AGENCY PERSPECTIVES
Marketing Technology & Financial Services
Two Questions
To bring the marketing technology landscape into clearer focus for financial’s leading marketers, Gramercy Institute posed two questions to 10 different financial expert agencies, seeking their unique responses to two important questions.​
In five years, in what new ways will AI continue to weave its way into existing businesses practices within the financial services industry?​
​What is your advice to financial firms as they craft their future AI marketing and strategy plans?
Gramercy Institute maintains a cohort of about 20 best-in-practice agencies that specialize in various disciplines within the financial services marketing industry. Gramercy Institute has tapped the wisdom of 10 of these agencies to construct this collective thought-piece.
Gramercy Institute wishes to extend its gratitude to all member agencies of the Gramercy Institute Financial Agency Short List for its industry leadership—and especially to those agencies that have submitted there opinions for this collective thought piece.
​
VIEW FULL ROSTER: FINANCIAL AGENCY SHORTLIST
​
AI Personalization, Authentic Financial Brand Storytelling
Jennifer Goldberg
Director of Strategy
As people become accustomed to hyper-personalized results from their LLMs, financial firms must leverage AI to anticipate their clients’ needs before they ask. Meeting these high expectations requires tailored insights delivered in the formats clients prefer. A big focus for our financial clients is using AI to quickly adapt a single piece of content to multiple channels to reach an audience with varying consumption habits. Turning a long-form article into a video script, a podcast segment, an email summary and social posts, for example, allows firms to deliver personalized content at scale.
Meeting customers where they are, whether that’s on social, in their inboxes, or on their commute, will only become more critical, and AI makes telling stories in multiple formats faster and more cost-efficient. At the same time, trustworthiness and brand authority are increasingly important as people grow skeptical of marketing they suspect is AI-generated. Search engines and LLMs are also actively prioritizing high-authority content that offers unique perspectives over generic summaries. In the coming years, financial firms should consider focusing their strategies on using proprietary data to create original content and leveraging their own subject matter experts to help differentiate their thought leadership from others. Anyone can use AI to generate generic content. Strategically combining technology with human storytelling and creating authentic content messaging will help brands stand apart.​
AI As A Partner—Not As A Replacement
Shelly Danse
Business Development Director
Trying to ignore AI now feels like trying to hold back the tide. It's not going away, so you better jump in and learn to swim. The businesses that will benefit most from AI won't be the ones using it as a word-churning machine. That's probably the least interesting thing it can do. Instead, use it as a co-worker. Ask it to challenge your thinking, brainstorm ideas, analyze research, spot trends, question assumptions and help you improve on what you are creating. Teach it your brand's tone of voice and the way your business communicates, then let it become a partner not a replacement.
Marketing has never changed as quickly as it does today. New platforms appear, audiences shift, regulations evolve and best practice moves on almost weekly. AI can help you to keep up. It can scan vast amounts of information, surface new ideas, highlight what's changing and suggest ways to make your marketing work harder. Financial firms struggle with speed and change. AI could make this easier – reporting on what’s happening now, what needs to be improved and new ways of marketing. It can also help strengthen content, improve consistency and even act as another pair of compliance eyes. But don't let your own skills become rusty. Keep learning. Keep questioning. Keep writing, thinking and creating. If the technology disappeared tomorrow, or became too expensive, you want a team that's still truly capable. The exciting thing about working in the 2020s is that we're all learning in public.
AI should make us more curious, push us to ask better questions, create better marketing and do our best work for the people we serve. The future belongs to those who can combine the speed of AI with the judgement, creativity and empathy that only humans can bring.
Trust First: Using Al to Deepen Client Relationships
Amy Ricketts
Managing Director
Artificial intelligence (AI) looms as one of the biggest disruptors to our personal and professional lives. For marketers, the bounty that AI can produce – the promise of efficiency and faster speed to market is extremely tempting. But in our industry, where credibility is paramount, we believe AI’s value lies not in creating more but in helping deepen relationships and accelerate opportunities.
When deciding where and how to use AI, we’d encourage you to view every opportunity through the lens of trust. The financial industry is built on trust, and every initiative should be evaluated by asking: Will this enhance or erode the trust our clients have in us? For example, if you’re activating a piece of thought leadership, AI can take that one piece of content and distill it into dozens of social media posts, snippets and assets. But while those efficiencies can be valuable, they also introduce risks like subtle inaccuracies or a diluted brand voice. And do you really believe that your audience’s trust in you will grow by virtue of a doubling of your social media post volume? Moreover, after your subject matter experts gave you their time and expertise, publishing posts that don’t align with their point of view will erode their trust in you. We think a bigger opportunity than using AI for content creation is leveraging machine learning to uncover opportunity drivers hidden in data. For example:
-
Discover previously unrecognized customer needs by scanning and summarizing Reddit discussions
-
Find contacts and accounts with the greatest likelihood of action
-
Identify potentially valuable content gaps by exploring content consumption patterns and customer demographics
These ideas offer ways to build trust by enabling you to gain a deeper understanding of needs and opportunities that deliver value. However, executing the ideas is not easy. Getting your data right and training AI/ML systems to do this work is an investment of time and resources—but it’s an investment, we believe, with a stronger return than simply creating more, faster. Trust is something that is built day-by-day over an extended period of time…but can be destroyed with one misjudgment or bad decision. Financial Marketers must take this dynamic to heart as they embrace the use of AI and take an approach that’s a disciplined and strategic trust builder, not a fast and flashy content deliverer.
From Tool to System: Agentic Al in Finance
Eamonn Conway
