EUROPEAN EXECUTIVE SUMMIT 2022

October marks the return of the Forum’s invitation-only Executive Summit, this time back in the South of France.

In this year’s program we will be looking at the market outlook, vulnerable customers, changing consumer behaviours, brand survival, and examining effective organisational output. The Summit also poses an opportunity for the most senior FS marketing leaders to meet with their peers, share their learnings and connect.

Please check the website for more speaker updates.

Please note that this is a by invitation only.

The Agenda

Wednesday 5 October

17:00 WELCOME DRINKS RECEPTION

19:30 DINNER AND KEYNOTE SPEECH (TBC)

21:45 DRINKS AT THE BAR & NETWORKING

Thursday 6 October

08:00 BREAKFAST

09:15 SESSION I: KEYNOTE (Moira Clark, Professor of Strategic Marketing and Director and founder of The Henley Centre for Customer Management) Moira Clark will kick off the first day of the summit by considering some of the key challenges facing marketers including culture, climate, and the critical linkages between employee behaviour and business performance.

09:45 SESSION II: EMBRACE YOUR TOMORROW: THE ST JAMES'S PLACE BRAND JOURNEY (Claire Blackwell, Chief Client and Reputation Officer, SJP & Monica Ralli, Head of Brand Implementation, SJP) Claire Blackwell, Chief Client and Reputation Officer at St Jame’s Place, will lead a session on SJP’s successful Brand Project. This project which has been three years in the making, and is still in implementation, has been as much about organisation culture and business strategy as it has about brand itself. Claire will take us through their journey, covering the background and approach, and give a candid view of lessons learnt.

10.30 SESSION III: BRAND IS A TEAM EFFORT (Hazel Pitchers, Founder of Merakiting Ltd) In an industry saturated with similar products, how do you make your marketing stand out above the rest? Does this start in the boardroom with the marketing team, or does it start with the team culture itself? Established brands are seeing their campaigns being blown out of the water by emerging, disruptive firms that have the capacity to unite their marketing teams through a strong sense of brand awareness, company loyalty and overall sense of unity – things that can often be lost in bigger corporations. Could there be larger lessons to be learned from these small, disruptive competitors?

11.15 COFFEE BREAK

11:45 SESSION IV: HOW TO STAND OUT AND NOT FIT IN (Bradley Gamage, Senior Client Partner and Senior Director, Publicis Sapient) Experience is the battleground in banking and, increasingly, the wider financial services sector. Almost 9 out of 10 companies say they compete primarily on customer experience. Not surprising then, that 75% say their top objective is to improve the customer experience – this session will unpack moving from ‘pirates’ to pom-poms… Intrigued?

12:30 LUNCH

14:00 SESSION V: SUSTAINABILITY AND BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE (Greg Davies, Head of Behavioural Science, Oxford Risk) Analysing consumer behaviour using behavioural science methodology, Greg Davies will take us through how and why clients wish to engage with green and more sustainable financial services products, along with why there is often a disconnect between what the consumer wants and what they do in practice. How can using behavioural approaches to sustainability help us close the gap between intention and action, and get consumers to engage with these products the way that they really want to?

14:45 SESSION VI: ESG BREAKOUT SESSION (Campbell MacPherson, Change Strategist and Author) Is ESG suffering the same fate as the other well-meaning acronyms of the past, and is this changing the way your firm is approaching ESG? Although a well-intentioned set of values, issues have arisen with the usage of ESG as a metric: Greenwashing has now arguably become an industry in its own right, the three metrics are often in conflict with one another, and many companies use the term as a catch-all one size fits all definition. What are you doing to counteract these issues, and how have they impacted the operations of your business?

16:30 FREE TIME OR SIGHTSEEING TRIP TO ST. PAUL DE VENCE

19:30 DRINKS RECEPTION ON THE TERRACE

20:00 DINNER

22:00 DRINKS AT THE BAR & NETWORKING

Friday 7 October

08:00 BREAKFAST

09:15 SESSION VII: IMPLEMENTING CX RIGHT (Christopher Brooks, Managing Director, Lexden CX) How does your business handle customer experience? Christopher Brooks will take the lead for this session, outlining the common problems businesses encounter when embarking upon a customer experience strategy without a proven methodology to adopt or an operating model to govern their efforts, as well as proving the value of adopting these successfully using real-world successful outcomes.

09:45 SESSION VIII: INVESTING AMID A STRUCTURAL REGIME CHANGE (Tim Craighead, Senior European Strategist, Bloomberg Intelligence) Events of the last 2 years are combining with longer-term trends to drive a critical inflection that will impact investing for yours to come. Specifically, the pandemic is serving to exacerbate three powerful secular themes – deglobalisation, decarbonisation and demographics – that are spurring a regime change towards a more uncertain landscape. Investors will still need to analyse cyclical trends, but within the context of elevated inflation, interest rates and volatility. We see opportunities into 2023, but the path to get there could be messy.

10:30 SESSION IX: MARKET POSITIONING BREAKOUT SESSION + COFFEE BREAK (Campbell MacPherson, Change Strategist and Author) Are we in danger of fiddling while Rome burns? With the Bank of England forecasting inflation rates of 10%, UK domestic power bills tripling and mortgage interest rates set to follow suit, an increasing number of people will have to make the choice between heating and eating this winter. Meanwhile, stock markets are rebounding and bank profits are soaring, reaching dizzying new heights. Are we at risk of alienating consumer bases, and how should we change our market positionings to reassure them that we’ll remain on their side through the difficult times ahead.

12:30 LUNCH

14:00 SESSION X: INTERVIEWS ON THE TERRACE (David Cowan, Managing Director, The Financial Services Forum) Concluding another year’s summit, we take some time to reflect on all we’ve learned this year – both in the sessions we’ve attended and also from the conversations we’ve been having over dinner or a cup of coffee.

15.00 CONCLUDING REMARKS

15:15 SUMMIT CLOSES AND DELEGATES DEPART Phased departures to the airport

**THIS SCHEDULE MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE**