TOP CMO: Becky Moffat, HSBC UK - 'From Insights to Impact'

Ben Kaplan  00:00

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest-growing companies, and most disruptive startups hematoxylin.

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Ben Kaplan  00:13

This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan. today I'm chatting with Becky Moffat CMO of HSBC. In the United Kingdom. HSBC is the United Kingdom's largest bank with more than $3 trillion in assets under management. For her role at HSBC, Becky held senior positions at Boots UK, and at Barclaycard the credit card arm of Barclays. So what makes a great CMO? And why are more CMOS these days viewed as potential CEO material. Let's find out with Becky Moffat. Becky, we've spoken about this before this notion of what makes a great CMO. What is the skill set involved to do that? So what do you think if you were going to define the super CMO, we're going to create a new superhero character what would be some of those qualities that you see that that person him or her possesses? Great question,

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  01:10

Ben, I think the most important thing in a CMO or in any marketer is curiosity. So a desire to really seek to understand to understand customers to understand customer behavior to understand the business and organization how it operates. So I think curiosity sits right at the heart of of any any really, really compelling marketer. I think the other piece though, for me is that a key skill is being able to convene, bring things together. So great marketers, meaning to be convener and be able to actually join dots. So to be able to see different things, bring them together and make more of individual things so that they they become meaningful for customers are for an audience. So I think absolutely curiosity, absolutely that ability to convene or join the dots. I think commerciality is absolutely critical. I think there has to be creativity. This will cease, isn't it? I've got four C's already.

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Ben Kaplan  02:03

There you go. We have a framework that sounds like a framework. Sounds good, good.

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  02:06

But it's a speaker have commerciality but coupled with creativity, and creativity comes back a little bit to how do you join things up together as well in a way that others haven't done it. So I think for me, commerciality, creativity, ability to convene and bring things together. And curiosity is what would make a really powerful CMO. In

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Ben Kaplan  02:24

your industry, which is financial services, you have a background originally you thought and grew up, as I know from your story wanted to be an economist had no exposure probably to marketing, right, it didn't enter the conversation that like, Oh, that would be an area that you could go into. So what made that jump over, and if you're an economist or wannabe, you're probably a quantitative person, you probably go a little left brain as well, is that useful in a CMO role as well,

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  02:50

it's incredibly useful in a CMO role, particularly working in a CMO role within financial services where there, there are a lot of left brain people, and you have a lot of people who are from finance, legal, etc, backgrounds, risk backgrounds. So if you're way out there as a CMO, you may find it difficult to actually connect with some of your colleagues. So definitely important. My shift into marketing was complete serendipity. I was working for a competitor by two species at the time on their grad program, I'd done a year as an economist, learnt lots but realized it wasn't what I wanted to do forever, and didn't know what to do for my final placement on grad scheme. And I had two three conversations and met a fabulously interesting guy named Darrell who was running something called delivery channel developments. And it was Barclays Bank actually creating PC banking. And they were the first high street bank to put your banking on your computer and get you to assert yourself. And I joined the team working on that, because it sounded really interesting and curiosity, and absolutely loved it. Because that gave me that that real broad church exposure to marketing, go to market strategies, building propositions, making them work, taking on board customer feedback, actually then taking that into the communication strategies around how we actually launched. And that was how I ended up working in marketing. And I have worked in multiple different parts of marketing ever since but with a stronger bias towards sort of digital digital proposition than actually sort of like the more communications ended up,

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Ben Kaplan  04:15

we've defined with your multiple C's, their qualities of a CML, so it's okay, you ought to be really curious, you ought to be able to kind of synthesize, use the word convene, and bring people together or messages together, you got to be able to understand how this translate into dollars to I think we have to be commercialization, we're in a business, this isn't just messaging. Here's another see for your actual currency, converting to the actual money. Those all sound like great qualities of a CEO, too. So my question for you, and we've chatted a little bit about this before is, why is it that in the marketing track the CMO is the top of the mountain, the king or queen of the hill, and why don't more CMOS go on to book Some CEOs, what is the reason of that? How do you see it? Again?

