Barclays: the challenge of compliance

My work for Barclays is done through Clarendon Marketing, a London agency that specialises in financial sector work. I've also worked for several of Clarendon's other customers, including Lehman Brothers and Origen FS. Most of my Barclays work has involved writing copy to promote structured investments to independent financial advisors. It's a rolling campaign, with email, brochures and mailing letters as the principal media. Financial copywriting is particularly demanding because of the amount of regulation governing the sector. Everything I write for Barclays, or for any other financial institution, is scrutinised by a compliance team to ensure it complies to the standards required by the Financial Services Authority, as well as the different institutions' own policies and brand values. It's very hard to strike the right balance between developing a lively, direct and engaging concept for an ad and sticking to a stringent set of standards. Fortunately, the team at Clarendon is very friendly and easy to work with - they're also great at finding images to accompany some of the more way-out concepts I dream up ('...an animated squirrel? No problem. We do squirrels every day'). One of the hardest parts of this kind of work is explaining the benefits of the products clearly and making the whole ad interesting and engaging. Structured investment is not the world's most gripping subject, even if you're an IFA, so we try to make the emails and brochures as eye-catching and easy to read as possible. That's not easy when the benefits of the products being described are tied up in percentages, which in turn are hedged around with warnings about how markets can fall as well as rise. At the time of writing (Nov 2007) I'm continuing to work on the Barclays account. I'll keep the samples on the left updated with new work as it's completed. back to top... back to portfolio main page...