Veteran-led small businesses are about to find the door to international trade rather easier to push open.

UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government’s export credit agency, has today unveiled a partnership with specialist broker Finance for Forces designed to plug an awkward gap that has long frustrated former service personnel turning their hand to enterprise: getting the right finance, at the right moment, to chase orders overseas.

For the thousands of veterans who have built businesses since leaving uniform, the appetite to export is rarely in doubt. The cash flow to underwrite that ambition, however, has been another matter. Under the new arrangement, Finance for Forces, founded by Russell Lewis MC and Paul Goodman, will be able to introduce qualifying clients to UKEF’s suite of short-term products for smaller exporters, including working capital guarantees, bond support guarantees and export insurance policies. UKEF, in turn, will refer veteran-led firms back the other way where the fit is right.

It is a neat piece of joined-up government, and one that comes with a clear strategic backdrop. The collaboration is explicitly designed to support the Government’s Veterans Strategy, launched in November 2025, which framed the ex-service community as a national economic asset rather than a welfare line item, citing the leadership, discipline and operational nous that translate, with surprising frequency, into commercially robust SMEs.

Beyond the referrals plumbing, the two organisations will run information sessions and networking events aimed at demystifying export finance, an area that even seasoned founders can find labyrinthine. For veteran entrepreneurs, many of whom are scaling for the first time, that hand-holding is likely to matter as much as the products themselves.

Chris Bryant, Minister of State for Trade, said the partnership was about converting service into commercial reward. “Our veterans have shown extraordinary bravery and dedication in service to the nation, and their skills should be matched by real commercial opportunity,” he said. “This partnership will help turn entrepreneurial ambition into export success, helping veteran-led businesses reach international markets with the backing and confidence they deserve.”

Tim Reid, chief executive of UKEF, said the agency’s small business remit was central to the move. “Supporting small businesses to export and grow is central to UKEF’s mission. By partnering with Finance for Forces, we can reach more veteran-led businesses and help them access the finance they need to win international contracts, enter new markets and scale up with confidence.”

Paul Goodman, co-founder of Finance for Forces, was perhaps the bluntest on the practical problem the deal is meant to solve. “Veterans bring leadership, resilience and a mission focus to business, but navigating commercial finance can be challenging,” he said. “This partnership with UKEF will help veteran-led firms understand their options and access the backing they need to develop exports and accelerate growth.”

For UKEF, the announcement sits within a broader push to shed any lingering reputation as a facility primarily for the corporate heavyweights. The agency has spent recent years recalibrating towards SMEs in every corner of the country, promising faster response times and more targeted support irrespective of location, size or ownership. Bolting on a dedicated channel for the veteran business community, a constituency with a particularly strong record on resilience and follow-through, looks, on the face of it, like a sensible bet.

Whether the partnership translates into a meaningful uplift in veteran-led export volumes will depend, as ever, on awareness and execution. But for founders who have spent years wondering whether the export financing system was really built for businesses like theirs, the answer just got a little more encouraging.

Read more:
UKEF teams up with Finance for Forces to put veteran-led exporters on the global map

Britain’s ambitions to lead the global race for driverless cars took a significant step forward today as the Government inked a formal partnership with Wayve, the London-headquartered artificial intelligence scale-up that has emerged as the country’s standard-bearer in autonomous vehicle technology.

The Memorandum of Understanding, signed between Wayve and the Department for Business and Trade, is designed to deepen collaboration on next-generation self-driving systems and underpin the company’s continued expansion on home soil, a notable vote of confidence at a time when many of Britain’s most promising tech firms have been lured across the Atlantic by deeper pools of capital.

For the SME and high-growth community, the deal is being read as a barometer of Whitehall’s willingness to back homegrown champions with more than warm words. Under the agreement, Government and industry will pool research interests around the responsible deployment of automated vehicles, with the explicit aim of converting Britain’s world-class AI research into commercial reality on its roads, in its factories and across its supply chains.