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  05:03

It's great question. I think sometimes we haven't marketed marketing well enough to actually demonstrate how marketing drives business growth, and the depth of understanding and especially need to have in a business to do marketing. Sometimes marketing is seen purely as cones, and not broader and more commercial than that. I think certainly, within financial services, where I've spent a lot of my career in marketing can sometimes be seen as over there and doing the advertising rather than actually driving the growth. Equally. I do wonder, as I've said, already, I'm not sure that marketers often market themselves very well as broader business operators. There are some incredibly smart CMOS in the marketplace. I don't know I it's a really it's a really open question. I don't know why we didn't see more of those going on to be CEOs in large businesses.

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Ben Kaplan  05:49

And when you think of like, let's say, a CMO versus a senior VP of Marketing, what is the difference? I guess, presumably, that senior VP is heading up, the marketing team has leadership is doing many of the same functions. But the idea is you put the sea in front of it, then suddenly you have responsibility for it really the whole business too, right? You might come together with that C suite to say, how do we drive this forward? And the question then becomes, well, should more CMOS be asserting and trying to, you know, have a vision for this is how the business drives forward? I have expertise in marketing, I have knowledge, that's an important part, or do you think that there's just some marketing lead businesses and others that are not marketing lead, and maybe Financial Services is not typically a marketing lead business? And that's it, but then that would bring up the questions like, why don't we see, you know, CMOs from Coca Cola becoming CEOs of Coca Cola or something that is more of a marketing focused business.

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  06:42

So I think we've seen some of that in some some FMCG companies, you have seen more of movement from cmo CEO. So definitely more I think, within financial services, it is an organization that there are organizations that have very strong functions around risk around financial control is as we would want and expect with banks. I think that there is also actually a number of organizations a number of businesses where CMOS don't sit on the expo or are closely associated with the expo. So to your point, the VP marketing rather cmo role. And I think, actually, that's a bit of a mess, in terms of bringing that broader, broader outlook on what's going on in the world, what's going on with customers what customers need, and want, why do they will this brand and add to this brand show up? So I think the challenge for marketers, is to demonstrate the breadth of marketing, and that marketing is a very broad church and a very strategic, as well as very commercial discipline. And it's it is more than just communications and advertising. They are really, really important parts of marketing. But marketing is much broader than that. It is

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Ben Kaplan  07:41

interesting to think about at different points in all of our careers, whether we're early on or midpoint or we're more senior, we're further along. There is sort of the sense of early on in our careers, we should experiment, we should try things I know you've said before, you don't know if you like it until you until you try it. The question is, as we go further along, we get higher up in the food chain, we have more experience, we have more responsibility, can we still continue to experiment? Because your role becomes more defined in some way, as marketing as a discipline start to limit you in some way? Or do you have to kind of push to say, Hey, I'm going to continue to push the envelope of what my role is, if I can find a way to make a contribution, I will even if others perceive that they don't know if it's in my role or not, should we continue to try to experiment and sort of push our learning forward, and might that position more CMOS to be CEOs to have a bit of a broader business experience by saying, I want that I want that broader experience, I don't have to be a really senior specialist. Absolutely.

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  08:40

And I think that's critical. And I think that at all stages of your career, I would strongly advocate to try different things try, try working in different industries, try working in different parts of businesses that you're in, I genuinely believe that you don't know if you know somebody you don't know, if you love something until you try it. I've tried many things. Some of them I absolutely love some of them hide net, they're not for me very quickly. But some of the some of my best learning, for example, is I'm in financial services. Now, I spent a lot of my career financial services. But some of the the deepest learning that I've had is when I've worked outside financial services, and in different industries. And I apply that day in day out in terms of those experiences that I had in places like boots, when I worked in publishing and actually being able to bring different perspectives and different experiences into into the industry that you then operate in. So I think it's absolutely incumbent on all of us if we want to grow and develop both an app career and as human beings is to keep going, how do I stretch how do I learn more? How do I try different things? And how do I broaden this and have it have impact? I think, certainly for me, I'm I'm very driven by the desire to sort of make things better, try and actually improve things. And I think just sitting in a box probably isn't how you do that.

