Financial services marketing is a specialism that’s easy to claim and hard to prove. Any agency can say it understands the sector. Fewer can demonstrate it through a sustained body of original thinking, built in public, with the industry’s own senior leaders as the validators.
Hub set out to build something that would do both. Not a blog. Not a white paper. A proper editorial platform, designed around the conversations senior marketing leaders in financial services are actually having, but rarely having on the record.
The result is The Growth Engine Marketing Podcast.
Hub’s target clients are CMOs, Heads of Marketing, and Investor Relations Directors at asset managers, investment trusts, and fintech businesses. They’re senior enough to be sceptical of generic agency positioning, and experienced enough to spot the difference between genuine sector knowledge and sector veneer.
This audience reads the FT. They sit in board meetings where marketing budgets are defended against investment performance data. They don’t need another article about the power of storytelling.
What they respond to is peer-level thinking: real practitioners, naming real decisions, with real context. That’s the format Hub built around.
The Growth Engine is an interview-led podcast hosted by Hub’s CEO David Hunstone. Each episode brings in a guest who has done something genuinely interesting in financial services marketing and gives them room to explain how and why it worked. It isn’t a panel discussion or a trends round-up read aloud; it’s hosted with enough sector knowledge to push past the prepared answers and get to the strategic thinking underneath.
Series 1 built the show’s credibility the direct way: strong guests, straightforward distribution across Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and a body of conversation good enough to be worth finding. With that credibility established, Series 2 marked a deliberate shift in how Hub built the audience around it. Distribution alone reaches people already looking for a podcast; it does little to reach financial services marketing leaders who aren’t yet looking. So from Series 2 onward, Hub treated YouTube as a separate, actively managed channel rather than a third feed for the same audio file, and backed it with a targeted paid media strategy aimed specifically at CMOs, Heads of Marketing, and their peers across financial services.
The results since that push began speak for themselves: over 45,000 views and more than 300 watch hours on Series 2 content alone. The split between formats tells the real story. Short-form clips do the reach work: the “We’re back with Series 2!” teaser pulled in more than 17,500 views on its own. Full episodes do the engagement work: the conversation with Rebecca Hoberg on Ninety One’s marketing playbook holds nearly 46 watch hours, the strongest of the series. Financial services marketers are watching another financial services marketer think out loud, for far longer than most B2B video content holds attention.
Every episode is also supported by a full transcript, guest profile, and key takeaways on the Hub website, making each conversation a searchable, durable content asset as well as a broadcast one.
Series 1
Series 1 ran to 31 episodes and set out to answer one question: what does marketing leadership actually look like in financial services when the people doing it speak honestly? Nick Laws brought the inside story of building NEST into one of the UK’s most recognised pension brands using behavioural economics and a rigorous test-and-learn approach. Nick Morgan of Invesco gave a forensic account of what global brand consistency actually requires in practice. Rick Cannon walked through how Schroders moved from 23rd to 5th in global sustainability brand rankings over two and a half years. The Growth Engine established itself as a credible forum for senior practitioners, not a content marketing exercise dressed up as a podcast.
Series 2
Series 2 narrowed its focus to the pressures reshaping financial services marketing right now. Ross Duncton explained how F&C Investment Trust, the oldest investment trust in the world, rebuilt its marketing for a TikTok generation. Oliver Lago described running a Consumer Duty-grounded broadcast and digital campaign across three listed trusts simultaneously, using Sky AdSmart. Gillian Elcock brought the board perspective on marketing as a governance necessity. The series addressed Consumer Duty, AI adoption, retail investor engagement, and what it means to compete for attention when an investment trust is up against Netflix.
A financial services marketing agency that can consistently attract CMOs, brand directors, campaign leads, and board members from across the sector’s most recognised institutions is not a generalist agency with a financial services practice. It’s an agency with a sustained, credible position inside the industry it serves.
The Growth Engine is the most visible expression of that position. You cannot produce 37-plus episodes at this level without the access, the knowledge, and the trust that comes from years of genuine specialism. And the way the audience around it has grown since Series 2 shows something else: Hub doesn’t just know how to make good content, it knows how to build a B2B audience around it deliberately, on purpose, aimed at the people who matter. Treating YouTube as its own channel and backing it with targeted paid media wasn’t guesswork; it was the same evidence-led approach Hub brings to client work, applied to its own platform. The podcast exists because Hub has the specialism. It keeps growing because Hub also knows how to grow it.
Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
