There, she led award winning teams, implemented industry leading technology and championed a customer focused marketing approach across multi billion dollar businesses.

Today, she's here to share her insights on leading marketing functions, executing large scale projects and driving innovation within the financial services industry. Amy, welcome to The Growth Engine. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Amy, reflecting on your history, rich history in the industry, what experiences sort of led you to fill and kind of led you to this part and also be prepared to take on the role of CMO at LSEG?

Yeah, so I've been in financial services marketing on the B2B side for about twenty years now, which I can't actually believe, but there's obviously been various phases of my career that have led me to this point, which has been quite the journey when I reflect on that. And I think some of the sort of key areas that I would really pull out of that journey would be things like managing teams. That's been a really important growth area of mine. So if I look back at the various companies I've worked for, I think that really started around the Dow Jones era where I took on a larger team and it was a more kind of geographically spread team as well.

So since the time at Dow Jones, I've definitely stepped into bigger and bigger sort of management roles and sort of reflecting on on those teams and the development and the growth and the success of those teams has been absolutely, sort of critical as I've, as I've sort of progressed through, through my career. I would also say that one of the key moments as well was moving from more regional based marketing to global.

And that's quite a daunting thing to take on. When you're sort of used to certain regions, you know, everybody's comfortable in their home market and their domestic market, but actually when you then really expand your remit and expand your coverage into other countries and continents, you've got to start to think quite differently. So when I've moved, for example, to, Thompson Reuters, that's when I really moved from a more EMEA or Europe based role to much more global. And in that move, it was really trying to manage my own time, you know, getting on early with the APAC region, maybe finishing a bit later on the Americas side, and then making your day work for those different teams, respecting different cultures, respecting different time zones, making sure that you're bringing teams together, making them feel like they belong and that they're part of something bigger, but each area is, is important and relevant in itself as well.

I really reflecting that for the, for the whole company. Another area I really think is important. And I reflect on for a lot of marketers and especially in the B2B space is around that trade off or that balance between demand based sort of marketing and brand marketing. And there's a lot of conversations that go on about, you know, budget allocation and time and resource allocation to those two disciplines. And when I was at S and P global, I definitely found that my experience in the demand side was of course incredibly important, incredibly useful, you know, being a really commercially minded marketer. But then to add onto that, the importance of brand and that longer term, reputation and that build a brand in the industry and the wider world that became more to the forefront in that role as well. So that's been, that's been quite a big one.

And then I would say just influencing at the C suite. So that's been very important as well. So thinking about your stakeholders across large, complex global businesses, you've got to be very mindful of the different needs of the business and the different objectives in the business as well. And being able to align marketing and align marketing goals to those objectives to make sure that you're really driving that success for the business.

And it makes sense for the C suite as well, because sometimes marketing, we can talk in our own language and our own jargon. And so you've gotta bring it back to what is the company actually trying to achieve and how is the marketing function actually adding into that as well. And then I'd say lastly, bringing it back to LSEG, adding all of that together. Plus I would say now being in a fully centralized function, it's that balance between the corporate group level that, that we, that we kind of really focus on at the L seg group level.

And then the importance of the divisions that make up the group. So we have teams that are more aligned to the group level, the horizontal, the corporate level, and then you have vertically aligned teams that are at the, the, the divisional level and balancing again, the needs of those different parts of the business and making sure that it's all coming together in a holistic way that the marketing team understands and the business understands, then that's been crucially, crucially important as well.

That's fantastic. Thank you. L seg then, let's focus in on that.

Yep.

You've been you've been in the role now just over a year, I believe. Yes. Yeah. It's been a busy year as we're about to to find out.

If we go back almost to the beginning, when you took on the role, what what challenges were you brought in to to tackle? Obviously, big role, global CMO. There must have been some underlying challenge that they were like, right. Let's we need something sorting here.

I'm interested in what that was, and then how did you approach that, and what did that mean was on the list for year one?

Yeah. Not just one challenge, not just one opportunity. I'm gonna reframe it to an opportunity. So LSEG has gone through a big period of integration and then transformation. So a few years ago, Elseg bought Refinitiv, which is an incredibly large company. And there was a big job at hand to integrate those two businesses. I'm massively simplifying this, but just think of a big integration project.

There were other acquisitions as well, and a lot of ambitious and pretty enormous growth in the business as well. So, the few things on the list, just a few small things was a brand transformation, which was simplifying the brand, rebranding the entire group and launching the first real group brand campaign globally. So it was the first one aligned to that is a digital transformation.

So with all of those companies coming together and the big growth of the business, it was about the websites. And I mean, again, massively simplifying, but the technology that sits under the marketing function and the websites that we obviously go out to market with, and that's our digital shop front was bringing all of those websites together and simplifying that customer experience and really, aligning to that brand experience that we're also transforming as well with that was also a restructure of the marketing function. So that was really the first job.

They'd been How many are in there in the the the your team?

So in my team, it's around a hun sorry, two hundred and fifty now.

Wow. A that's a big job to restructure that Yeah. Just in itself, and that was part one.

That was part one. And the first part of the the team restructure was my leadership team. So I needed to build a really strong, robust leadership team that could work hand in hand, like I said, at the corporate group level, but also at the divisional level to make sure that we were meeting all of those diff different business needs. So yeah, the team, the team restructure was quite a big deal.

And then within that, I would say building the relationships and the reputation of marketing within the business was really important as well. So making people understand marketing, why we were there, what the value is and how to work with us in the best possible way to get the best outcomes out the team as well. And then, not to forget efficiencies and governance. And, and we don't talk about this a lot.

I don't think in marketing, but it's sort of getting your house in order, making sure that you are being fiscally responsible, that you're being very transparent with how you're investing marketing budget, that you're being very mindful of showcasing ROI, that metrics are very clear. And that the team understands that there are certain responsibilities, and efficiencies we're trying to drive from a cost and margin perspective as well. That again is talking the business, language. So we're trying to drive revenue on one hand, but we also need to be really, responsible with our spend at the same time.

That's an interesting point because that sounds like it. Listening to all of these, these points, they sound like they almost ladder and support each other, but they so you talk about efficiency and governance, but just before that, you've mentioned about driving and and starting to almost educate the business of the value of marketing, and those to me sound like they go hand in hand because you can't do one without proving the other.

Absolutely.

And presumably setting your senior leadership team in place, needed to kind of say, right, bang the drum here. This is how we're gonna run marketing. We've got this job to do within the business, all of which on their own sound like they would take a year. You tackling three of those at once. Yep. Phenomenal.

I'm still here.

Yeah. Brilliant. And and still smiling. So I I can't wait to hear how that's it's all gone.

When you start to, as I say, have the senior leadership team put this in place about, okay, we're running marketing like this. We need to prove this into the business. Was there was was that not there already within L seg? Did it not have that level of rigor, shall we say, in order to drive the significant transformation that we're talking about?

As you think about LSEG's journey, we brought a lot of different disparate marketing teams together that were actually structured in very different ways and had quite different roles within the businesses that they came from. Bringing the marketing team together as a group. It was incredibly important that we restructured in a way that really does fit the needs of the group going forward and the divisions within. So it was basically just a matter of sort of restructuring, tidying things up, putting some rigor in, in place in, in some of those teams that maybe had been a bit more disparate in terms of their focuses. So making sure everybody's super focused, knows the direction of travel and is comfortable in their roles in terms of what they're there to do and there to deliver.

Makes sense. And I guess businesses at the size of LSEG are in constant evolution. It's constantly changing.

You need to be keeping an eye on what the changing needs of the business the best that flex into the team and being able to to move and and be agile and change things at speed whilst also keeping the sort of big strategic goals in mind is is really important.

Yes. Yeah. Let's go back to the some of the the big activity that you've been focusing on. I'm fascinated in in what you're saying of again, at the beginning of how you as a as leader taking on this role and how you start to transform from thinking from being regional to global, you're now working at LSEG across the execution of this large global marketing campaign.

