Where?

All major head office centres.

Employers?

All major financial services companies.

Marketing in financial services

Banks and insurers have a number of specialist areas. One of the most important is marketing. Indeed, many banks and insurers offer a wider range of marketing positions than any other sector of the economy.

As a career, marketing offers a multitude of options. It covers everything from planning and executing advertising campaigns to complex analysis of customer behaviour. It also includes press and public relations. Within each of these areas, there will be a wide range of both strategic and operational roles – all of them vital in ensuring that the organisation’s brand is projected in the right way to the right audiences, and that both product and customer strategies are based on proper analysis.

For the budding marketeer, the sheer variety of roles is exciting in itself, but it also means that there are roles available to fit a wide range of character traits. For example, if you are good at communicating with individuals and can create a persuasive case, then press relations may be a good area for you. If you are good with numbers, then both banks and insurers need to get very detailed statistical profiles of their customer bases so they can work out which products will work and which will not. If you are highly creative, then working with advertising agencies and creative writers might be for you, helping to develop the ideas that will sell the company’s products to the mass market.

Joining the graduate training programme

Marketing careers often begin in the graduate programmes run by the large retail and clearing banks, together with the large insurers. Investment banks do have marketing teams, but they tend to be very small, and they often like to have people who already have some understanding of the financial markets before they join. Having said that, the investment banks do have large presentation teams, which can provide a good entry point.

As a graduate entering the marketing function directly, you will almost certainly be expected to have a 2:1 – although the subject of your degree is not usually an issue, since jobs exist for both the numerate and the creative. On the other hand, if you join the graduate programme in a general role with a 2:2, there may well be opportunities to move into marketing at a later date.

Training

Marketing departments are not huge, and some banks and insurers will only recruit into it on an occasional basis. Programmes should include opportunities to move between disciplines, in order to establish which suits you best. The three main areas you will move between are:

• media relations
• customer insight/research
• marketing and communications

Together, these give you scope to develop your powers to persuade journalists, to measure customer behaviour, and to develop marketing activity creatively.

However, most banks and insurers are keenly focused on the need to understand the business, so expect to do some 'grunt work' in a branch or elsewhere. You will also quite probably spend a lot of time outside the central marketing function, working with individual business units and getting to know their operations – both in the front line and in the unit's management team.

As part of this programme of development you may be required to take formal qualifications. You may well be expected to undertake qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (http://www.cim.co.uk) to develop your abilities in the main functions of marketing. You may have to demonstrate your understanding of financial services, at least showing you have a grasp of the fundamentals of the products, and here you may be asked to undertake some ifs School of Finance qualifications.

Rewards can be very good when entering the marketing stream. At one time, marketing people all wanted to work for independent agencies because of the higher rewards. These days, however, in-house teams are equally well paid. In 2007, one UK banking group offered graduate-entry marketeers a training salary of £24,000, plus a regional allowance of £4,000. As most of these jobs were in London, that meant an effective starting salary of £28,000, plus a signing-on fee of between £2,000 and £4,000.