Founder and Managing Director
In five years, AI will no longer sit at the edge of financial services; it will be woven into how firms think, decide, and communicate. AI will quietly infuse every layer of operations, including how firms understand and engage audiences. One of the biggest changes will be AI evolving from a tool into a system of intelligence. Content will no longer be created campaign by campaign; it will be continuously generated and refined by AI agents trained on brand guidelines, audience behaviour, and market signals. Early versions of this are already appearing in tools like Adobe. This shift will accelerate with agentic workflows. According to Cambridge’s Global AI in Financial Services Report, 81% of industry respondents believe agentic AI will be meaningfully achieved by 2030. AI agents will independently scan markets, extract insights from data, validate narratives, and produce content. Humans will increasingly guide judgment and strategy rather than build everything from scratch.
AI duplicated content is going to be de-ranked more and more as the tech matures. You will need to create original content with a clear point of view, at volume and speed, while maintaining a distinct voice. It’s basically creating a corporate newsroom, and infrastructure that better connects marketing with the wider business. That is why more companies are hiring “Storytellers.” Financial marketing teams need people who can embed themselves in the business, identify stories, and work with experts or clients to turn insights into engaging content. Someone who can sit in a morning meeting and go “wow, that would be of interest to our audience” and then be able to perhaps use an iPhone to grab a quick interview and create a quick piece of unique content, or infographic that can sail through compliance.
Looking ahead, the firms that lead will not simply use the most AI, but embed it intelligently across insight, creativity, and decision-making. But 5 years is a long time, and those firms that can also integrate the human touch with all of this will survive.
Al Driving Revenue, Compliance, and Client Experience
Andy Seibert
CEO and Founder
Over the next five years, AI will move from a back-office efficiency tool to a core driver of revenue, compliance, and client experience in financial services. Here’s where the Imprint team thinks the deepest integration will occur: Hyper-personalized wealth management. AI will synthesize real-time market data, behavioral signals, and life-event triggers to deliver individualized investment advice at scale. Not just for ultra-high-net-worth clients, but across mass-market segments. Robo-advisory will evolve from rule-based rebalancing into genuinely adaptive portfolio management. Agentic compliance and risk. Rather than flagging anomalies in marketing materials for human review, autonomous AI agents will investigate, contextualize, and resolve compliance issues end-to-end. It’s already starting to happen at some of our clients, and it will dramatically compress marketing review and response times.
Conversations guide the way. AI-native interfaces will handle the majority of client interactions, from loan origination to claims processing. But human escalation will always be required for genuinely complex or emotionally sensitive situations. Research continues to show that even younger audiences who expect their financial institutions to heavily use AI still deem human involvement crucial for fully developing trust.
Our advice for financial firms creating their AI strategies: First, lead with trust, not capability. Companies that are clear and transparent about how they use AI will earn more confidence from clients and regulators. Second, own your data advantage. The proprietary transaction history, behavioral patterns, and relationship data are your real edge. Your marketing strategy should be built around leveraging that data. Third, design for human-AI collaboration, not replacement. The marketing teams that thrive will be those that elevate their people with AI rather than simply reducing headcount (particularly in roles where judgment and empathy remain irreplaceable). Our view on AI: move decisively, but govern rigorously. Short-term gains from rushing never outweigh the long-term value of quality.
Five years from now, AI will be less visible as a standalone tool and more embedded throughout financial services workflows. AI agents will move beyond answering prompts and creating content to coordinating multi-step tasks across a firm’s systems. Example use cases include preparing advisors for meetings, monitoring portfolios, supporting research, identifying risks and executing trades.
​
For marketers, the more substantial shift will be from content generation to connected decision-making. AI will interpret audience signals, recommend content, personalize journeys, coordinate campaigns and help arm sales teams and relationship managers. Used well, it could make marketing more relevant and responsive.
But that does not make every application a good one. Questions around accuracy, privacy, regulations and brand safety remain unresolved. There is also a strategic risk. As firms adopt new models and automate more marketing communications, financial brands could become less distinctive when differentiation matters most. More content and more personalization do not automatically create stronger engagement.
​
At Living Group, we believe firms should treat AI as a supplement to human expertise, not a replacement for it. Firms must decide where automation adds value, where human judgment is essential and which interactions should remain personal. AI can improve speed, consistency and relevance, but it cannot replace the human connection and empathy that build trust and move people to act.
Over the next five years, AI’s integration into financial services marketing will evolve from simple automation to a sophisticated integrated AI model. Rather than just streamlining workflows, AI will act as the co-architect that enables marketers to deliver hyper-personalized, contextually aware experiences at an unprecedented scale. The future of financial marketing lies in solving a critical consumer need: the demand for wellness. That isn’t a typo or a mistake. Proprietary research conducted by MERGE reveals that financial wellness is a key contributor to whole-person health, and establishing a sense of financial control is the primary driver in unlocking positive, sustained financial and health behaviors.
Ultimately, being financially in control makes people feel oriented, capable, safe, and supported. For marketers, this shifts the mandate. AI allows us to move away from generic, product-centric campaigns and instead provide a personalized journey designed for control and supported by education. The next five years: Hyper-personalization in action By 2031, AI will weave into existing business practices by synthesizing real-time data—such as shifting market conditions, life stages, and immediate behaviors—to deliver predictive, dynamic, hyper-localized content. It will help marketers develop individualized narrative journeys that provide structure and clarity.