Can you you talk us through that that execution, what that actually I'll try and keep it brief as well because I could be here today.

I love a bit of details.

Yeah. Well, we'll see how that goes.

So if you, if we take a step back as to the job at hand, so LSEG as a brand is not as well known or has not been as well known in the past. LSEG stands for London Stock Exchange Group.

The, the, the issue within that name is that the London stock exchange is the first part of that name. So there is a misperception that we are only a stock exchange and that we're only based in London. So the job of the LSEG brand campaign was to really kind of, myth bust and really sort of reposition LSEG as a group and what we are here to do in the world in terms of serving our customers and our stakeholders and, the success that we're trying to, to build across, across the business. And so when we thought about how we, how do we build a creative concept together to, to kind of take on some of those myths that are sort of out in the market and build a campaign that, that kind of rebuffs those, but in a way that's got some warmth behind it, it's got some personality behind it.

And it actually injects a little bit of intelligent wit, which are all can feel quite risky in a brand campaign. But we we briefed an agency and we also said to them, we don't just want to cut through in b to b financial services here. We want something that really, really stands out in a B2C world really, because we don't, you know, we don't wanna put a benchmark in place that might end up with us looking and sounding like a lot of other big global companies in our, in our industry. So we decided to, to take some risks with the creative and that was an early, really interesting process in that we had, the group CEO was very bought in and, and involved from the start.

And so bringing him on that journey was was a interesting, experience as well, I'm sure for him as well as all of us, and getting him comfortable with us pushing the boundaries slightly creatively and saying, okay. Well, we're gonna do something quite different that we've never ever done before.

And this is how we want to kind of position ourselves and be perceived in the market. So that was incredibly difficult. But then when we saw the end result and the, the reaction we got actually to the end result was phenomenal. And I think most of our ex co and and our senior leaders were, I think the words were pleasantly surprised. Right. Because I think everybody just didn't know how that was gonna go. You never do.

Too bold, isn't it? Bolder the business and Yeah. Must have been, I mean, obviously you had huge belief in it. Otherwise, you wouldn't have instigated it, but Yeah. Must have been a relief as well.

It was. It was a huge relief on the day and it was and then, you know, within a week, we just started to see this momentum build. And what we'd actually done on the launch day, the, sorry, the day before the launch was an internal launch called a super stream event, which was almost like this enormous global town hall that kind of followed the sun in a lot of our major, global centers around the world.

And we launched the campaign within that kind of super stream, environment, which involved all twenty five thousand people at work in our group. Wow. So essentially we were kind of make, well, trying to make brand champions and brand ambassadors out of all twenty five thousand people around the world. So they really felt like, again, it belonged to them. They were part of it and it was something to be excited about. And so I think that's what really helped to drive the momentum behind it was all, firstly, it was kind of the slight surprise of the positioning that we'd taken and the, you know, the, the creative concept. But then once they'd sort of accepted the surprise of, oh, that's a bit different.

Than people were so excited and they were just out there in the market and just driving the momentum because I mean, we executed across fifteen major markets around the world. We went out in five different languages. So we had to translate absolutely everything, but obviously that's really important for our, for our global audience. And we went out across a plethora of different channels, you know, the big out of home plays taking over airports and stations in these major cities around the world. We took over London taxis, trams in Hong Kong.

We were on TV, which is a first, and we sponsored podcasts, and also obviously a lot of digital, really targeted programmatic kind of buying as well. But across all of those, going back to that internal, sort of build of excitement, because we did a lot out in the markets in these different cities, we had people just very naturally sharing. So they'd go and take a photograph with the campaign in, in situ and share it on social media. So we had this huge momentum just started building.

Yeah. Almost like a tidal wave that suddenly followed the Exactly.

You know, going viral. Going viral really. But it was our own people that were really driving that. And the pride that came across and the excitement was was phenomenal.

So I love that.