Officials hope the partnership will act as a catalyst for fresh investment, skilled employment and long-term growth across an automotive ecosystem that has been buffeted in recent years by the transition to electric vehicles, supply-chain disruption and intensifying competition from China and the United States. The signal to international investors, ministers insist, is unambiguous: the UK is open for business and intends to be the destination of choice for ambitious technology companies looking to scale.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle said the agreement demonstrated how the Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy was being put into practice. “This partnership with Wayve shows how government is backing high-growth British scale-ups through our Modern Industrial Strategy to turn world-leading research into real-world deployment,” he said. “By working hand-in-hand with innovative companies, we are accelerating self-driving technology while anchoring jobs, investment and manufacturing here in the UK, making Britain the best place to start, scale and grow a business.”

Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder and chief executive, struck a similarly bullish tone. “I’m delighted to deepen our collaboration with the Department for Business and Trade. We share the Government’s ambition to drive economic growth through the development of the self-driving vehicle sector in the UK and globally,” he said. “Strengthening domestic capabilities will anchor high-value manufacturing in the UK, create thousands of skilled jobs across the supply chain, and support the future of the automotive industry. This is in addition to the transformative benefits to road safety to be gained from self-driving vehicles deployed at scale.”

Founded in 2017 and now one of Britain’s most valuable AI businesses, Wayve has established itself as a pioneer of so-called “embodied AI”, training vehicles to learn from experience rather than relying solely on hand-coded rules and high-definition mapping. The company’s investor roster reads like a who’s who of global capital, and its decision to keep its centre of gravity in the United Kingdom has become a touchstone for the broader debate about retaining home-grown intellectual property.

Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall described Wayve as “a true British AI success story, putting the UK at the forefront of self-driving technology.” She added that the agreement would “help secure high-skilled tech and advanced manufacturing jobs in this country” and send a clear signal that “the UK is the best place for ambitious tech firms to start up and scale up.”

The substance of the MoU is squarely aimed at moving automated vehicles beyond the prototype phase and into commercially viable services on British roads. Joint workstreams will cover safety assurance, large-scale simulation and the integration of full self-driving capability into production-ready vehicle platforms, areas where Britain has long held latent expertise but has often struggled to commercialise at pace.

The partnership also reinforces the Government’s ambition to position the UK as a global hub for automated vehicle manufacturing, strengthening domestic supply chains in artificial intelligence, systems integration and advanced automotive hardware. Wayve, for its part, has agreed to share insights from real-world trials with ministers and regulators, providing the empirical foundation for the rules and standards that will govern a national roll-out of self-driving services.

For an automotive sector in the throes of structural reinvention, the implication is significant. Closer collaboration between industry, Government and local partners is intended to revive and evolve British vehicle manufacturing, demonstrating that fast-growing companies can scale at home rather than relocating overseas in search of supportive policy and patient capital.

The announcement comes against the backdrop of the Modern Industrial Strategy, which Whitehall says has already crowded in private investment into priority growth sectors. The Government points to roughly £360 billion in investment commitments, £33 billion in export announcements and 120,000 jobs secured since publication, figures that ministers will be keen to translate into a wider narrative of economic renewal as the political cycle wears on.

For founders, investors and SME leaders watching from the sidelines, the lesson is straightforward enough. When Government and a scale-up of Wayve’s calibre line up around a shared industrial agenda, the message is that Britain intends to compete at the sharpest end of the technology frontier, and that the long-promised marriage between policy and enterprise may, finally, be moving from theory into practice.

Read more:
Wayve lands government deal in race to put Britain in the self-driving fast lane

Somewhere in a damp Parisian hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie schoolteacher called Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, glanced at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out of the window at the working girls below, and rattled off a small reggae-flavoured number about a prostitute he had never met.

He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column.

That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreats, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweating the asset” I have ever encountered in business.

Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week’s offering. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn’t, got a few pence per copy. And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.

Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life’s work. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are positively obscene, and rising.

Why? Because, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion globally last year. Streaming alone topped $20 billion, fully 69 per cent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten consecutive years of growth. The very technology that everyone solemnly said would kill the music industry, Napster, file-sharing, the iPod, the internet itself, has instead resurrected it as the perfect annuity. Music doesn’t sell once any more. It sells forever, in fractions of a penny, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.

Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who fitted my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The barrister who drafted our new sponsorship contracts billed by the hour and that was that. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all selling time, all watching the clock, all running flat out until the day they retire and the cheques stop. Even the great industrial fortunes of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, required factories, foundries, lorries, lawyers, picket lines and the occasional hostile takeover. Whereas Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of Yesterday in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, scribbled “scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs” as placeholder lyrics, and has since banked north of £19.5 million on a single song — the most-covered tune in human history, with more than three thousand versions. The Beatles’ catalogue is now valued comfortably north of £1.2 billion and reportedly throws off £70 to £90 million a year for owners who, gloriously, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.

This is the lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It is not what you make. It is what you make that keeps making. The whole intellectual property economy, software, brands, patents, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and bills you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people about him. Coca-Cola scribbled a formula on a piece of paper in 1886 and has paid for four generations of dividend cheques. But none of them, not one, possesses the casual, narcotic genius of the songwriter who spent an afternoon humming and is still cashing seven-figure royalty statements in his seventies.

We business owners should be furious. And inspired. In November 2023, The Beatles even released Now and Then, a John Lennon demo from the late seventies, patched up with artificial intelligence and a bit of Peter Jackson studio wizardry, and it strolled to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart-topper. The asset, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and now sweating for a fourth generation of listeners who weren’t born when their grandparents bought the original LP.

So the next time some private equity grandee bangs the boardroom table demanding “operational efficiency” and “recurring revenue streams”, remind him gently that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a paunchy Geordie with a guitar humming nonsense about a Parisian prostitute in 1977 and banking nine-figure cheques in his seventies. The rest of us should be so lucky. Or, more usefully, so clever.

Read more:
Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold it for £240 Million

The entertainment industry no longer revolves around televisions, desktops, or fixed schedules.

Today, most digital entertainment happens on phones.

Streaming, gaming, sports coverage, social interaction, and live content now follow users everywhere through mobile platforms designed for constant access and instant engagement. What used to be secondary mobile versions of websites gradually became the center of the entire experience.

And honestly, that shift happened faster than most industries expected.

Mobile Became the Default Experience

A few years ago, companies still treated mobile apps as optional additions.

Now the opposite is true.

Many entertainment platforms are designed for smartphones first, with desktop versions adapting afterward. Businesses realized where user attention actually lives, and the industry changed around that reality.

People no longer wait to get home before consuming content. They watch clips during commutes, follow live scores while shopping, and interact with social platforms throughout the day.

Entertainment became continuous instead of scheduled.

Speed Changed User Expectations

One major reason mobile platforms became dominant is speed.

Everything happens instantly now. Notifications arrive immediately, live streams load within seconds, and updates refresh constantly in the background.

That level of responsiveness changed what users expect from digital services overall.

If an app feels slow or difficult to navigate, people leave quickly because alternatives are always available.

Modern entertainment platforms survive by reducing friction as much as possible.

Streaming and Gaming Adapted Quickly

Streaming services were among the first industries to fully embrace mobile-first behavior.

Short-form content exploded because people increasingly consume entertainment in smaller bursts throughout the day rather than through long viewing sessions.

Gaming platforms adapted in similar ways.

Mobile gaming became massive globally because phones removed hardware barriers and made access easier. Players no longer needed expensive consoles or PCs to participate in online entertainment ecosystems.

That accessibility expanded audiences dramatically.

Real-Time Interaction Became Essential

Modern entertainment is no longer passive.

Users now expect interaction while content is happening. Live chats, instant reactions, community discussions, polls, and personalized feeds became standard across digital platforms.

Sports and live betting especially changed because of this shift.

Mobile-first sportsbooks evolved around continuous engagement and fast updates, and MelBet (Arabic:  ميل بت) reflects how entertainment platforms increasingly prioritize instant access and real-time interaction on mobile devices.

The experience now feels active instead of static.

Social Media and Entertainment Merged Together

Another major change is how closely entertainment and social platforms became connected.

People rarely consume content silently anymore. They react, share opinions, create clips, and participate in discussions while events are still unfolding.

That social layer keeps users engaged much longer.

