Financial Services
Overview
Role: Principal, Brand & Creative Leadership
Scope: Global (EMEA, APAC, Americas)
Focus: Brand governance, storytelling, global consistency
I led creative and brand direction for Invest in Progress, a global initiative designed to articulate UBS Asset Management’s long-term thinking around sustainable and impact investing.
UBS Asset Management operates in one of the most regulated and risk-sensitive environments in financial services. As client expectations around sustainability and impact investing increased, the organisation needed a clearer, more consistent way to communicate its point of view globally without compromising credibility or compliance.
- Translate complex investment thinking into clear, credible storytelling
- Maintain consistency across regions with different cultural expectations
- Align leadership, marketing, and creative teams around a shared narrative
- Operate within strict regulatory and brand governance frameworks
- This was less a creative challenge and more an alignment challenge at scale.
I was brought in to provide senior creative and brand leadership, working closely with global marketing leadership and regional teams.
My remit was to:
- Shape the overarching narrative and creative direction
- Establish guardrails for consistent execution across markets
- Enable regional teams to deliver locally relevant work without fragmentation
Key decisions included:
- Prioritising clarity and restraint over expressive creativity
- Defining a small number of core narrative principles that could scale globally
- Designing creative systems that balanced global consistency with regional nuance
- Creating governance structures that empowered teams rather than slowing them down
The guiding question throughout was:
Does this build trust at a global, institutional level?
The work translated into:
- A unified storytelling framework for sustainable and impact investing
- Multimedia content spanning digital, video and internal communications
- Clear creative standards adopted across regions
Execution was deliberately modular, allowing teams to move quickly without re-interpreting strategy.
- Improved global consistency in how sustainability and impact were communicated
- Stronger alignment between leadership intent and external messaging
- A creative framework that continued to be used beyond the initial campaign
