Group CMO, Barclays
Barclays has long believed in the power of sport to forge deep emotional connections – and with Nina Bibby as group CMO, it’s doubling down.
Appointed in September 2023 to the newly created role, Bibby brought heavyweight experience from O2 and Barclaycard. Since joining, she has overseen a renewed focus on football partnerships, with Barclays extending its 23-year relationship with the Premier League and renewing its title sponsorship of the Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship.
Outside of football, the bank has also partnered with Wimbledon and Lords, with Bibby describing sport as a “profound” way for brands to engage people and “open conversations”.
Bibby has also overseen smarter local targeting. A 2024 geo-targeted campaign to raise awareness of under-used Barclays Local sites reached more than 4 million people and increased footfall by 24%, leading it to win the Marketing Week Award for Excellence in Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning.
The bank posted a pre-tax profit of £8.1bn in 2024, with the first quarter of 2025 off to a strong start, up 19% year on year.
CMO, Lloyds Banking Group
Suresh Balaji has spent more than 25 years criss-crossing the globe, moving back and forth between India, Dubai, Hong Kong and London. He has been based in the UK since joining Lloyds Banking Group in October 2023.
“I’m like a kid in a candy store… It’s possibly the best job I’ve had,” Balaji recently told Marketing Week. In his words, Lloyds is currently undergoing the “UK’s largest fintech transformation”.
Balaji is overseeing the modernisation of Lloyds’ brand, marketing and customer experience across its full banking portfolio, as the group delivers its five-year strategic plan. In late 2024, he led a refresh of its 16 brands, launching a new brand positioning – ‘Lloyds Moves Everyone Forward’ – and its biggest-ever multichannel campaign.
It’s the first social-led campaign Lloyds has run, and he says the impact was immediate, particularly among younger audiences. Balaji has cited record spikes in app downloads, package account signups and social media sentiment. He has also introduced a more “dynamic” approach to effectiveness, including the hire of a head of effectiveness to help optimise marketing in real time.
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CMO, NatWest Group
Margaret Jobling has shown herself to be a stickler for brand consistency. On joining NatWest Group in 2020, she embarked on a mission to improve marketing’s credibility and bring genuine purpose into the brand, culminating in the launch of the bank’s creative platform, ‘Tomorrow Begins Today’, the following year. It captures the company’s mission to make banking more accessible to more people.
Four years on, NatWest continues to build on the platform. Its latest brand campaign targets entrepreneurial young people with a social-first strategy, with creators and influencers key to bringing the campaign to life throughout the year. NatWest is no stranger to TikTok and Snapchat, making use of these platforms for its Team GB Olympics campaign last year.
An advocate for marketing effectiveness, Jobling says NatWest “measures everything”, from colleague sentiment to ROI. The business delivered a strong financial performance in 2024, with operating profit before tax rising to £6.2bn and 500,000 new customers joining the bank. It followed that up with a 36% jump in profits in Q1 2025, comfortably beating analyst forecasts.
Vice-president of marketing and growth, Monzo Bank
An advocate for the commercial power of creativity, AJ Coyne joined Monzo in early 2024 from payments fintech Klarna. His is a first-of-its-kind role for the digital bank, which released its first brand campaign in five years just months after his arrival.
‘Money Never Felt Like Monzo’, the bank’s second-ever brand ad, drove record awareness, a 21% uplift in brand value, and helped Monzo win The Marketing Society’s Brand of the Year.
To support the campaign and fuel growth, Monzo boosted marketing spend by 77% to £97.4m during its 2024/25 financial year. It was a record-breaking year for the bank, which saw revenue rise 48% to pass £1bn for the first time, while adjusted profit before tax hit £114m (an eightfold increase), and customer numbers grew by 2.4 million. The bank also recorded an NPS of +70.
Under Coyne’s guidance, Monzo has shifted to a pulsing strategy with more frequent brand activity. It found success tapping into “awkward money moments” during reality TV, while using humour and gamification to engage consumers, all part of its mission to “make money work for everyone”.
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Global chief growth & marketing officer, Revolut
Antoine Le Nel spent his first three years building Revolut’s brand and global marketing team from scratch as vice-president of growth. In June 2024, after the fintech tripled in size, he was promoted to chief growth and marketing officer, a role created to “take the brand to more inspirational ground”.
That has meant dialling down the product focus and adding more emotion to the brand. In 2024, Revolut launched its first members-only event, ‘The Revolutionaries’, a two-day London festival of music, talks and exclusive content. This year, it rolled out a global brand campaign, ‘Money Possibilities’, designed to position Revolut as a premium disruptor with the potential to become “the biggest bank in the world”.
To reinforce that elite feel, Le Nel is also planning high-impact activity such as airport advertising and a premium sports partnership with the NBA. Revolut reached 50 million customers in 2024 – including 10 million in the UK – and more than doubled pre-tax profits to £1.1bn, as revenue jumped 72% to £3.1bn.
Le Nel also launched Revolut’s two-year Marketing Graduates Pathway, supporting the next generation of marketing talent.
