Targeting Internal Leaders for a Banking Industry Consultancy
The Business Challenge
This training consultant for banks, now owned by globally recognize financial intelligence provider, needed to raise awareness of the value of its corporate training programs in credit risk mitigation with senior executives among its established large bank clients. Some of those clients are global systemically important banks and many are domestic or regional systemically important banks. Deemed systemically important to the financial services industry by regulators, these "too big to fail" institutions receive careful supervision by multiple regulatory agencies for risk tolerance and stringent adherence to risk mitigation policies guided by federal agency governance standards.
To prevent the global fallout that occurred during the Great Recession, both the consumer and business public and agency officials demanded U.S. banks create a risk mitigation culture Both customers and regulator expected banks to engage in bank-wide, ongoing corporate training for personnel at every level of the institution. That takes coordination, collaboration, and corporate change—and trained leadership.
The 20-year-old consultancy felt challenged to reach economic buyers among human resources executives, corporate training leaders, and c-suite decision makers with its credit risk mitigation and leadership training. The consulting firm especially wanted to create editorial content that was useful to internal communicators required to disseminate its message of the importance of this training throughout their bank. Their goal was to help leaders gain widespread support for this type of corporate training, something many employees resist.
The Approach
I recognized the brand's need to reach internal communicators at banks and principal client-facing managers and employees. I pitched an editorial content strategy to the consultancy’s then global marketing manager to create blog content on specific credit risk issues and how their training mitigated them. I collaborated with her to develop a series of robust, well-researched blog posts that targeted specific bank internal audiences.
While the focus was on generating awareness of the value of credit risk management training for banks general, the posts covered internal communications, human resource management, cross-functional collaboration, change management, cultural reorganization, c-suite leadership, and personnel development.
As importantly, the posts spoke the language of industry professionals in the financial institution risk mitigation community by addressing pain points related to broader areas of bank regulation management, including routine compliance requests and risk tolerance stress testing. These two enormous pressures banks face often overshadow the importance of ongoing training to make them less distressing.
The editorial content I delivered provided essential insights to key bank leadership on the benefits of investing long term in credit risk mitigation training as part of their standard bank operations.
The Outcome
The content met the client's basic requirements—to provide internal communicators a method to reach employees bank wide with the risk mitigation culture message. As I tracked the content on social media, I saw target audiences engaging with the content in respectable numbers. It got read widely, commented on, and shared. The consultancy got more course registrations and position paper downloads. My expertise and performance delighted the executive who brought me in to do the work.
Work With Me
I can provide your financial services or wealth management industry firm with similar digital corporate communications strategic help. After you learn more about my expertise, then contact me, and we can discuss your requirements.
I offer a complimentary 30-minute introductory phone call to discuss your needs. Learn about that by reviewing my “Work Process” here.
(c) 2022-2023. Dahna M. Chandler for The Financial Communicator, Inc., a division of Thrive Media Collaborative, Inc. All rights reserved. This case story may not be reproduced or reposted in whole or in part or used for AI applications without express written permission from the author.