Strategic advice for financial firms
To capitalize on this shift, financial services brands must rethink their approach: Move beyond the message: Wellness and financial control must become your operating system. Use AI to build tools and scalable, one-to-one experiences that actively give power back to the user. Build contextual awareness: Invest in AI models that help marketers to understand the moment a customer is in through real-time signals, ensuring that outreach feels supportive and intuitive rather than intrusive. By leveraging AI to deliver what the consumer needs, in context, when they need it, financial institutions will transition from mere product vendors to indispensable, trusted life partners.
Authenticity Over Automation: Al and Human Advantage
Erin Slater
VP, Financial Services
Strategic Growth
AI will become increasingly deeply embedded across financial services over the next five years, helping with everything from generating predictive customer insights and hyper-personalized content to delivering real-time service and enabling compliance support. The firms that win, however, will not simply be the ones using AI the most. They will be the ones using it most authentically.
The financial services sector has long struggled with the perception of being a “sea of sameness.” As AI makes it easier for every brand to generate polished content, automate campaigns and optimize messaging, that risk only grows. If every firm relies on basically the same tools, prompts and data patterns, the result is more uniformity when what brands really need is differentiation. My advice: Use AI to enhance your brand, not replace your humanity.
The most effective marketing and communications strategies will still be grounded in a clear voice, a strong point of view and a deep understanding of the people you serve. AI can accelerate execution, but authenticity, empathy, trust and emotional intelligence remain uniquely human advantages. Especially in an industry built on relationships and confidence.
Customers don’t just want efficiency; they want reassurance, transparency and connection. The financial firms that stand out will be those that combine AI-driven intelligence with a distinct, authentic brand identity and a genuinely human, empathetic experience.
Technology can scale content, but it can’t manufacture credibility or purpose. In the future, being unmistakably human may become the greatest competitive advantage of all.
Al as Material for Human Progress
in Finance
John Paolini
Partner and Chief Creative Officer
Five years from now, financial services will be the proving ground for AI’s real promise. AI will be embedded in every inflection point of a client’s financial life—not as a chatbot answering FAQs, but as an intelligent presence helping someone author their own financial self. What do I mean by self-authorship? For the first time in human history, everyday Americans will have the coherence at scale to not just get answers but to truly understand the why and the how behind financial products and services, not just the what. The opaque landscape that once required an RIA to navigate will be in our hands. The brand brief for financial firms, however, is both simpler and harder than it sounds. Financial services has always been in the trust business. AI doesn’t change that—it amplifies it, in both directions.
Deploy AI to cut costs and headcount, and every fear the skeptics carry will be confirmed. Deploy it to genuinely serve people in the most consequential moments of their financial lives, and you have something rare: a brand that earns belief and belonging. The brands that will define this decade are not the ones who automate the fastest. They are the ones who show up most meaningfully when it matters: when someone doesn’t know if they can retire, when a family is underwater, when the market is terrifying and the client needs a steady hand.
Stop marketing AI as a product feature and start using it as a material for human progress. And most importantly: do not let your AI story become someone else’s villain narrative by default. The financial services industry has a credibility problem it has spent decades trying to solve. AI is either the thing that compounds that problem, or the thing that finally helps you transcend it.
From Al Adoption to Intentional, Human-Centered Fluency
Ted Birkhahn
Managing Director
The Next Five Years: From AI Adoption to AI Fluency Most financial firms treat AI as a tool — something you “use” for a discrete task. In five years, AI won’t be a feature bolted onto existing processes; it will be woven into the connective tissue of how firms operate, communicate, and build trust with their customers. We’ll see three shifts in particular.
First, AI will move from back-office efficiency to front-line relationship-building, personalizing client communications at a scale and level of specificity previously impossible. At the same time, compliance guardrails become embedded rather than reactive.
Second, marketing and content functions will operate as human-AI teams by default, with professionals spending less time producing first drafts and more time on judgment, strategy, and the nuanced editorial calls that machines can’t make.
Third, the firms that win will be those that have built proprietary knowledge systems — e.g., AI fluent in their voice, their products, and their regulatory reality rather than relying on generic, off-the-shelf capability. For financial marketers, the temptation is to chase the newest AL capability. The firms that pull ahead will instead invest in the foundation, including clean data, clear brand voice, documented compliance standards, and a workforce trained to collaborate with these tools rather than fear or unquestioningly trust them.
Additionally, it’s crucial for financial firms to retain human judgment instead of relying solely on AI. While AI can easily generate competent but forgettable content, in an industry where trust is paramount, true differentiation will come from human insights, perspectives, and authenticity, qualities that AI cannot replicate on its own.
The firms that thrive won’t be the ones with the most advanced AI, but the ones who deploy it with the most intention. Front-line personalization builds trust when a human still owns the relationship. Human-AI teams only outperform when people bring the judgment that machines lack. And proprietary knowledge systems only differentiate when they’re fluent in something worth amplifying — your distinct voice, point of view, and reason for being.
Action to Consider
Based on the above agency insights, Gramercy Institute has synthesized the collective wisdom and sentiments into a set of recommendations to financial marketers.
​
12 Recommendations to Financial Marketers on Maximizing Their own Team's Marketing Success and Business Efficiency:
1. Establish Al governance that prioritizes accuracy, privacy, compliance, transparency, and client trust across every marketing use case.

