Navigating the high-stakes world of financial services communications requires strategy, agility and, according to Nick Woods, Managing Director, Head of Financial Services at MHP Communications, a healthy sense of humour. Having ‘fallen into’ comms after an ill-fated cricketing career, Nick has since carved out an impressive path leading MHP’s financial services practice. He believes in building strong, empowered teams, creating value-driven campaigns, and, crucially, making sure the job is still fun. From tackling AI’s growing influence to launching new specialist offerings, he’s always thinking ahead, though his greatest achievement might just be mastering the art of the school-run ponytail.
1. Can you give us a brief overview of your professional background and what inspired you to pursue a career in communications?
Like most people in the industry, it is definitely one I fell into. Having failed as a professional cricketer, I’d spent six months in Australia trying to answer the dreaded question of what next. I wanted to find a career where I could combine the creative with the strategic and where you got exposure to some really interesting people. Communications seemed to tick most of the boxes so I applied to the graduate scheme at Hill & Knowlton and the rest is history.
Hill & Knowlton was a great learning ground, working on some fantastic brands alongside highly talented people in a big agency environment. The subsidised bar in Soho Square also helped. It was at H&K I took the decision to specialise in financial services and that sector focus has stayed with me throughout stints at M: Communications, Powerscourt, Instinctif and now MHP Group.
Each of those moves taught me a lot in terms of the discipline and craft as well as culturally and operationally how different agencies go about their business. These lessons have been invaluable as I’ve progressed and I think have shaped my approach to practice leadership.
2. You head up the financial services team at MHP Group. What’s the secret to successful leadership?
Agencies are only as good as their people so you have to create an environment in which they feel supported, able to develop, bought into what you’re trying to build and empowered to contribute.
Being clear on your mission and strategy is essential to that, coupled with a culture of transparency and collaboration. I’ve found getting those fundamentals right means people understand where the team is going, their role in helping deliver and shape it and what is expected of them.
Alongside that, it’s important that people understand how the practice and wider agency is performing and what is driving that both for better and worse. I think this not only embeds a commercial mindset at all levels but it also ensures that people have the appropriate context of some of the decisions we might take as leadership team.
Finally, I think it’s important to foster and environment where it’s okay to have some fun and people can express themselves freely. Agencies can be stressful places and I think its vital that teams have the support mechanisms and networks to manage that. As professionals we spend a lot of time ‘always-on’ so it needs to be enjoyable!
3. What skills and qualities do you look for when hiring high-performing comms professionals in the financial services sector?
Financial services is a unique sector which I think makes really interesting from a hiring perspective. It’s an industry being reshaped by technology, deeply technical, widely misunderstood and yet fundamental to supporting consumers, driving economic growth and enabling a more sustainable future.
Aside from the non-negotiables of integrity and being a team player, I’m always on the lookout for people that are intellectually curious, capable of simplifying the complex and forward thinking in their view of communications. People buy people so I also look for candidates that are engaging in their delivery and can tell an interesting story around their experience.
Within any successful team you also need a mix of backgrounds, perspectives and skills so looking at how candidates can be additive to practice overall is also a key factor
4. At MHP, you recently created a specialist offering to provide comms support to insurance and risk clients. What led to the decision to expand into this area?
One of our key differentiators in the market is the ability to combine deep sector and subsector knowledge with the capabilities and creativity of a fully integrated agency. As part of our growth strategy we’ve always been focussed on building out specialist pillars of expertise that align with our view on areas of the market that are underserved and where there are strong economic and political drivers.
For years we’ve had good credentials in the fintech space working with high-growth disruptors, which is great in a market where money is cheap and the innovation ecosystem is firing on all cylinders. However, I felt we were over exposed in a market where funding is harder to raise and where fintech failures were increasing.
Conversely insurance is a market that in a volatile and risky world is more relevant than ever and highly networked. I felt if we could find the right person to lead it we could build something very compelling and thankfully we hired well, attracted some great senior talent and have established a client roster we’re very proud of.
5. What changes do you predict in financial services over the next 5 years that might affect how you work with your clients?
Without doubt I think its going to be the impact of AI both in terms of impacting the operating models of financial services firms and also the agency proposition. As the technology improves you’re going to see more businesses look to integrate it and with that there is huge potential for reputational risk, particularly as the regulatory framework for its use becomes clearer. There are lots of ancillary issues it creates in terms of employee headcount, navigating potential biases, the skills of the future etc. and I think communications firms need to be across this to help their clients navigate it.
On the agency side, I think more agencies will become AI enabled, allowing them to spend more time adding strategic value as opposed to admin and reporting. I believe we’ll also see it turbocharge the use of data & insights enabling agencies to interrogate this more effectively to develop more data-led solutions and also drive innovation in areas like creative or message testing through the use of synthetic personas.
6. You have worked at a few agencies; can you tell us about a challenging situation you had to navigate and the lessons you learned from it?
I think it’s less of a specific issue but I think symptomatic of the past 18-24 months and the tough economic climate we find ourselves in. It’s driven a huge amount of stakeholder change amongst clients, at all levels, from C-Suite to marketing and communications. It’s a healthy reminder that agencies need to not only be adding constant value but also ensuring that they’re showing that effectively and building relationships across the business.
7. What’s the best professional advice you’ve been given along the way, and by whom?
The best professional advice I’ve received was to ensure that I struck the right balance between working ‘in’ a business and working ‘on’ a business. The agency market is highly competitive and financial services constantly evolving which makes it easy for propositions to become quickly outdated. For me, its important to ensure I’ve got time set aside to take stock of where we are, understand how the client base has evolved and how our offer needs to evolve to stay relevant. In the day-to-day delivery of client work that can often get forgotten and suddenly there’s a new competitor that’s starting to eat your lunch.
8. What or who inspires you, and why?
I’m a huge sports fan so a bit of a sucker of inspirational stories of elite performance and courage. I think sport is a strong blueprint for what makes teams great and there are a huge parallels within business. For me Kevin Sinfield is a truly inspirational figure in terms of what he has achieved both on and off the field. I recently read his autobiography where when talking about a high-performance culture he said that any individual is ‘only as good as their five closest influences’. I think that’s a really powerful way of thinking about how you build a culture of excellence regardless of your industry.
9. If you hadn’t ended up working in comms, what was your Plan B?
My degree is in Experimental Psychology and I’ve always loved understanding how the mind works and what drives behaviours so if I hadn’t ended up in comms I’d have probably ended up doing something sports psychology related.
10. Do you have any hidden talents?
As a dad to two young daughters I’ve certainly mastered the ability to wrestle a wriggly child into a reasonable ponytail and still make the 7.54 train into the office. It’s definitely improved my ability to multi-task.
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