One truth, three doors: Northern Trust’s Julia Gregory-Royle on communicating through complexity

Julia Gregory-Royle's career is a masterclass in versatility. From building businesses and earning a reputation as a fintech marcomms queen, to becoming a trading platform expert and most recently, leading communications for global bank Northern Trust, she has continually reinvented herself while staying at the top of her game. What a fascinating career journey – is there anything Julia can't turn her hand to?

We're delighted to be interviewing her as she shares how she turns complex, high-stakes issues into clear, compelling stories that resonate with diverse audiences; what a strategic partnership looks like in practice; and the entrepreneurial mindset that has shaped how she builds and leads teams. She also reveals some excellent hidden talents.

1. Could you give us a brief overview of your career so far?

I left university with a language degree, able to say the same thing in three different ways, but not much by way of work experience. I joined a small and perfectly formed 360-degree financial technology marketing agency, that had ten people when I started and had grown to a hundred by the time I left. I learned almost everything there: running conference and events in New York and London, lead generation campaigns, corporate and product collateral, early websites, media and analyst relations and working my way into messaging, and strategy. That is where I really learnt the marketing and communications craft: what are we trying to achieve, how do we say it and to whom, and how do we take something complex and make it land simply.

From there I built a career that has moved between agency and in-house, and between huge corporates and tiny startups. I have taken small companies through their first funding rounds with friends and family, and I have worked for names like Microsoft, the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. I have worked across fintech, clearing houses, exchanges, algorithmic trading platforms, block trading platforms, ETFs, in businesses ranging from lightly regulated startups to some of the most heavily regulated firms in the world. That gave me a real understanding of financial technology and capital markets, not just the marketing layer sitting on top of it.

The last eight years have been at Northern Trust, a US-headquartered global bank, where I started running corporate marketing and communications across EMEA and APAC and ended up leading global communications for several of the bank's largest functions.

So when I look across the whole career, a few themes hold it together. Taking the complex and making it simple for whichever audience is in front of me, whether that be investors, analysts, journalists, the board, employees or the people we are trying to hire. Having a seat at the table early enough to understand what the business is trying to achieve, and building a plan that gets it from A to B faster, better and cheaper. And, especially in financial services, understanding the regulatory framework we operate in, because transparency, risk management and tone from the top have never been more important.

2. Your career has seen you in PR, marketing and internal comms roles. Your 360° experience is impressive – was that accidental or by design?

Honestly, a bit of both. I never sat down with a five-year plan that said "do events, then PR, then internal comms." I followed the interesting problem, and the interesting problem kept moving.

But there is a logic to it looking back. I have worked in London, New York and Silicon Valley in the early dot-com years, and across Europe and APAC. That gave me more than breadth across marketing communications, it gave me an understanding for how culture changes what lands. A message that works perfectly in London can fall completely flat in Tokyo or Sydney, and understanding why is half the job.

It is not just the discipline that has been broad, though. The range of firms has mattered just as much, and it has built up a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. You work for one client and learn risk management or risk technology. You work for another and start to understand exchanges, or clearing firms, or custodians and asset servicing. Then it is algo trading, block trading, the buy side, the sell side. Piece by piece, you end up with a properly joined-up picture of how a complex market actually fits together, not just how to talk about it. So by design or by accident, I ended up with a career that kept forcing me to re-learn how to communicate, not just what to communicate, and to keep filling in a bigger picture of the industry as I went.

3. At Northern Trust you led communications for huge international comms projects. How do you approach building a story that works for the C-suite, tens of thousands of employees and external stakeholders all at the same time?

You start by accepting that it is not one story told three times. It is one truth, with three different doors into it. The board wants to know what changed, why, and what it cost or saved. Employees want to know what it means for their Monday morning. External stakeholders want to know whether the organisation still knows what it is doing.

When we rolled out Microsoft Copilot across more than 30,000 employees and contractors in nine months, the executive story was about productivity at scale and disciplined adoption. The employee story was about a new colleague who could take the boring bits off your desk. Same rollout, same facts, different entry point. The discipline is making sure none of those versions could ever contradict each other if someone compared notes, because eventually, someone always does.

4. Sitting on the COO and CIO leadership teams of a global bank gives you a unique vantage point. What does “strategic partnership” look like in practice at this level?