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Tom Cain  09:53

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Tom Cain  10:29

And zombies. Yeah, we just heard from zombies in there. Your vision, our craft, topthoughtleader.com? I don't know. Can I listen to the first draft? Again, back to the show?

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Ben Kaplan  10:45

I love you saying make things better at top our agency one of our values is make it better. If it ain't broke, optimize it. I like that. Yeah. So how are you trying to do that? And the other point is that maybe early on in our careers, we sometimes think of I call it experience collection, which is we're experienced collectors, how much can you pull in, but then later on, maybe we say like, ah, we've got a lot of experience, right? We don't need to be collecting as much, but you can collect it in different ways. And one of the things that I found very useful in marketing to specifically as a discipline is trying to push the envelope in the different types of things you market, which which sort of exercises your muscles differently. So it's nice to be okay, you're a hardcore b2b marketer. But if there's an opportunity to do one part of the business or one thing in sort of a b2c way, I mean, we've done for us, we have like a lot of financial services clients, we have some deep tech, you know, technology clients that push us more technically. And then we have some pet food brands that make us think about how do we market cat food and dog food. And what I would sort of suggest is that actually like working on how to market dog food, and cat food helps us on deep tech, because we just were thinking about things and flexing muscles a different way. And working on deep tech helps us with cat food brands, because we have to understand that you really have core thought leadership. And if you flex those muscles, you get better. I

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  12:07

completely agree. I completely agree. And I think being able to bring that sort of 45 degree angle way of looking at things when you've seen things in different industries in different ways. That does help you to come back to a problem or a challenge and think about it differently and deconstruct it and actually go right, what is what is the real problem here? What is the question I'm trying to answer? And how do we do it best? So I think that the idea of constant learning is so important, and being able to, to build your experiences from a number of different places. But then to switch from being I think your wasn't like the as the experience acquire. But you need to become an experience applier as well and be able to experience and bring that experience together and go now how do I go from the back of my head, bring something that I saw a number of years ago in a completely different environment and apply it to this challenge. So I think there's a skill set that we all have to continue to polish, which is, how do I pull that experience and make it relevant to what I'm facing? Now?

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Ben Kaplan  13:02

We do this at the junior level, we should do it at the senior level. But what about for all the people coming up? I know in terms of diversity inclusion, you've been a champion of why are there a high proportion of women in junior roles, but not as much in senior roles? And is there something that we're doing systemically? Is there something that we're doing and how we're promoting rewarding hiring is or something else? What are your thoughts on that? You know, we get more CMOS to CEOs, but then also to how do we sort of position the next group of CMOS five years from now? What do they have to be doing now? And why don't we see a broader range of people from personal

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  13:34

perspective, I think that its flexibility is an enormously important part of being able to progress in your career. I have two children, they're grown up now, once 18 was 13. And I was fortunate to have incredibly supportive partner where we shared so much he actually exited the business and has been the primary carer for the last three, four years about kids. And I think that there are there are always compromises that you make as a family to manage careers. I think that there's a real challenge for us in actually supporting women through maternity leave, and all parents actually to intensely through return to work through enabling flexibility. And in actually really focusing on outcomes. I think if we can focus on outcomes and what people deliver, rather than what have you input, then you will start to see more women being able to actually climb that career ladder and get some of the higher positions. I think there is still a challenge with a lot of women where they don't believe that they have the skills to do the job. So I think there is a self belief challenge around you absolutely can make that step up and you can do it pretty damn well. And I don't I don't see enough women putting themselves forward for stretch roles and having the self belief that they're actually going to do it. So I think there's definitely something around how do we actually help other women to believe that they are absolutely ready and absolutely able to do a job when their own self perception says I'm not quite They, or it's, or it's too big a stretch, or I'm gonna have to forfeit too much to do it. And I think that we are starting to see more and more great senior women role models who are demonstrating that you can have impact, you can make things better, you can make a difference. And you can have some balance in your life in senior roles. And I think that's really only the last 10 years or so that we've started to see more volume of that, and it's nowhere near where it needs to be, but it is getting better.

