Financial communications is not merely about helping people understand financial services, but also about giving them reasons to trust the organisations behind them. As misinformation spreads and public narratives take shape faster, communications leaders face growing pressure to build credibility, position senior executives as trusted voices, and identify reputational risks before they escalate into crises.
Telum Media spoke with Kevin Santos, Group Head of Communications at Asialink Group of Companies, about communications challenges in the Philippine financial services sector, approaches to executive thought leadership, and what effective financial communications could look like in the years ahead.
Trust becomes even more valuable for organisations to build and preserve as our world becomes riddled with synthetic media, mis- and disinformation, and increasingly subjective interpretations. In the context of financial services, approaches to financial literacy depend on standard variables: client profiles, products, geographic areas, income groups, and education levels.
Strictly from a communications perspective, the ‘greater’ challenge isn’t a choice between trust-building and fostering understanding per se, but rather whether the two are done synergistically, especially for Philippines-based companies operating at a larger scale.
Financial education, for instance, should already be a recurring part of an organisation’s customer journey, not merely a post-transaction add-on or corporate citizenship initiative.
On our end, we employ a proprietary process that genuinely makes it a point to get to know our clients and their businesses, and to help them understand our product offerings, rates, and terms. It does take time, but it lays the groundwork for building trust and understanding while contributing to sound risk management and sustainable portfolio performance.
When communicating to business partners and consumers, I would argue that achieving the balance between accessibility, clarity, and credibility starts with an organisation fundamentally knowing what it is, what it’s offering to the public, and what it stands for. I am a strong believer in contextualised communications; internal and external teams working on this will most often achieve their goals.
For us, it means regularly training our people to know our services and how to properly market them, building a verifiable track record of performance, and amplifying these results in a way that aligns with our collective values and is understandable across our linguistically diverse landscape.
Amongst other frameworks and variables, I first advise and classify senior leaders based on their “ABCs”: advocacies, business expertise, and communications clarity. For me, it’s imperative to know what they care about, get a solid idea of their acumen, and understand how they engage people. I then determine their ideal placements based on where they sit in that living matrix.
Ultimately, nothing beats substance, expertise, and a sense of purpose. It’s much more productive and efficient to collaborate with a seasoned and tested leader capable of original thought, who can credibly draw from their experience, including lessons learnt and "what-could-have-beens" from their own leadership journey, along with a clear persistence in explaining how they or the organisation keep going.
The ‘communications’ part of this demands leaders be exposed to opportunities to hone or enhance these skills. From there, it’s a matter of ensuring the leader’s competencies match those opportunities, providing systems-based training, and, most importantly, ensuring that where thought leadership is shared leads to actual short- and long-term outcomes.
Preparation minimises pressure, including in the realm of thought leadership. I would advise holding back if both the communications professional and the thought leader haven’t completed the necessary prep work.
Crisis leadership is a pillar of corporate governance. Shifting towards this thinking from a reactive or “hands-off” posture when handling crises will save organisations reputational currency and long-term market capitalisation.
While anticipating “sudden” crises, communications teams should be on the lookout for “smouldering” crises, and, where possible or needed, provide the tools for non-communications functions to discern what exactly those are. Those are long conversations, sometimes recurring, but much-needed ones.
Habitual social listening, including client sentiment scanning, is similarly critical. Particularly, and considering that what “viral” means now can change in the next few years, we add more weight to information velocity and sources rather than strictly numerical vanity metrics.
In financial services, there is no question that product sentiment is also a trust indicator and a signal. A company can build a narrative about their products, but if they do not align with what clients are saying, that will remain challenged, credibility will remain dampened, and it can easily become a media issue.
Apart from communications, the operations side of the business also needs to seriously consider reputational risks when developing a product.
Considering the current realities of AEO (answer engine optimisation), and the larger shift towards the use of LLMs (large language models) for brand research, narratives are quicker to harden. This makes it imperative for teams to exercise sound yet swift judgment when preventing or responding to a crisis. Before any of that, what I tell people is to build those trust signals before institutions come to collect.
Considering the VUCA world we live in, along with the synthetism brought in by AI, I am leaning towards stakeholder-centric, evidence-based traceability as a key indicator of effective financial communications locally; it will prevail in terms of building lasting trust, regardless of the business model.
On the client or consumer front, with attention spans declining and claims increasingly easy to verify or compare, effectiveness is also an exercise in originality, creativity, and providing value to the market, rather than your usual awareness-raising of one’s financial products or mere busyness and frequency in execution.
Financial literacy initiatives, for example, become much more meaningful if an organisation takes the time to track how effective said initiatives were and how they translated to communities. That’s a better story to tell in my opinion.
There is also an abundance of content, and we continue to move towards interest-based media and hyper-personalised digital realities. Aside from ensuring alignment with their organisations’ long-term goals, communications teams worth their salt, arguably, also bring real long-term value if their strategies can create conversations that go beyond traditional channels.