We were incredibly excited. And our little one minute video that was our kind of hero film at the last count at the end of last year, I think it was, it was, it's been viewed eighty eight million times now.

Goodness.

And so for B2B video and financial services, I don't think that's a normal result. So we're just so excited. It was, it was being shared just so much because people quite surprised. And the one thing that really sticks with me that the senior leaders were very kind of proud of everybody was saying my family and friends have seen this and they love it. Yeah. And they love it. And so it just felt like this sort of showing of of sort of love and affection for for LSEG as this new newly positioned group in the world.

What a wonderful story. I I love the fact that that you sort of call it the global super stream.

Yes.

Yeah.

I love that, how you've you've created twenty five thousand champions, more than that by the sounds of it, because all the families are now starting supporting and going, oh, I know what you do now.

Yes. Exact that's exactly it. Exactly it. Yeah. So people didn't feel like they had to explain every time, because it's quite complex what we all do.

That feeling of pride that you've created within all of the employees that work there, and then what was that? Was that planned? Was that, or was that a pleasant surprise off the back of it?

Mean, we of course worked hand in hand with our fabulous internal comms team who did a phenomenal job delivering the super stream and I'd be remiss to not mention them. And we definitely wanted that internal engagement. I mean, that was the design of doing that the day before we went live externally. I don't think we knew exactly how big that would get.

Yeah. And so I think the combination of doing the super stream launch, getting everybody really excited, having leaders in the different geographies around the world, getting everybody involved and then having the bigger out of home sort of quite physical campaign presence, Those two things allowed people to feel the excitement, but then actually go and do something about it. And in a in a world of sharing and liking and and social media, it's that's what people want to do. They kinda want to share with their Yeah.

Their own communities and their own their own networks. And so we kind of put the two things together. I think we built the both intentionally, but the kind of end result of both coming together, the sort of synergy you got out of that was was quite phenomenal really.

You talked about the digital estate. Yes. You talked about how that's been transformed and again, huge, huge job. You've got multiple platforms there that you're, you're, you're, you're touching. What's, what's the, impact? How do you actually measure that? From a point of view, from a impact from the brand perception point, but also customer experience, what can you tell us around that?

So yeah, again, a step back, bringing those websites together was about simplifying the journey for our customers. Because if you imagine across L seg as a group, we had many, many separate websites, completely separate with a totally different experience and a completely different look and feel. So the first job was to bring them on to get all together onto l seg dot com and to a shared platform as well. Because again, the, the journeys were all disparate and disjointed and, you know, the poor teams that have to report all of these areas and measure had to do it across many different, many different kind of disparate sites and technology stacks.

So bringing that together onto elsig dot com was, was super, super important. And what that's allowed us to do is simplify the business in terms of making sure that however anybody lands on elsig dot com, their needs can be met. I if they're looking for one of our sub brands, for example, FTSE Russell or the London Stock Exchange, they can very easily navigate there. So that's a super super simple journey for them.

It's almost the rule that you set it out by.

Exactly. It's like, this is sort of our business, but if you're looking for these sub brands, these are they're there. Very easy to find on that sort of big top navigation.

But of course, being much, you know, we really focused on, on customer centricity. It's about also allowing people to navigate based on their job role, the company type, what are they actually looking for and making sure that we're building on technology that's allowing us to get to know our customers much, much better. And also then build journeys for them and personalize content for them and the experience for them that makes everything easier and simpler.

Now on the flip side, it also makes it easier to measure because everything's in one place, everything's on one stack. The other thing to say is that with old websites can come old legacy technology. And obviously as a regulated firm and a systemically important firm, we, we can't have, you know, sort of risks and cybersecurity and, and we've got to build that resilience and robustness into our digital, capabilities as well. So that's a kind of absolute must, must do as well. So seeing the, The importance on that is really, really important, but also when you're saying about measuring, there's a lot of measurement here that is actually about legacy cost and it's taking legacy cost out of the business and setting the business up for much, much more efficient investment in the future, than investing across many different things that disconnected. We're on one journey, one tech stack, and that's our future.