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Ben Kaplan  15:25

I liked your phrase of sort of stretch roles. Because if you want to become more flexible or become stronger, you have to push yourself right, you have to do it a little bit. So this notion of that's a good thing, we should be stretching, we were talking about experience collection and collecting his experience you talked about then applying experience also. And for us to grow our experience base, we have to stretch if we're use a weightlifting example, if we're doing like five pound weights all day, you know, we can get pretty efficient, maybe a little bit of tone there. But we're not gonna like, you know, we need the 15 pound weights, the 20 pound weights to stretch us to push a little bit more. And that's a good thing. We should actually seek that out. Maybe as well, when you say,

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  16:03

I absolutely, absolutely agree. And I think that proactivity is really, really important that you just accountable for their own career. You can they can find people to help them. They can have great line managers, they can have colleagues, but actually being motivated to drive that stretch is really, really important.

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Ben Kaplan  16:19

In the current climate, there's this sense of there's a lot of uncertainty, we're not sure. You know, are we in a recession? Are we maybe in a recession? Are we soon to be in a recession? There's all that there's certainly a lot of companies who are a little bit more like, let's be conservative. Now, because it's not grow at all costs. It's let's make sure we're profitable. Maybe we scale back a little bit. How should one think about one's career in this environment? What is an opportunity now that they might not otherwise have in this uncertain, somewhat leaning conservative environments that we're in at this exact moment, but I'm

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  16:52

a great believer that opportunity can always be found in uncertainty and in change. There's a real mindset around actually seeking out the opportunity, when there is some uncertainty around there is still certainly in the UK as I go out and look at recruitment. There is a very, very energetic market for the moment. So there are lots of opportunities, I think, equally as a sort of like sat within a team, where we are is challenge for us is actually how do we really take sort of the uncertainty, some of the challenges that we've got, and turn that into something powerful. So again, Saturday can be the mother of invention. So how'd you relook at what you're doing, I think you use the the great iron, which I'm going to steal from you around, if it ain't broke, optimize it. And that's exactly what you do in a time where there's uncertainty, you look at the bits that work really well. And you go, how am I really double down on that and amplify it? And really push that out? Versus how do I actually potentially give myself some real challenge around? Why am I still doing that? Why we're still doing that, you know, just because we've always done it doesn't mean it's right now. So I think I think uncertainty can create an opportunity to really reassess both in what you're doing within a job, but also in action. Is that the right role for you? Is that where you want to go? Is there opportunity to try something different? So I think, for me, there is a there is always a sense of there is there is an opportunity, it's really how you want to look at it. And, and everybody's circumstances differently there. People have different levels of risk appetite and different levels of sending like a bank account i But, but it's really having that positive view about still looking for growth opportunities, both in the job that you're doing or elsewhere is really, really important. And those can continue to exist to uncertainty. But

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Ben Kaplan  18:33

let's talk more about the marketing discipline itself. How are you thinking about marketing HSBC in the UK? And there's inflation occurring costs of living going up? How does that impact your messaging, your marketing, what you're trying to say to people in different segments that you target?