Watching the content itself became only part of the experience. The surrounding conversation often matters just as much.

Mobile Notifications Keep Users Connected

Notifications changed user behavior more than many people realize.

Platforms no longer wait for users to open apps manually. Instead, updates arrive directly on lock screens throughout the day.

A sports result, breaking news alert, streaming recommendation, or live event reminder immediately pulls people back into the platform ecosystem.

That constant connection helps explain why engagement numbers continue growing across mobile entertainment services.

Personalization Became More Aggressive

Entertainment apps also became much more personalized.

Algorithms now shape feeds, recommendations, and notifications based on user behavior patterns. Two people using the same platform may see completely different content experiences.

This increases engagement because users spend less time searching and more time consuming material already matched to their interests.

The process happens almost invisibly in the background.

Mobile Infrastructure Keeps Improving

Technology improvements also accelerated the shift.

Better smartphones, faster networks, and stronger mobile internet access made high-quality streaming and live interaction far easier than before.

As infrastructure improved, mobile entertainment became more reliable and more immersive.

The experience no longer feels limited compared to desktop systems.

In many cases, mobile platforms now perform better.

Entertainment Companies Think Mobile-First Now

The industry mindset changed completely.

Entertainment businesses now assume users will interact primarily through phones. Product design, advertising strategies, subscription systems, and engagement models are all built around mobile behavior from the start.

That approach influences almost every major entertainment category today.

Final Thoughts

Mobile platforms reshaped digital entertainment because they fit how people actually consume content now.

Users want speed, flexibility, interaction, and constant access, and smartphones deliver all of that in a single device people carry everywhere.

What started as a convenience gradually became the foundation of modern entertainment itself.

And judging by current trends, mobile-first experiences will only become more dominant in the years ahead.

Read more:
How Mobile Platforms Are Reshaping the Digital Entertainment Industry

Every marketing team operates with a working library of “best practices” — heuristics that started as someone’s specific finding, got generalized in a conference talk, and now circulate as universal advice.

Some of them remain genuinely useful. Others survived past their expiration date and now actively damage the campaigns built around them. Leadia Solutions OÜ, a performance-driven marketing partner working across the customer journey, fields questions on this topic from clients almost daily. According to Leadia Solutions, the honest answer is that the same “best practice” can be helpful in one context and lazy in another — and the discipline worth building is the discipline of asking which context applies. This FAQ collects the questions Leadia hears most often, with the answers experts at Leadia Solutions suggest companies sit with.

Are marketing best practices ever genuinely useful?

Of course, if they contain valuable insights into patterns gained through experience and confirmed across many scenarios. For instance, “always test creativity,” “segment your audience before investing in a budget,” and “evaluate the performance of cohorts rather than campaigns” are still around because the core rationale applies broadly.

The easy way out is when marketers apply the name without comprehending the underlying principles — for example, using an A/B test sample size too small to draw conclusions or creating meaningless segments that share behaviors.

When does a best practice become lazy?

Leadia Solutions suggests four warning signs:

• It’s repeated without reference to the specific context that produced it
• It’s applied identically across channels with very different mechanics
• It produces decisions no one can defend with current data
• It substitutes for thinking rather than accelerating thinking

When any of these are true, the practice has stopped being a tool and started being a script.

How can a marketing team tell the difference in real time?

Experts at Leadia Solutions suggest a simple test: ask whoever is invoking the best practice to articulate the specific evidence that supports it for this business, this channel, and this audience. If the answer is “everyone does it this way,” the practice is functioning as a default rather than a decision. If the answer references measurable evidence the team can verify, the practice is doing useful work.

Are some best practices universally outdated by now?

A handful of marketing maxims circulate well past their useful life:

• “Higher click-through rates always mean better creative”
• “Last-click attribution is good enough for most decisions”
• “Frequency caps should be set at 3”
• “Mobile traffic and desktop traffic should be optimized the same way”
• “Brand campaigns can’t be measured against performance metrics”

None of these are uniformly wrong. All of them are uniformly outdated as universal advice.