So it's an important As well as designing the the digital transformation, and part of this was changing the underlying tech stack Yeah.

As well.

Building on the best that we had.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Just to check, there are, you're working to still three sixty five days in a year like all of us do.

I've got a fantastic team.

Goodness me.

That's all I will say.

Yeah. So that's that's that's huge. I mean, I've seen organizations that would just struggle to do that in, you know, across multiple years and doing a number of big things simultaneously.

Yeah. It's it's been a lot and being able to celebrate those milestones has been really important because, you know, it's hard work. It's hard. I mean, it's a great team, but it's all hands on deck all the time and a huge heavy lift for a of people and a lot of teams. And that is so appreciated across the group. So it's really important that we keep that level of kind of team spirit and motivation and and and like I say, celebrating those milestones when we hit them is is really important. It's usually celebrate and move on to the next quite quickly, but it's kinda taking a moment to say that this is important.

So I suspect that you need in order to have that level of high performance, which and and achieve the the volume of activity that that you're you're you're you're setting the the the drumbeat on, you need to keep a very supportive, effective team environment, especially when you're going through such speed of change. How do you go about managing a team of that scale and providing that support?

Yeah, and again, it's quite a disparate team in that, I think we're in over twenty countries around the world as well. So, you know, lots of locations, lots of languages, lots of cultures across the team.

If I think again back to the, of not first day, but you know, few weeks and really setting the expectations of the team, I actually launched something we called the eight ambitions of the team. And that was something that became very repetitive over the last year or so.

I won't go through all the ambitions, but it's things like we are customer centric. We are one team. We are strategic. We simplify.

We collaborate Quite simple things, but actually what we could do is then use our team meetings, the town hall type meetings, the roundtables that we do to bring those to life in lots of different ways and showcase what good looks like. Yeah. So on top of those kind of eight ambitions of the team, we really started to focus on what we call raising the bar. So the program across everything across the year is raising the bar.

So you can kind of take each one of those and find amazing examples of those from across the team. And they're not always the big shiny campaigns that have gone to, you know, they're of course really important, but there's a huge amount of work that goes on in the operational side of things. And in the efficiency driving side of things and in the automation side of things that not everybody gets to see all the time. We put a call out obviously across our sort of managers and our leaders across the team to say, it's your job to shine the light in those parts of the team that are important and showing those examples of how we're raising the bar across the team just naturally starts to get this sort of feeling of, oh, I want to be spotlighted or, or I can see what that person's doing.

I could take that example and use it in my part of the function as well. So that was quite a sort of softer thing to do at the start, but it was it sort of felt quite important. And the men the sort of momentum we've built on the back of that has been has been great. And I would say though, that being a leader of a sort of disparate global team, you do need to have a really strong operating rhythm and be very consistent and repetitive actually.

So setting up very clearly an operating rhythm of monthly town halls, you know, monthly directors calls my, my leadership team meetings, round tables in different regions, one to ones with different levels in the team, making sure that that very simple operating rhythm is in place and it is respected. Yeah. You know, we all know, we've all had leaders in the past, you know, something just gets canceled at the last minute or it's not important anymore, or they move on to something different. And I just really believe that you've got to, it's almost the, the foundations that cannot change.

And then from those foundations, can build that expectation. You can build the ambition and start to raise the bar across everything you're doing and, and celebrate those successes. So there's definitely two sides of it.

I love that. That that sort of setting the the the rhythm. Here's that. Here's the the meeting rhythm, essentially. Here's how we're gonna hold up.

And communications as well on top of those meetings, of course.

Yeah. And then the the shining the light into the areas and and giving the team leaders responsibility to shine the light. I I love that as well because those projects for me almost sound like the scaffolding that underpins all of the the grander ambitions, like the global execution of the campaign, but you couldn't have that without all of the other BAU stuff aligned and supporting in general the whole business. So it's no. It's fabulous. So that sounds like a busy year. Congratulations for the success that you've had on year one.

