Telum Talks To: Haymarket Media

Independent communications, public affairs, and research group, Sandpiper, has announced the promotion of three senior leaders.

Elizabeth Chu has been promoted to Managing Director, Financial Services and Managing Director, Singapore. She will oversee the growth of the financial services practice and take on broader regional leadership responsibilities. Elizabeth previously served as Deputy General Manager of Sandpiper Singapore before being appointed to lead the Singapore business in 2024.

Kimberley Spear has been appointed Managing Director, Financial and to the newly created role of Head of Employee Experience. Previously General Manager, Hong Kong, for five years, she will now oversee employee experience, including consultant development, and workplace culture.

Unice Liu has stepped into the newly created role of Head of Growth Markets. She will lead Sandpiper’s efforts in supporting organisations entering, expanding, and investing in growth markets, with a focus on risk management, reputation, and stakeholder engagement across Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

"Our success has been built on two pillars: exceptional people and an unwavering focus on delivering results for our clients,” said Emma Smith, CEO of Sandpiper Group.

”As organisations continue to invest in growth across Asia Pacific and the Middle East, they need advisers who combine local insight with regional reach, specialist expertise, and deep stakeholder understanding. These promotions reflect our commitment to investing in the next generation of our leaders who will help shape Sandpiper's future, strengthen our capabilities and continue delivering outstanding outcomes for our clients. Developing talent from within isn't just part of our culture; it's part of our DNA.”

(Pictured, from left: Elizabeth Chu, Kimberley Spear, and Unice Liu)

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.

In the Philippines, is the greater communications challenge helping people understand financial services, or helping them trust the organisations providing them? How do you balance accessibility, clarity and credibility when speaking to both business partners and consumers?

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.

From your experience supporting thought leadership communications for senior leaders, how do you decide who is the right person to speak on a financial topic, what they are best placed to speak about, and when it is better to hold back?

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.

In financial communications, a crisis often starts as a trust issue before it becomes a media issue. What early signals should communications teams in the Philippines be watching for, and how should they respond before the narrative hardens?

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.

What will define effective financial communications in the Philippines over the next few years - clearer financial education, stronger trust-building, better use of data, or more human storytelling?

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.

Are communicators confusing the durability of a message with the durability of its emotional effect?

Reassurance can have a remarkably short half-life.

A confident statement from a chief executive can restore optimism. A compelling vision can make an uncertain future feel manageable. A clear explanation of a difficult decision can temporarily settle an anxious workforce. But the relief doesn't necessarily last.

Sometimes it survives for weeks. Sometimes only days. Occasionally, another question emerges before the leadership briefing has even finished.

Nothing material has changed. The information remains valid. The leader is no less credible. Yet the anxiety returns, demanding another explanation, another demonstration of confidence, another reason to believe things might turn out well.

We tend to assume that reassurance accumulates. That each confident statement, encouraging development, and demonstration of competence contributes to a growing reservoir of trust. But perhaps reassurance is better understood as something we consume. And when the underlying uncertainty persists, the relief it provides may create an appetite for more.

For strategic communicators, that raises an uncomfortable possibility: What if the message has worked, but the reassurance hasn't lasted?

When the message isn't the problem

Much of strategic communication is concerned with ensuring that messages are understood, believed and remembered. We develop narratives, establish credible spokespeople, build communication programs, and measure whether audiences are receiving and accepting what we tell them.

When anxiety persists, our instinct is often to communicate again. Refine the narrative. Increase leadership visibility. Find another way to demonstrate confidence. Sometimes that's precisely what's required.

But consider an organisation undergoing a significant restructure.

An employee attends a leadership briefing and receives a clear explanation of the organisation's direction. They understand the rationale for change, believe the chief executive is acting in good faith, and accept that difficult decisions are necessary. They may even leave feeling reassured.

The following morning, however, they wake up worried about whether they'll still have a job in six months. The message hasn't been forgotten. Their confidence in the chief executive hasn't necessarily diminished. The uncertainty has simply become frightening again.

What, exactly, has the communication failed to achieve? Perhaps nothing.