The deeper problem is that marketing teams often feel like they’re measuring rigorously when they aren’t. Nielsen’s 2025 Marketing ROI Blueprint surfaced exactly this gap: globally, 85% of marketers report being extremely or very confident in their ability to measure holistic ROI, but only 32% actually measure traditional and digital spending in a truly holistic way. That’s a roughly 50-point gap between perceived capability and actual practice. Leadia Solutions OÜ reads this as the clearest possible warning sign — when confidence dramatically outruns measurement reality, the “best practices” guiding decisions are almost certainly riding on assumption rather than evidence.

What about platform-recommended best practices? Are those different?

This is one of the more nuanced questions Leadia Solutions gets. Platform-recommended practices — the guidance Meta, Google, and similar platforms publish — are optimized for outcomes the platforms can measure within their own walls. They’re often genuinely useful for in-platform performance. They’re sometimes misaligned with business outcomes measured outside the platform.

The performance marketing toolset by Leadia Solutions OÜ used internally is built around this principle: layer platform recommendations on top of business-outcome measurement, and let the data resolve the tension when it appears. Treating platform recommendations as inputs to evaluate against business data, not as instructions to follow, is the consistent posture worth building.

How does Leadia Solutions weigh testing best practices versus following them?

The test isn’t testing versus following. It’s understanding why a practice works before either testing it or adopting it. A team that understands the mechanism behind a practice can adapt it intelligently. A team that’s only memorized the headline will either follow it blindly or test it badly.

Are there best practices Leadia Solutions OÜ consistently recommends?

Yes — a small set that holds up across nearly every B2B context:

1. Define the downstream business metric before building the campaign. Reverse-engineering campaign goals from existing creative leads nowhere good.
2. Build cohort-level measurement before scaling spend. Aggregate metrics hide the truth that cohort metrics reveal.
3. Maintain creative diversity within active campaigns. Creative fatigue is the most predictable cause of performance decay.
4. Treat audience definition as a discipline, not a one-time setup. Audiences shift; static audience definitions silently degrade campaigns over time.
5. Review channel mix against incremental contribution quarterly. Channels that produced last year’s wins rarely produce next year’s at the same rate.

These hold up not because they’re trendy but because the underlying logic is durable.

What’s the single most lazy thing teams do with best practices?

The consistent answer: copying the practice without copying the measurement that justified it. A best practice without its measurement context is folklore. The measurement is what makes it useful — without it, the practice is just confident-sounding guesswork. And as the Nielsen research above suggests, confident-sounding guesswork is exactly what most marketing teams unknowingly produce.

How often should best practices be re-evaluated?

Quarterly review of operational best practices, annual review of strategic ones. Quarterly is fast enough to catch shifts in platform mechanics and audience behavior. Annual is appropriate for higher-order decisions about channel mix, attribution philosophy, and measurement architecture.

What replaces best practices when they fail?

Not the absence of practice — that’s chaos. What replaces a failed best practice is a better one, derived from current data in the current context. Marketing teams should always be running a small portfolio of practices on probation: practices that have worked historically but are due for re-validation. When the data confirms them, they continue. When it doesn’t, they’re replaced with the next candidate.

The Posture Worth Building

For B2B companies trying to decide whether their marketing operates on living practice or inherited folklore, Leadia Solutions OÜ believes the most valuable shift is treating best practices as hypotheses with expiration dates rather than as rules. The teams that build this posture stop arguing about whether a given practice is “right” and start asking whether it’s still earning its place in the current portfolio. Leadia Solutions views this discipline — the willingness to question what’s working as rigorously as what isn’t — as the difference between marketing organizations that compound and marketing organizations that stagnate.

Read more:
Are Marketing Best Practices Helpful or Lazy? Leadia Solutions OÜ’s Answers

Here’s a question worth sitting with: Does your team use AI, or does your marketing actually run on AI?

There’s a difference. A big one. And most brands, if they’re being honest, fall into the second camp — AI-adjacent, not AI-ready.

That’s not an insult. It’s just where most teams are right now. They’ve added a few tools, automated some emails, and maybe plugged in a chatbot. But the strategy underneath? Still manual, slow, and built for a world that no longer exists.

