Earning The Room: Influence In The C-Suite
Financial Narrative London Live brought senior marketing and communications leaders together over breakfast on Thursday 18 June at Vested, 82 Great Suffolk Street, for a panel titled Earning the Room.
With strong turnout of senior marketing and communications people from across financial services, there was a real mix of familiar faces and a lot of new ones, and the warm, candid atmosphere that comes when the right people are together. It was a reminder of the quality of the Financial Narrative network and the generosity of the community we have built around it.
The Panel
Heidi Ashley, Group Head of External Communications at HSBC, leads external communications for one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations.
Alexandre Rizos, Global Head of External Communications at AXA XL, the property, casualty and specialty risk division of AXA, leads external communications across the business worldwide.
Catherine Sin, Co-Founder of BEYLA, is a former chief marketing officer who now works at the intersection of marketing and artificial intelligence, having made the move from senior in-house marketing leadership to building her own business.
Elspeth Rothwell, EMEA CEO at Vested, the global marketing and communications agency for the financial sector, moderated the conversation.
The Conversation
The opening question set the frame: what separates the leaders who shape decisions from those who communicate them. The discussion then moved through four connected movements.
What a seat at the table actually means. The panel was clear that it is about influence rather than a title or a reporting line, and that many people already hold real influence in a form they have not recognised. The reframe for those earlier in their careers was to stop chasing a particular chair and ask instead whether they have the ear and the impact.
How you earn it. Career paths here were varied and rarely linear, shaped as much by network, conversation and resilience as by any plan. A recurring idea was that trust is built from the ground up: be reliable and add value on the small things, and you get invited into the strategic ones. Commercial fluency ran strongly through this, the point being that the C-suite does not respond to the word marketing but to growth, risk, cost and value, and that speaking that language is what moves you from fighting for a seat to occupying one. Sometimes the sharpest contribution is the right question rather than the ready answer.
The value you bring once you are there. This covered bringing the outside in, translating decisions for the journalists, regulators, brokers and investors who do not think like internal teams. It also covered marketing as both art and science, the data that earns the right to be heard and the storytelling that builds emotional trust, and the constant work of educating stakeholders on risk and opportunity.
The seat under pressure. Trust at the top is not a popularity contest. It is earned by being willing to tell leaders what they do not want to hear, and by managing yourself through high-pressure moments on instinct built from years of experience. Authenticity was a strong thread, the lesson being that you lead best as yourself rather than as a louder, borrowed version. Crisis readiness came through too: clear processes and board trust established before a crisis hits are what let you act when it does.
The conversation drew such engagement that it ran straight into questions from the audience, with the room sharing its own experiences as much as putting questions to the panel.
What's next
We will keep meeting to discuss what matters most in the world of fintech, financial services and insurance, and to equip the marketing and communications professionals in these industries to lead. There are more events to come before the autumn. The one we would particularly encourage you to register for is our Annual Summit, held at the Charlotte Street Hotel on 24 November. Numbers are strictly limited, so do register early.
We would also love to hear from you. If there are topics you would particularly like to see discussed, or hear more about, please let us know. And if you would like to be considered for a future speaker slot, or to host an event with us, do get in touch.
Kate Woodyatt Hudson is Contributing Editor at Financial Narrative and Head of Strategic Programming and Speaker Curation EMEA. She brings more than 25 years of senior experience across financial services, marketing, media and corporate communications, and leads Financial Narrative's events portfolio across the region, including the network's presence at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam. She is also the founder and managing director of WH Communications, and formerly served as Global Head of Campaigns and Content for HSBC Group.
