a role on LinkedIn these days, it's like 150 applicants straight away. So I think something about curated introductions or pre-vetting or recommendations, that's certainly an area that I'm quite interested in going forwards. And another area I'm interested in but haven't started that much on is really kind of broadly about financial education.

I mean, there's a lot of good charities and groups out there that are helping people to understand credit cards and mortgages and pensions and so on. But I'm particularly interested in how I can help the next generation to learn about financial services, learn about the companies, the different roles and how they can get through. So that's another kind of element of kind of recruitment, learning and training that I'm kind of starting to think through.

And again, I think that humans in the future won't be doing so much dog work, monkey work, basic work, but you will need to have very clever people to kind of keep up and come up with new ideas that then will be AI powered.

Rutger van Faassen (13:45.239)
Yeah, yeah. No, And what you started with, with your why, community is crucial. right? Creating community, getting people together, especially in this rapidly changing world. That might be a great place to wrap this up. Thank you very much, Jacob, for being on the podcast.

Jacob (13:58.348)
Thank you. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.

Rutger van Faassen (14:01.546)
And until next time, choose to be curious.