Group chief customer officer, Nationwide
Catherine Kehoe is on a mission to spotlight how Nationwide’s mutual model sets it apart from traditional banks, and above all else, reward its members. One of her first actions after joining in early 2023 was launching the Fairer Share initiative, which gives eligible customers a £100 share of Nationwide’s annual profits.
This year’s payout followed the ‘Big Nationwide Thank You’ campaign, fronted by Sir Trevor McDonald, which gave customers an extra £50. In total, the building society returned £1bn to over 4 million members, following record growth in retail deposits, mortgage lending and profit before tax.
Nationwide has upped its focus on humour on Kehoe's watch, with the business evolving its ‘A Good Way to Bank’ platform starring Dominic West. Last year’s ‘In Your Best Interest’ landed in the top 8% of all UK ads for creative effectiveness, according to Kantar. Its sequel, ‘Mist Me’, introduced West’s on-screen daughter to target younger customers.
Kehoe was also chair of judges at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards, where she urged the industry to work together to raise the bar for marketing effectiveness.
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Chief customer officer, wealth and personal banking, and CMO, HSBC UK
Becky Moffat thrives on connection, both with customers and her colleagues. She describes her leadership style as that of a “deep collaborator”, connecting the dots across business functions. Since joining HSBC in 2021, she has broadened the bank’s marketing approach, including more localised and immersive campaigns.
In February, Moffat launched ‘Everything’s Premier’, an OOH-focused campaign promoting HSBC’s Premier banking proposition. She described it as a “bold new creative direction that will stand us apart from the competition”.
This summer, she was promoted to chief customer officer for wealth and personal banking, alongside her ongoing UK CMO role, a move reflecting her influence and the growth opportunities she sees in “deepening” HSBC’s customer relationships. The promotion follows a strong 2024 for HSBC, with pre-tax profit rising to $32.3bn (£25.6bn), up from $30.3bn (£24bn) in 2023.
Moffat also sits on the IPA Effectiveness and Effie councils and serves as a non-executive director for tourism startup City Unscripted.
CMO UK, Hiscox
Fiona Mayo believes the core skills and principles of marketing apply across all sectors. After senior roles in telecoms and energy, she joined specialist insurer Hiscox in 2022 and quickly set about embedding marketing excellence and reigniting the brand.
This year marks the third year of ‘The Most Disastrous Campaign Ever’, which was launched to counter an overreliance on performance marketing and declining brand metrics. The bold and humorous campaign flipped that approach, using media space to mimic the very mistakes Hiscox insures against. Recent iterations include the ‘Bad Knockoff’ radio ad and an OOH campaign that cheekily borrows other brands’ iconic slogans – both highlighting the risks of copyright infringement.
The campaign has delivered tangible results: branded search is up 46%, click-through rates in UK Direct rose over 50%, and broker feedback has signalled stronger brand perceptions. It has also won 18 industry awards to date.
To win internal buy-in, Mayo says commercial language and robust measurement were key. She encourages other B2B brands to ditch the jargon and adopt a more “human voice”.
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Chief customer officer, Compare the Market
Tom Wallis’s role has evolved considerably since he first joined Compare the Market as chief revenue officer in 2023.
Last year, the business restructured its marketing leadership team, removing the CMO role and appointing former holder Mark Vile as chief brand officer, while Wallis became chief customer officer. The move aimed to sharpen the business’s focus on short-term performance and long-term brand building.
Following the departure of Vile in July, Wallis’s role transitioned again, meaning he now has end-to-end responsibility for brand, customer and performance marketing, with the brand team reporting to him.
Central to the brand is its long-standing meerkat characters, Aleksandr Orlov and Sergei. The latest evolution is Meerchat, a talk-show format featuring the meerkats interviewing celebrities at events like the MTV EMAs – part of a broader push to reach younger audiences.
Compare the Market’s strategy appears to be paying off. In the year to June 2024, the business posted a pre-tax profit of £221.6m – up from £152.3m the year before, on the back of nearly £100m in additional revenue.
Chief customer and marketing officer, Aviva
Cheryl Toner joined Aviva more than four years ago, bringing with her CMO experience from NatWest Group and AXA UK.
Last year, she oversaw a brand refresh aimed at modernising perceptions of the business. Assets and imagery were overhauled with new colours, refreshed logos and an updated tone of voice.
The updated identity took centre stage in a new instalment of Aviva’s ‘Make it Click’ campaign, which explored the emotional side of financial decision-making through the story of a family-run restaurant. YouGov BrandIndex data shows Aviva is significantly outperforming its competitors on several key brand metrics, including customer satisfaction, value and quality perceptions, as well as its overall index score.
The business also stepped up its partnerships – including tie-ups with Amazon and fitness coach Joe Wicks – to help the brand connect more emotionally with consumers.
Adjusted operating profit rose 20% to £1.77bn in 2024, beating analyst forecasts and pushing shares to their highest level since 2018. The insurer also added 1.3 million net new UK customers, with 5.4 million people now holding two or more Aviva policies.
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