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  18:51

Well, first and foremost, what we want to be famous for what we want to be able to do for the UK isn't that HSBC, we want to really open up opportunity for our clients and customers. But we want to do that by improving the financial health of the citizens of the UK. If you have that as a as an ambition, then really helping people to understand how to build that financial resilience in time of times of cost of living crisis, how to actually build their financial understanding, and actually how to actually help people to become included in the financial system are all really really critical things and things that we we try to talk consistently about to customers and the UK, we have some very clear demonstrations of that HSBC is a huge global brand. One of our brand challenges is to demonstrate that we aren't too big to care, we are actually big enough to make a difference. So if an organization like HSBC gets behind something, we really can drive change or we can make a difference. And in the UK, we have a long standing partnership with shelter, who focus on housing for those who don't have fixed addresses who are dealing with homelessness. And we've been working with Shell To actually create ways to actually bring those who don't have a fixed address, if you don't have a fixed home address, it's almost impossible to open a bank account. If you don't have a bank account in the UK, then you can't get paid benefits from the government. And you might be able to get paid for money from a job, etc, it's impossible to get a rental property. So that piece around inclusion is really, really important and actually very critical to our brand to actually be able to demonstrate tangibly demonstrate how HSBC is big enough to make a difference. And in partnership with real leaders in this space, like shelter, we can actually provide more impetus to really drive financial inclusion. So for me, there's a really, really critical part around what we're talking about has to align with that purpose has to meet needs of customers, because the critical question in my head is always, who are we for? And why do they want us? And then how do we talk to that to actually demonstrate why we can help and how we can help. So being clear, being simple, demonstrating with authenticity, what we're about and why it matters? Those are the things that for me, we need to double down on, particularly in times of change in uncertainty. How do you

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Ben Kaplan  21:07

think about differentiation within financial services industry in the sense that in some ways, it's become commoditized, right? productized, you can get a similar offering from different providers, different big banks, particularly have a certain sort of size and scale. If you go through and you talk to a lot of financial services industry, and they go through their branding exercise, they will come out with a similar result meaning, okay, we're not just about helping transact money for you, but we're about thinking about your future, and what are your dreams and what's the meaning of true wealth, and you'll hear messages, which were very positive like that, that give us a nicer way to position money in the context of what people are about. So you get all that? How do you differentiate yourself within all that within industries that are highly productize commoditized, similar messaging, similar aspirational communications. But then, if we all say that we all start to sound the same, there

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  21:59

is a real sea of sameness, often in the way that people communicate that financial services tool, you can sometimes see imagery and see things and you could take one brand off and put another one on. So how do you stand out? How do you look different? For HSBC, we have Winter Olympics, our superpower is we are unashamedly International, in the way that we operate, we have a still a very, very broad global footprint. And we have some incredibly powerful international connections from east to west and west to east. And so actually, the way that we look at it is we need to be really good in the markets that we're operating in. And if you're operating outside of those markets, and across markets, so if you're an ambitious business that wants to grow, that's based in the north of England, but wants to open up offices in the US or in, in Singapore, which bank is best place to support you. HSBC, we have that we have boots on the ground, we have expertise in numerous markets. And so our international connectivity is what we believe actually really differentiates us. That's not to say that you cannot be good, you've got you've got to be good within a domestic market. But I think for us, it's an and that says in the UK, we are a strong, really strong, safe domestic. And we have this absolute superpower in our ability to connect internationally.

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Tom Cain  23:16

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23:20

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Tom Cain  24:07

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Ben Kaplan  24:16

you feel that in the sort of era where lots of brands have become publishers, content creators, thought leaders for their audiences do you consider HSBC? Obviously there's a lot of financial education, confusion, whatever you're whether you're an individual, whether you're a business, whether you're different levels of financial goals or success. Are you a content publisher? Are you creating content? Do you consider yourself that as part of your marketing or not so much?