It looks like being in the room before the decision is final, not being handed the decision afterwards and asked to make it sound better. If comms only shows up once something has been decided, you are doing translation, not partnership.

In practice, it meant sitting on the leadership teams for Enterprise COO and Technology, hearing the operational reasoning in real time, and being able to say "that will land badly with this audience" while the plan could still be adjusted, not just narrated. It also means being trusted to say the unwelcome thing. Nobody needs a communications lead who only agrees with them.

5. Having built your own successful fintech agency, how did that entrepreneurial experience and determination shape the way you lead in‑house teams?

Running your own agency removes any illusion that communications is separate from commercial reality. When you are the one signing the payroll, a campaign is not a nice-to-have, it is a P&L line that needs to earn its place.

It also teaches you to roll up your sleeves and not be daunted by anything, because nobody hands you a thing when you set up your own company. You source your own technology, your own providers, office furniture and space. In the early days at Cre8 Results, I was sales, finance, HR, legal, and technology, as well as being the person actually doing the marketing communications. You learn to find a solution rather than wait for one, and you stop taking any part of a business for granted, because you have had to be every part of it yourself at one point or another.

I carried that straight into every in-house role since. I want data behind a comms plan, not just instinct, and encourage my teams to think like owners rather than order-takers. But it also gave me something else: a real appreciation for the people around me and the support a larger organisation gives you, the legal team, the technology function, HR, all the structure you once had to build yourself from nothing.

6. When you’re hiring to build a successful team, what qualities do you look for that aren’t always obvious on a CV?

Someone who understands the why, as well as the what. It is relatively easy to find people who can talk fluently about a strategy, but when you dig a little and ask them to explain the reasoning, some cannot, because they never really understood it in the first place.

I also look for curiosity, people who aren’t afraid to improve processes rather than repeating the way it has always been done. Delivery matters just as much as content in this business, so I look for people who can take a client or a stakeholder through a process in a way that feels professional and considered, not just clever on paper. Passion is also key: I try to understand where someone's energy naturally goes, because that is what you can build on. The best teams are the ones where people build each other up. It stops being about any one person and starts being about what the group can do together.

7. What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your career so far?

There are always challenges inside any role, and you find a way through most of them. The bigger challenge, for me, sits at the crossroads: the point where you sense that what you have been doing for years is starting to run its course, and you have to decide what comes next.

We spend an enormous amount of our lives at work, and I have always believed you should, on balance, love what you do. So, when you reach the point where you are not learning as much as you used to, or you can feel yourself looking for something new, that is the real test. It takes faith that the next step will open doors, introduce you to new people and reignite something, well before you have any proof that it will. Making that leap, more than any single crisis or campaign, has consistently been the hardest and most important thing I have had to do.

8. What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve been given along the way and by whom?

The advice I remember best came from my brother, when I was newly out of university with a language degree and almost no conventional work experience. Most of what I had done had been abroad, perfecting my French and Italian in menial jobs. He was working at one of the world’s first electronic stock exchanges at the time, and as I started job hunting post graduation, he offered this: people hire people they like.

Clearly, it’s not quite that simple. We all recognise how much stronger diverse teams are than homogenous ones. But a positive culture of respect, transparency and trust rests on something harder to measure: the human element, the connection between people, that gets teams through the hard days, makes a deadline bearable when everyone is pulling together, and makes it worth stopping to celebrate the small wins as much as the big ones. That is the part of the job that technology, however capable it becomes, will not replace.

9. If you hadn’t moved into comms, what would have been your Plan B?

I read Modern Languages and European Studies, French and Italian, so it was never just about the languages, it included international relations too. At one point, I considered becoming an interpreter for the European Commission. In a slightly different life, I also rather liked the idea of being a newsreader or a serious journalist, covering business or politics, or reporting from wherever in the world the story was happening.

10. Do you have any hidden talents?

I have an adorable Australian labradoodle who is, subjectively, the best trained dog I know. I trained her myself, and people often ask whether I’m a professional dog trainer. I think that this is a stretch, but I’ll take the compliment.

I also love to bake. I’ve been known to make some quite ambitious children’s birthday cakes: a hedgehog, a sheep, one memorable year a fairy castle with trellises of flowers running down the walls. These days it’s more likely to be a pavlova, a chocolate banana cake or a batch of breakfast muffins. There’s something about the impact a cake has on people, so much more joyful than any savoury dish could ever manage.

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