From attention to AI agents: 3 finance leaders on modern marketing success

Every marketer today is navigating a landscape shifting faster than the industry can track. While no sector is immune to disruption, finance occupies a unique vantage point.

As the world’s largest profit-generating engine, banking controls the flow of capital and risk, effectively dictating the pace for every other industry. In this high-stakes environment, brands must continuously balance the urgent demand for digital innovation with the immovable realities of regulatory compliance and risk management.

That’s why we asked finance executives for their learnings from this marketing realm. Whether you’re in fintech, retail, travel, or a lean startup, their lessons offer a roadmap for any brand striving to win over the modern digital decision-maker.

Winning the 5-second battle for attention

As a finance leader, I evaluate marketing through a strict lens of efficiency. In the digital world, we live by a brutal five-second rule, that tiny window to capture people’s attention before they scroll past. Ads without recognisable faces compete with millions of cat videos and alerts. However, ads featuring a familiar face narrow that competition to the few people your audience actually cares about.

That’s why partnering with global brand ambassadors is our secret ingredient. They deliver five crucial advantages: a shortcut to attention, a transfer of trust, a boost in mental availability, an engine for search demand, and a consistent presence across channels.

Take this XTB campaign featuring footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović:

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

At XTB money works for Zlatan, not Zlatan for money.

By leading with a familiar face, our YouTube ad view-through rates jumped 30% above the category average. Because people actually wanted to watch to the end, 30% more viewers were exposed to our full message. The finance translation? We effectively spent 30% less to achieve the exact same effect.

And it turns out grabbing attention drives real, hard performance. After just three weeks in two markets, relative ad recall shot from 7.1% to 17.6%, and consideration jumped from 6.7% to 19.2%. By week four, we saw a massive 4X relative search lift for “XTB” on Google Search. This playbook is a huge reason we’ve fuelled our growth to nearly 2 million accounts.

To replicate this efficiency, avoid these common pitfalls:

• Short-term thinking: Partnerships that are too brief in terms of length don’t build real momentum.
• Content imbalance: Find the sweet spot. Don’t create too much or too little content linking your ambassador directly to the brand.
• Misallocation: Don’t treat an ambassador like a standard media placement, and never underinvest in the media buy required to promote them.

Leading with a familiar face and staying genuinely consistent doesn’t just capture attention, it builds a highly efficient business.

Trust is the only metric that matters

I’ve spent my career realising a hard truth: in marketing, it isn’t enough to be a loved brand. You have to be trusted. While the financial world is obsessed with speed and disruption, speed is replicable. Trust isn’t.

At UBS Switzerland AG, we’ve navigated 160 years of change by understanding that trust isn’t just a feeling. It’s the result of showing up consistently so clients can connect with you when it matters. From processing 2.5 million daily payments to supporting a third of Swiss households, our goal is bridging high-tech innovation with the human need for absolute reliability.

For marketers — especially in the Middle East and North Africa where there is a dynamic hub of hyper-connected consumers — leveraging tools like Google Business Profile ensures your brand is instantly accessible.

We brought this commitment to presence to life by transforming 200 of our branch profiles from static map listings into active value centres. Crucially, we made them interactive. We integrated zero-friction contact forms for instant appointments, optimised for hands-free voice searches, and built digital product shelves that displayed specific financial products tailored to each neighbourhood’s unique demographics.

By transforming these profiles into a powerhouse sales channel, we generated 11.3 million views and 442,000 direct calls across Switzerland in a year, driving over 15,000 qualified leads within 18 months. At the same time, we turned client insights into structural improvements, boosting branch satisfaction ratings from 2.1 to 4.3 stars in just two years.

This proven approach is highly relevant to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), where “near me” queries are skyrocketing. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alone, 46% of searches carry local intent, and 76% of consumers visit a physical store within 24 hours of a local search.

While digital visibility and AI search influence guarantee brands are easy to find, human connection closes the deal. By being present at over 1,000 annual local events across sports, culture, and education, we actively engage with people through the moments they care about most, proving that our trusted brand is always within reach.

Position your brand to be the “best answer” for a trusted AI agent

Imagine a world where buying groceries or booking your next getaway doesn’t start with opening an app. Instead, your trusted AI assistant handles the research, compares options, and helps you make decisions — all under your guidance.

Working in GCC markets, where digital payments are rising, I see this shift as an exciting evolution for digital commerce. We aren’t replacing the human touch. We’re using intelligent tech to make commerce smoother, safer, and — ultimately — more human.

For marketers, this means a fundamental change in how commerce is experienced, with the core principles remaining unchanged. Brands are evolving from traditional business-to-consumer models into an era of agent-enabled commerce. That means AI acts on behalf of people or businesses to safely discover, compare, and transact.

But for these digital assistants to confidently restock pantries or organise travel plans, we need a foundation of trust. That’s why we partnered with Google to introduce Verifiable Intent, an open, standards-based trust layer that creates a tamper-resistant record of authorisations. It gives consumers, merchants, and issuers cryptographic proof they can rely on. Think of it as an immutable audit trail for AI-driven purchases, binding a person’s identity to the specific instructions they gave their AI agent, and to the final transaction outcome. This mathematically proves the AI acted exactly as authorised, all while protecting the user’s privacy.

By combining tokenisation, verified credentials, and Mastercard Agent Pay — soon featuring Verifiable Intent in its APIs — we ensure AI-initiated transactions are secure, authenticated, and transparent. This captures true human intent, protects people’s data, and keeps them firmly in control.

For marketers, this changes everything. If AI agents are taking over the research and comparison phases of the buyer’s journey, your strategy must pivot from solely capturing human attention to also optimising for algorithmic discovery. Success now depends on providing clear, machine-readable signals — like highly structured product data, verifiable reviews, and consistent value propositions — that these intelligent systems can instantly process and trust. Whether you’re driving campaigns in retail, fintech, or travel, positioning your brand to be the undisputed “best answer” for a trusted AI agent is the new frontier of customer acquisition.

Agentic commerce isn’t about removing people from the journey. It’s about giving them their time back, making their daily transactions smarter, more secure, and deeply personal.