Our Managing Director, Julian Rea, shares his thoughts on what’s coming up in 2025. 

As 2025 gets underway, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the new year will bring, for Liminal, and for the financial comms sector at large.

Last year turned out to be a bit of a strange one, characterised by a lot of caution one the one hand, and a great deal of noise on the other. This made it harder than ever for organisations to get their voices heard and secure coverage in key publications.

On that front, I expect the challenge of standing out in an increasingly crowded space will intensify, but as communicators, we’re more equipped and ready to work harder than ever to adapt and achieve meaningful results.

So, for those willing, and able, to make the effort, the rewards are there in terms of building long-lasting, strong and trusted relationships with journalists and clients.

Politics, Trump’s return & the Ripple Effect

Politics, unsurprisingly, will be a big theme for 2025, with the second Trump Presidency inevitably touching all areas of life, including financial communications.

On this side of the pond, it will be interesting to see how UK and European governments and regulators respond to developments in the US, where deregulation in particular, seems to be high on the agenda.

While there may be some course-correction later in the year, for now it looks like the regulatory burden for financial services firms is set to increase further, with CSRD and other sustainable finance disclosure requirements being especially key for communicators, though there is a whole raft of diverse regulation coming online.

As Linklaters observes: “It’s not just the volume of regulatory scrutiny that will rise, but also its complexity, its pace and its consequence”. All this is going to further reduce the availability of compliance teams to sign off comms materials, so both in-house teams and agencies need to be on top of their game in order to lessen, rather than add to the workload.

This means putting together press releases, articles, comments and campaigns that are already compliant, and easy to sign off. Without this, it will often be challenging to get new projects off the ground or materials turned around in time to use.

Thinking about the broader business, economic and market environment, I believe there is cause for optimism here. 2025 should (!) be a year marked by more stability than the one that preceded it, giving senior leaders the confidence to invest in medium and longer-term projects, including marketing and comms campaigns.

Finally, AI: Even as the hype seems to fade, it’s here to stay

No outlook of any sort these days would be complete without the mandatory look at AI. There was a bit of a sense of disappointment about AI in the comms space towards the end of last year, as people came to accept ChatGPT wasn’t able to magically do all our jobs for us.

But, while it might not (yet) have lived up to the hype, AI is clearly here to stay, and the big agencies are investing very heavily in building applications for this technology, so the rest of the industry must follow.

This year we’ll see agencies of all stripes get better at using AI in myriad mundane ways that probably won’t dramatically change anyone’s life, but will make work, particularly for more junior staff, a little easier and more efficient.

The key will be for managers and senior agency leaders to make sure they don’t take their eye off the ball when it comes to training and developing their teams: AI is no substitute for knowing how to do something yourself, and there’s a real danger that vital skills and know-how will be under-developed in PRs that lean to heavily on the robots, especially early in their careers.

Overall, an interesting year ahead, that promises an intriguing mixture of stability and change for comms professionals in the financial services space. I, for one, am feeling very positive about what 2025 will bring, and I hope you all do too!