The team at Moindes Limited has spent a lot of time in the trenches of performance marketing and conversion rate optimization, watching how companies handle this gap. Some close it fast. Others keep buying new tools and wondering why nothing changes. The difference usually comes down to one thing: foundations.

What “AI-Adjacent” Actually Looks Like

AI-adjacent companies aren’t doing nothing. That’s the tricky part. They often look modern from the outside.

They might be using an AI copywriting tool to speed up content drafts. They’ve got an automated email sequence running. Someone on the team tried a predictive analytics dashboard once. There are widgets, integrations, and plugins.

But none of it is connected. None of it feeds into a decision-making loop. The AI is decorating the existing process — it’s not changing it.

The Symptom That Gives It Away

The clearest sign of an AI-adjacent setup? The team still makes the same decisions the same way. They just make them faster because a tool sped up one part of the process.

Moindes team claims that real AI-readiness looks different. Decisions get better because the system is learning. Campaigns adjust automatically based on what’s working. Creative testing doesn’t wait for a weekly review meeting — it runs and updates in near real-time.

This is a pattern the agency often points to: companies invest in AI tooling before they’ve sorted out their data. No clean data means no meaningful AI output. Garbage in, garbage out — except now it’s garbage coming out faster and looking more polished.

The Four Pillars Moindes Limited Uses to Assess AI-Readiness

When the specialists at Moindes work with brands to optimize performance, they ask four questions before recommending any AI integration. Think of it as a diagnostic, not a checklist.

1. Data Quality and Accessibility

Can the AI actually learn from what you have? This means: is the data clean, current, structured, and accessible across systems? Many companies have data — lots of it — siloed in six different platforms that don’t talk to each other.

Before automation can work, this has to be solved. IBM research found that poor data quality costs businesses an average of $12.9 million per year, which makes the “boring” work of data hygiene anything but boring. It’s unglamorous, but it’s the foundation.

2. Process Clarity

AI can optimize a process. It can’t invent one. If the current workflow is messy or undefined, automating it just makes the mess faster.

Moindes Limited’s approach here is to map out every touchpoint in a campaign, from first impression to conversion, before introducing automation. The clearer the process, the more leverage the AI can actually provide.

3. Team Fluency

This one gets skipped most often. Does the marketing team understand what the AI is doing well enough to catch it when it’s wrong?

AI tools make mistakes. They optimize for the wrong metric. They miss context. A team that doesn’t understand how the system works will just trust the output, and that’s where campaigns go sideways in interesting ways.

Experts at Moindes see this as a training gap, not a tech gap. The tools are usually fine. Humans need more time with them.

4. Testing Infrastructure

AI gets better when it has structured experiments to learn from. If a brand isn’t running consistent A/B tests or multivariate experiments, the AI is essentially guessing.

Conversion rate optimization and AI go hand in hand for this reason. CRO creates the test environment that gives AI something real to optimize against.

AI-Readiness vs. AI-Adjacent: A Side-by-Side Look

The table below captures what Moindes Limited typically sees when comparing brands at different stages of the spectrum.

The gap between the left and right columns isn’t just a technological one — it’s an organizational one.

Where the Real Leverage Is (and Where Companies Keep Missing It)

The Conversion Layer

Most brands focus AI efforts at the top of the funnel — content generation, ad targeting, and audience segmentation. That’s reasonable. But Moindes Limited notes that the biggest unrealized gains are usually sitting in the conversion layer.

Small changes to landing page copy, button placement, form structure, or email timing — when informed by behavioral data and tested systematically — move numbers far more than another round of ad spend optimization.

Automation That Earns Trust

There’s a version of automation that feels like spam and a version that feels like relevance. The difference is almost entirely in the data layer.

When an automated outreach sequence is built on real behavioral signals — what someone clicked, what they downloaded, how long they stayed on a page — it doesn’t feel automated to the person receiving it. It feels like the brand is paying attention.

The team builds campaigns with this in mind. The automation is in the engine. The experience should feel human.

The Honest Assessment Most Brands Need

Here’s what the team at Moindes Limited has found after working across dozens of performance marketing engagements: most companies don’t need more AI tools. They need fewer, better-used ones.

