CorpComms Magazine

President Obama's Chief of Staff remarked about the economic crisis that we should 'Never let a serious crisis go to waste'. Our attempts to put in place the lessons learned from the downturn will heavily influence the outcome of this year across all spheres of life.

For those of us handling communications for financial services companies, this will see a continued emphasis on safeguarding and improving the still fragile reputations of our clients due to continued media, regulator and government scrutiny. This is also a time when consumers of such products are understandably showing a heightened interest in getting the best value. So finance will undoubtedly continue to be a topic that remains in the main news pages of the newspapers and mainstream broadcast programmes, which will no doubt be bolstered by the government's drive for nationwide financial education.  These significant and, perhaps, one-off circumstances mean an even greater need for well-crafted and considered communications that makes the outlook for our public relations sector positive.

Aside from this, other clear areas of growth are in evidence. Environmentally-friendly finance is clearly here to stay, and has perhaps been given a temporary boost by the Copenhagen conference. And the increase in the ISA limits will make this year's ISA season one of the busiest in some years for journalists and PRs alike. Other positive signs abound: as clients look to outsource their PR requirements on a 'needs must' basis recent projects have included hourly billable work, enquiries from overseas have begun again, recruitment freezes are thawing and projects long since on hold are being revisited.

Just one piece of anecdotal evidence to demonstrate this would be the recent increase in the pagination of some personal finance sections of newspapers, partly driven by the number of adverts for savings products. In the short term this means more stories that PR teams can be involved in, but in the longer term we predict this could lead to increased PR budgets.

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