Architecting Marketing & Communications Teams for the Future

At Financial Narrative's Spring Forum, Amber Roberts, US CEO of Vested, sat down with Micky Onvural, CMO of TIAA, to discuss what it takes to build and sustain a high-performing marketing and communications team.

Onvural leads a 400-person global function spanning TIAA, Nuveen, and the firm's wealth management business, and brought four and a half years of hard-won experience transforming not just a brand, but the culture underneath it.

The conversation covered a lot of ground. Onvural talked about arriving at a 105-year-old institution from the CEO chair at Bonobos, finding a marketing team that measured success in impressions, and realizing she had to rebuild the culture before she could change anything else. Her answer was a shared leadership story, co-created with her team, broken into annual chapters and quarterly objectives, and revisited at every town hall. The rituals that followed, shared KPIs across a 400-person org, mantras like "pick up the phone" and "ask for what you need, not what you want," and deliberate culture carriers planted across geographies, were the infrastructure that made the story stick.

She also talked about what comes next. This summer, TIAA's marketing team will gather for Homecoming, the first all-400 event in the organization's history, timed deliberately to the start of what Onvural describes as the sequel. A new learning and development program will launch alongside it, built around three tracks: industry and business onboarding, the full toolkit of modern marketing skills, and the durable human capabilities that matter more, not less, as AI reshapes the work.

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