Perhaps we've been treating the persistence of anxiety as evidence that a message hasn't landed, when the real problem is that the uncertainty itself remains unresolved.

Psychological research into reassurance-seeking suggests that repeated reassurance can temporarily reduce distress without necessarily addressing the underlying anxiety. In some circumstances, the relief can reinforce the impulse to seek reassurance again.

I wonder whether something similar happens in organisational communication. When people return repeatedly for information, are they always seeking answers to new questions? Or are they sometimes looking for renewed confirmation of something they already understand?

The distinction matters because one is an information problem. The other may not be.

The reassurance of leadership

This becomes more complicated when we consider what people expect from leaders.

Part of leadership is making an uncertain future feel real. Giving people a credible sense of where they're going, why it matters and why they should believe the journey is possible.

Strategic communication plays a central role in making that future comprehensible and believable. But how often does that sense of confidence need to be renewed?

An organisation navigating prolonged change may communicate frequently and effectively while its employees remain deeply anxious. Another town hall is scheduled. Another leadership update is circulated. Another opportunity is created to demonstrate confidence.

Is that evidence that the previous communication was insufficient? Or is it simply what people need when uncertainty continues?

Perhaps repeated reassurance isn't necessarily a failure of leadership. Perhaps it's part of what leadership requires. But there is another possibility worth considering.

A leader who repeatedly provides reassurance may become increasingly important to an anxious audience, even when the underlying uncertainty remains unresolved. People attend briefings, seek guidance, and return to official channels.

We might reasonably interpret that engagement as evidence of trust. But could it also reflect an ongoing need for reassurance? And might the two sometimes be difficult to distinguish?

What are we actually measuring?

Strategic communicators devote considerable attention to audience sentiment, message acceptance, leadership confidence, and engagement. These are useful indicators, but they may not always tell us what we think they do.

High attendance at a town hall can indicate confidence in leadership. It can also indicate considerable anxiety about what leadership might announce.

A positive response to an executive update may reflect genuine confidence in the organisation's direction. It may also represent temporary relief that a feared development hasn't occurred.

And an employee who continues asking questions may not be confused or distrustful. They may understand the situation perfectly well and remain uncomfortable with what it means for them.

The same observable behaviours can have very different psychological origins. Yet we can be inclined to interpret them through the lens of whether our communication strategy is succeeding.

Perhaps we need to distinguish more carefully between message retention and reassurance retention.

An audience can understand, believe, and remember a message long after the emotional comfort it provided has disappeared. Equally, a message can produce an immediate improvement in sentiment without creating any enduring understanding or trust.

The first may be excellent communication. The second may be considerably less effective than it appears. And if we don't distinguish between them, we risk drawing the wrong conclusions about our work.

Knowing when communication has done its job

None of this is an argument against reassurance. It can be humane, valuable, and essential, particularly when people are confronting circumstances they cannot control.

Nor am I suggesting that communicators should abandon the responsibility to build confidence or that organisations should communicate less frequently. But perhaps we should be more realistic about what communication can accomplish when the underlying uncertainty cannot be resolved.

We often approach communication as though its effects should accumulate. The more consistently we explain, reinforce, and demonstrate, the more confident our audiences should become. In many circumstances, that's a reasonable expectation.

But uncertainty may complicate the relationship.

People can trust their leaders and remain anxious. They can understand a strategy and remain doubtful about its outcome. They can accept a decision and continue worrying about its consequences. None of these responses necessarily indicates a failure of communication.

And perhaps that's what makes reassurance such an interesting challenge for our profession. Its immediate effects are visible and often measurable. Its durability is much harder to establish.

We can observe whether people feel better after hearing from us. We can measure whether they understand and believe what we've said. But how do we distinguish between confidence that endures and reassurance that simply needs to be renewed?

And when anxiety returns, how do we know whether we need to communicate differently, communicate again, or recognise that the uncertainty itself is doing precisely what uncertainty does?

Perhaps one of the more difficult questions for strategic communicators is knowing when communication has done its job.

When a message has been understood, believed, and remembered, but the anxiety it briefly relieved returns, what exactly are we trying to fix?

The message?

Or the uncertainty that no message can remove?

Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.

Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.

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