Job-title & company

Head of PR for Scottish Friendly

The main areas of the financial services market that I cover are:

Investments, Life Insurance & Critical Illness

I was prompted into working on the press/communications side of the business by:

Scott White, who saved me when I was working as a data analyst while on work experience at Aegon.

The biggest influence on my career to date is:

Difficult one to separate these two. Scott White who gave me the chance to work in PR straight from Uni and taught me the ropes in the early part of my career at Aegon. And Ross Keany from my time at Lloyds Banking Group. We spent a lot of time role playing to come up with answers to difficult situations. It worked time and time again and was also good fun. In fact, I remember the last thing he told me at my interview. If you don't enjoy what you do then what's the point. It's stuck with me to this day.

The best campaign/piece of publicity I have achieved for a financial services company is:

Having the One Show visit the Scottish Widows customer service office when Pension Freedoms were launched has to be a highlight. It was a lot of planning but very much worthwhile from a brand perspective.

However, the best piece of work has to be the recently launched Scottish Friendly Investor Index which looks at behavioural changes to investment habits by extracting data from our own customer database. Our Q2 data showed a surge in investments into ISAs after a significant drop in the early months of Covid-19. This will be launched quarterly and will be a significant part of our PR activity going forward. It also helps with Marketing campaign activity so a double win!

The financial services term or item of jargon that most confuses journalists in my sector is:

It still has to be annuities for me. Why not a guaranteed income or similar

The finance-related headline I would most like to see is:

Grandparents allowed to open Junior ISAs for grandchildren after rules are slackened

The column/feature in the financial services media which I always read is:

The Markets section in the FT, which in turn helps me choose the stocks I pick for my Investment ISA

I would describe my relationship with financial journalists as:

Professional but Friendly

If I weren't in my current job, I would probably be a:

A data analyst

Given £1,000 I'd invest in cash/gold/shares/property/cryptocurrencies/other:

A diversified portfolio. It's the only magic when it comes to investing right now.

The key to being good at financial media relations is:

To plan for the unexpected. At the beginning of the year I pulled together an external business continuity comms plan and the scenario I chose was – A Pandemic!

You won't know this, but I'm really good at:

I never cooked before lockdown but turns out its not all that difficult and I really enjoy it!