2. Audit, clean, unify, and "permission" data before deploying personalization, predictive scoring, or Al-driven audience segmentation.
​
3. Apply Al first to uncover unmet needs, intent signals, content gaps, and high-propensity accounts, not merely content volume.

4. Train Al systems on approved brand voice, products, compliance standards, proprietary knowledge, and audience priorities.

5. Keep humans accountable for editorial judgment, financial accuracy, emotionally sensitive interactions, and final compliance approval.

6. Create a human-led corporate newsroom that captures original expert perspectives, timely stories, and distinctive market insights.
​
7. Use Al to repurpose approved flagship content across channels while preserving context, accuracy, voice, and subject-matter intent.

8. Build contextual, permission-based journeys around life events, financial wellness, education, and customers' preferred formats.
9. Pilot Al agents for bounded workflows-research synthesis, campaign coordination, advisor preparation, and compliance pre-screening, before scaling.

10. Measure Al success through trust, relevance, conversion quality, retention, speed, and compliance outcomes, not output quantity.

11. Invest in ongoing Al fluency so marketers can prompt critically, validate outputs, challenge assumptions, and retain core skills.

12. Position Al as a way to improve financial understanding and human support, never use it simply as automation or for headcount reduction.
For More Information Regarding Gramercy Institute membership, sponsorship and future event tickets, contact
​