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  24:43

Yes, absolutely. HSBC is a very, very broad church from multinational corporates, two through two new sorts of kids opening their first account. We have a role to play across all of that around actually bringing together some of the insight and knowledge that we have connecting people with but also actually enabling people to understand more about about their money and their business and how they can grow their business and how they can grow their wealth. So, so absolutely, we see ourselves as being in the business of helping to provide and providing content to help people to make more of their money, your

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Ben Kaplan  25:18

cmo with a focus on the UK, and obviously an international bank and an international brand. How is it that effectively communicating with marketing to a British audience is different than maybe what the bank might do elsewhere? The

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  25:32

job work that my team and I need to do in the UK is to demonstrate to a UK audience, why are internationalist is relevant to them? So what can we do that others can't do because of that international illness. So a good example would be our global mini product is actually because of our footprint, because of our experience, we are able to actually do a phenomenally powerful global global payments. So the way we position is pay like local send local, local, our international and this enables us to do that, to bring a great product to the UK, equally within the UK, we need to be able to go actually, the scale of HSBC means that actually, we're very safe and secure. But yeah, some might say sometimes a bit dull, but it's, it's actually a very, we have a lot of a lot of positives around us. The challenge for us is always to turn sort of rational trust into deep emotional trust, and make sure that people can actually really go, they deal with me with empathy, they understand who I am, and they are relevant and for me, so it really it's always a balancing act between actually how do we how do we demonstrate that how relevant our international capabilities are, but how we can bring those in to actually being meaningful for customers who are largely focused on the UK? And then

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Ben Kaplan  26:42

what do you do to align campaigns with the real world? What I mean by that is, let's say you do a great campaign, you did everything you just said, you're like, Okay, here's our relevance, here's how we get you into more places, you want to be more markets, here's how we can support that effort. Here's how we can do all those things. And then the person is like, this sounds great. I need to HSBC on my corner, and they fill out a form online, they make a phone call. And it doesn't live up to that because there's a lot of frontline workers they have to interact with. And maybe that person didn't see the marketing campaign and didn't get the memo. How do you balance all of that, where you have aspirational views of how you want to be perceived, but you also have a big company with a lot of people who are on the front lines of picking up the phone that may or may not deliver that experience. The brand

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  27:26

experience, it's every touchpoint is every experience somebody has with you, it isn't just a great advert or a not great advert. It's actually every touch point. And what we try to do consistently is walk step by step so that we would never unlike would never canceled teen to run ahead with a brand promise that we can't live up to. So that is something that is front and center for us is that we need to be able to partly why we are very comfortable to talk about our partnership with shelter, we have done a huge amount of work, we've led the way around opening up accounts for people who are financially excluded, don't have a fixed address, we can demonstrate that we have opened up 1000s of accounts for people by doing that. So for me, it's really important that your advertising does not run ahead and create a brand experience and brand expectation gap, it needs to actually be very closely aligned to the experiences that you're able to deliver. But fundamentally brand is every touchpoint every interaction a customer has isn't an advert. So that branded experience needs to be thought through holistically and end to end

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Ben Kaplan  28:28

is a nice way of bringing our conversation a little bit full circle to this discussion of cmo roles and ce o roles. And is there a transition because that might be tell me if you agree with me or not that sort of brand expectation gap might be an area where CMOS could assert more to be, hey, we've got a great direction for what we're saying. We want to be able to say more, we want to be able to elevate our brand promise. But here's operationally where we are. And might there be some things that we can do to minimize that gap or align them better, that might be a natural way to go. Because oftentimes that brand experience that we're trying to create is the growth of the company. That's where we have to have it's usually aligned with how we're going to grow the business. And might that be a good way to say we've got to make everything we're seeing and messaging reflect reality. And that's how maybe a CMO could have more impact on the operational or product side as well. I think

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  29:22

that's 100%. Right? And actually, where do you focus? Where do you focus your energy, your transformation energy to actually deliver better outcomes for customers? And actually, by looking at that in the how do you take that to market but what are we doing what customers back to? What what do you Why'd people Walters that were who were we for? Why do they want us? And what is it that we need to deliver? And then how can you actually build that into your your brand narrative? I think that is actually a really nice way to bring that back to how they helped to shape and drive the business to deliver the growth.