What does, I'm always scared to ask, what's in store next? When you start to look to the future, what's on the to do list for you and L's sake?

Brand continues to be really, really important because you can't really just go to market with a big brand campaign and then go quiet in the market. So we continue our investment into brand. We're looking at our brand foundations. And what I mean by that is the parent brand outside of the campaign last year.

It's kind of what does the two, three, five year vision look like for the brand and really building on that and starting to get the buy in and understand that journey and what that investment might look like over the next few years. The digital transformation it's, we've kind of got the foundations now in terms of that customer experience and the, integration of the technology. And we're on the kind of right technology stack now. And so it's about building that kind of personalization at scale, understanding how we're gonna use customer data platform to really get to know our customers more profile them more and be able to give them what they need when they need it.

That's quite a huge ask across the different divisions that we have across our business, because we serve lots of different types of customers in lots of different ways. But what we try and do is simplify the journey. And then we have, you know, obviously very large accounts that are very important to us as well. The sort of highest value accounts that we need to have that view across the entire group for that account to be able to personalize from an account based marketing standpoint, which I haven't mentioned yet.

We have a really great ABM function in the team that works really closely with those sort of global relationship managers of those big accounts. And that's a good example of how customer data and building personalization and raising the bar of that experience of that customer is really important. So they can see the full value of LSEG that we can deliver the full value of everything that we have to offer into that, into that account. Again, if you take the converse of that in the past, a very disparate group, doing different things feels very different, very hard to navigate.

So when you bring it all together, it's just delivering that customer experience. And this year is about really raising, raising the bar for that. The other thing that is incredibly important is our sub brands. So I've mentioned a couple, but we, we have six distinct sub brands in the market and these are incredible businesses in themselves.

So for example, we have London stock exchange. We have FTSE Russell. They are very well known brands in themselves.

We also have a new sub brand that we have called, L seg data analytics or DNA for short. That is the rebrand of the Refinitiv business, which was a multi billion dollar business or multi billion pound business that was bought by L seg, a few years ago. So launching these new sub brands with a very new kind of look and feel that's very LSEG is super important now as well. So, across those sub brands, we're taking those into market, making sure that they are highly relevant, highly targeted to the audiences they serve, but that they are also complemented by the group brand of L seg as well. So it's about simplifying the business for for our customers.

So is that almost seven individual global brand campaigns that you're embarking on as well as Yes and no in that we are going to market with those campaigns, but we are finding the thread and the reason we did the rebrand last year.

So on top of the campaign, which we talked about, we rebranded the whole group and we rebranded thousands and thousands of touch points across every business. So they look and feel and sound much more, much more consistent and much more, related in terms of the association with each other and the association with parent brand. One good example of that is, one of our sub brands is called Elseg FX.

And this is a amalgamation of many, many different foreign exchange capabilities across the asset class that LSEG owns. And again, for customers, it's quite hard to knit that together and understand everything that we did in the FX space.

So the L seg FX sub brand is simplifying that, bringing it all into one sub brand and really laying out that we are pre trade at trade post trade, this full trade life cycle across FX and where the different capabilities sit in that journey. So it's just making things much, much, much more easier to navigate, not only for our customers, but also internally as well because, you know, internally we have to understand our own business and how it all connects together.

And it seems that now that you've put that technology stack in, so you've got uniformity across all of the business and the sub brands as well. Presumably, as you you mentioned, the the ABM team, that's gonna start identifying opportunity between the different sub and supporting sales in more in more in more detail, which again is another function of the of of the marketing team. So there's that sounds again like an excite very exciting year that you've got ahead of you and your team have got ahead of them.

I'm yeah. I'm I'm I'm slightly gobsmacked at the volume of activity that you've both managed to achieve in a year, but also the scale of ambition for LSEG and that you're driving. So thank you so much for coming in today, sharing that journey that you've been on and continue to go on.

That's been fascinating. Thank you so much, Amy.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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