Communicating Through the Noise: Insights From A Financial Comms Roundtable

Talk to enough communicators and the same worry surfaces. You can do everything right and still get caught out by something nobody predicted. A post lands overnight, a politician says something loose, and the share price moves before anyone is properly awake. 

So we convened a group of senior financial and corporate communicators to talk it through. Several themes stood out. 

The trouble with saying nothing

The instinct under pressure is to clam up. When the ground keeps moving, no comment feels like the careful choice. 

It isn’t, not any more. One participant told us their old firm logged every refusal for comment in a spreadsheet and called it strategic. Most of us found that faintly absurd. 

Reporters read silence as evasion now, and if you think no one inside the business will notice, you’re sorely mistaken. 

Where you sit changes the calculation: UK leaders assume the press will run the story anyway, so they try to shape it. American chief executives often want the microphone. 

In parts of Asia, the honest answer is that speaking out can be dangerous, so teams say nothing and mean it. The hardest questions in that environment are the ones about regulators and governments, especially when journalists keep pressing for positions that companies simply cannot give, and there is less goodwill than there used to be. 

Your own channels matter more

Partly because of all this, owned channels have quietly become the main event. A company website and a LinkedIn feed let you say your piece without a hostile headline framing it for you. 

LinkedIn brings its own headache. The profile belongs to the chief executive, but it carries the company on its back, so who really owns it? Everyone agreed the writing has to be theirs, because people spot a ghost-written post in a sentence. 

That authenticity has a sting in the tail. We heard about a leader whose warm, personal posts started to grate once results slipped. The photos of him being wined and dined did not help. 

Handled with care, these channels do real work. Employee profiles carry a message further than the corporate account ever will, because people trust a colleague more than a logo. 

The audiences have merged

The old walls between investor relations, media and internal comms are mostly gone. The three used to run on separate tracks. Now they overlap, and any daylight between them shows up fast. 

Internal comms is the one rising. When a chief executive will not face the press, the employee audience becomes where the energy goes. One firm now walks its staff through results with short films and animations, and those people end up better briefed than most analysts. 

What AI is actually for

Nobody in the room was breathless about AI, which was refreshing. Some use it to knock out a first draft of a reactive line in minutes. Others keep it away from anything sensitive and limit it to ESG reporting, where the repetition suits it. 

The split that mattered was simpler. AI saves time on the routine, but it does not yet do the thinking a difficult statement needs, and pretending otherwise gets you into trouble. 

Being there still counts 

For all the talk of tools, the conversation kept coming back to something low-tech: being in the office. 

You learn so much of this job just by standing near it. You catch a half-sentence in the kitchen, or read the mood on the exec floor. Either way, you pick up something an email would never tell you. 

Proximity also opens diaries. Get to know the executive assistants and the chiefs of staff, and suddenly you are in the room when it matters. 

One person admitted to flying to their head office thirty-odd times a year (before the pandemic), and though they don’t miss the travel now, the point remains that there are just things about a company that you cannot absorb through a screen, and the best people know it. 

This is the work we do at Hanson Search. We help organisations find the communicators who can hold a reputation steady when the environment turns against them.

Whether you’re hiring senior talent or considering your next career move, our team would be delighted to support you.

Hanson Search Group is a global talent consultancy providing executive search, recruitment and leadership advisory services. Built on more than twenty years of trusted relationships, we operate as a connected global platform of specialist practices with expert consultants embedded in key markets.