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Ben Kaplan  29:50

And what is implied in that statement as well. Maybe more CMOS take that approach would be how are we marketing internally better as well. So This is an external campaign we're communicating that is it communicated internally so that the whole company is behind Oh, this is the direction this is what we believe in. If to use your phrase, if we believe in, we're in the business of improving the financial health in a holistic way of our customers, how does that reflect internally to you almost have to market particularly from you're a big company, so that everyone who's interacting with them understands what we're trying to accomplish and do, which might means you mean, an internal marketing program, as well as an external marketing program

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  30:29

completely, it completely. And to that point, we have actually spent the first couple of months this year, we've had every one of our colleagues across the UK, actually, in person together, looking at how do we become future fit for our customers? How do we actually financial the UK? How do we build resilience? How do we build financial education? And what does that mean in terms of how we better support customers? So definitely trying to put our money where our mouth is in that sense.

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Ben Kaplan  30:56

Final question is, where do you think we're headed in the next three to five years as marketers broadly, also, more specifically, marketers within the context of financial services? What will we be doing in three to five years? What platform channels we'll be using? Where's this all headed? As you see it, I

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  31:13

think that certainly in the UK, we have come out of a period of long term low rates. And that is and we're entering probably, I was at a Mervyn King say this, look, Mervyn King said this is this is near the new normal. So I think there is a really important role for financial services marketers to play in, in helping customers to understand what that means for their money, how they can, how they can manage in different circumstances, I think there's a hugely important role for finance to really step up. And be very clear that, you know, customers are facing some form of financial difficulty, even if it's in the very early stages, and they just call cerned to come and talk to their bank, we've done some work already around actually trying to say to customers make the last place you'd come to the first, don't be afraid to come to your bank, because actually, we can help. So I think there's a shift in terms of what financial services marketing will do around that sort of helpfulness that supportiveness, and actually helping to build skills around money management and helping money grow grift customers. So I think that's quite a much more holistic approach to customer support and financial services. I think marketers as a whole, I think we've sort of driven ourselves into a little bit with the debate around and performance marketing versus brand marketing. For me, all marketing investment needs to perform, whether it be long term or short term. So I think I would love I would love to see marketers coming back to a more holistic view around the sort of like the brand brand and phones rather than brand and digital rather than rather than separating them out. And I think that there is probably a step change coming in how organizations think about media, it is so fragmented. And the combination of media and creative and how you actually create for a channel to make something work well is quite different to sort of probably five years ago, where you'd create something, then shove it down and channel. So I think there is a number of changes in the way we operate, that you will start to see disciplines coming back together more in order to actually be able to deliver really compelling messaging to customers, I would

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Ben Kaplan  33:13

agree with that. And also from sort of the softer marketing versus harder marketing, if you want to sort of say brand versus performance, but also different channels. You know, we're the multicultural marketing agency at top for a number of large banks and financial institutions. And we constantly say, you know, it's not like, multicultural is over here in its own lane. And we just like, you know, we have multicultural, honestly, we do, it's like, it's part of all of marketing. This is part of all of our audience, it needs to be integrated. So I think in general marketing as a whole, also, in particular, in financial services, like breaking down some of the silos, merging things back together. So you don't just have separate lanes running, you know, oh, here's your multicultural marketing program. It's its own thing. It has its own message voice. It's not even related to the main thing. Instead, we gotta merge that all together, and bring it back together completely Great. Becky Moffat. Thank you so much. I'm CMO at HSBC. And really appreciate both your left brain and right brain thinking and some thinking around what does it take to kind of bring up the next generation and also gets more of our CMOS to CEO roles as well. So thank you so much for joining us on TOP CMO.

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Becky Moffat - HSBC  34:18

Thank you very much for having me.

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Tom Cain  34:22

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