Finance leaders look to reputation data to see around corners

With the right intelligence, it can spot unknown risks and make the most of emerging opportunities, enabling complex storytelling and narratives that enhance a brand’s reputation. The global communications consultancy builds brand strategies and leverages a combination of ​​paid, earned, shared and owned channels to amplify the messages of clients of all sizes, from heavyweights such as American Express, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley to fintechs like Avant and Yieldstreet. 

But serving such a wide gamut of clients presents a challenge. How does Vested deliver the same high-quality marketing and communications insights for both major institutions and smaller startups, each with their own unique needs and goals? The company had previously tried a number of different data providers, but struggled to access the depth of intelligence each brand needed to make more informed decisions on reputation and strategy. 

Amber Roberts, US CEO of Vested: “With a growing client base of both large and smaller financial organizations, we knew we needed a better way to make sense of data, understand what’s driving reputation and maintain the quality of advice our clients deserve. Signal AI had both the sophistication and functionality to meet our range of needs.”

Providing a competitive edge with External Intelligence

Vested turned to Signal AI to track and analyze each client’s external environment, encompassing a broad range of sources from top periodicals to premium industry content, access premium content from sources like the Financial Times and Money Matters, and strategically measure reputational drivers, such as financial performance, sustainability and corporate culture for example. Thanks to Signal’s AI-powered search and measurement capabilities, Vested has been able to consistently demonstrate ROI to its clients by identifying emerging trends and measuring the impact of PR campaigns against areas that are important to the business. By aligning how brands measure their reputation with KPIs of the wider organization, Vested can help internal comms teams demonstrate how their efforts are turning the dial for the business. 

Every client has its own set of specific reputational goals and challenges – something that’s especially true in a heavily regulated and fast-paced industry like finance, where news events can rapidly influence a company’s share price and market value. 

Vested leverages Signal AI to build searches with AI-powered topics in a matter of seconds instead of using lengthy searches with multiple terms. By slashing the time it takes to track media coverage, the agency can focus on extracting insights from the data on each client’s specific products, objectives and competitors. Working across more than 50 clients, Vested’s teams might have once been stretched by the amount of monitoring and measurement required. But thanks to utilizing the intuitive Signal AI platform, teams across the globe can access the same data within dedicated sections for each client, saving even more time on analyzing coverage and extracting insights.

Vested ensures it has a finger on the pulse of the latest issues impacting the finance industry, whether that’s proposed regulation in the cryptoworld, advances in applying machine learning to consumer banking, credit or lending, or decisions to make sustainable investing more robust. Armed with this intelligence, Vested’s teams can use it to inform pitch proposals to new clients and quickly get up to speed on what’s driving their reputation, uncovering insights a prospective client might not even be aware of.

Delivering qualitative insights to clients

With AI providing external intelligence on each client’s environment, Vested can spend more time adding layers of insight and recommending actions, such as how a competitor’s investment into a key business line might require an increase in PR activities as well as rethinking a product offering. Consequently, Vested not only acts as data-driven advisors on reputation but on corporate strategy more broadly.

Thanks to Signal AI, it’s now easier for Vested’s global teams to parse enormous volumes of data and quantify what’s really driving the reputation for their customers. Vested’s account teams create insights reports by combining analysis on topics the client cares about, powerful metrics around sentiment and salience, and visuals provided by Signal AI’s Dashboards. These reports identify reputational strengths, risks and opportunities, as well as areas of whitespace the client could exploit, and performance against key competitors in areas that are important to the organization.

Armed with next-level external intelligence, Vested’s clients are equipped to protect their reputation and capitalize on the right opportunities in even the most volatile moments in the market. CEOs, CMOs and CFOs are informed by Signal data on how PR efforts are affecting the wider goals of the business and how they’re performing against key competitors. 

Amber Roberts, US CEO of Vested: “Across our client base, from legacy financial institutions to emerging fintechs and industry organizations, we’ve been able to demonstrate a deeper qualitative and quantitative measurement dashboard with data that is both informative and actionable, and can be leveraged in strategic, executive level conversations about business, sales, marketing and communications goals.”