The instinct when performance dips is to add something. A new attribution tool. A different email platform. Another analytics layer. But adding more complexity to a system that’s already unclear tends to make things worse.

The smarter move — and the harder one — is to strip back to the essentials, get the data right, and define the process clearly. Every Moindes Limited omnichannel strategy rundown points to the same conclusion: AI works best when it’s the last layer added, not the first.

That’s AI-readiness. Not the number of tools in the stack. Not the sophistication of the dashboard. Whether the system is learning, adapting, and actually improving outcomes — that’s the only metric that matters.

A Practical Starting Point

For brands trying to move from AI-adjacent to AI-ready, Moindes suggests starting with one question: Where does the biggest decision bottleneck live in your current marketing process?

Find that bottleneck. Map what data exists around it. Clean that data. Define what a good outcome looks like. Then, and only then, introduce automation.

It’s less exciting than buying a new platform. It’s also what actually works.

Read more:
Is Your Marketing AI-Ready, or Just AI-Adjacent? Answers from Moindes Limited

In the modern housing market, where technology is at the forefront, it’s not uncommon for homebuyers to find their dream home on social media before ever making an appointment to view it in person.

While browsing through social media, homebuyers may come across dozens of listings, but only a few stand out from the rest. That is where short-form video reels come in handy.

With Pippit and its AI video generator, homebuyers can now become the stars of their very own video reels, making their home listings look dynamic and engaging. Instead of using images or written descriptions, homebuyers can use video reels to bring their homes to life in just a few seconds, giving them a better idea of what it’s like to be in their home.

The outcome is quite simple: homebuyers are engaging, interested, and ready to buy.

Why short-form reels are transforming real estate marketing

Homebuyers may find dozens of listings on the internet, but only a few stand out from the rest. While homebuyers are browsing through dozens of listings, video reels are giving them a better idea of what it’s like to be in their home, making them engage, interested, and ready to buy.

Short-form video reels help change this. By utilizing movement, music, and storytelling, video reels establish a connection with viewers that static photos cannot replicate.

What reels allow agents to show

• The flow from one room to another
• The change in lighting from room to room
• The outdoors from within the property
• Lifestyle shots that help buyers envision themselves in the property

These help build a more engaging experience for a listing property.

The power of the first three seconds

Real estate video reels must grab viewers’ attention from the very beginning. People consume a lot of content on social media sites, so they scroll through content fast. Therefore, the first moment of a video must be impactful enough for viewers to stop scrolling and watch the video.

A hook for a real estate video can be something as impactful as revealing a stunning room, such as a living room, or a stunning view from above the property, or a unique feature in a property’s design.

Examples of attention-grabbing opening scenes

• A fast reveal of a luxury kitchen island
• A seamless transition from the front door to the living space
• A drone shot focusing on the property’s surroundings
• A before-and-after renovation video

These moments immediately communicate value and excitement.

Turning property features into visual stories

Every property has unique features that may be used as storytelling in the reel. Rather than presenting these features individually, real estate videos may feature these as part of a story.

For instance, the reel may begin with a shot of morning coffee in the kitchen, followed by another shot of a well-lit home office, and then another shot of relaxing in the backyard.

Lifestyle moments that resonate with buyers

• Preparing coffee in a sunlit kitchen
• Working comfortably in a dedicated office space
• Relaxing in a cozy living room
• Enjoying the sunset from a balcony or garden

These are storytelling moments that turn property videos into experiences.

Why video content helps homes sell faster

Today’s home buyers are likely to look at properties online before reaching out to agents.

As the viewer interacts with the reel, it increases their chances of remembering the property and also sharing it with others. Moreover, social media algorithms favor videos, so these reels have greater chances of reaching a larger audience.

Thus, it increases their chances of receiving more inquiries and making faster sales.

How AI tools simplify real estate video creation

Previously, creating professional videos for properties involved using advanced video editing tools or hiring professionals to create videos for agents. However, with the introduction of AI tools, it is now much simpler.

Agents can use a free AI video generator tool to create videos by uploading images, videos, and property details, which will then create a draft video for the agent.

Agents no longer need to spend hours editing videos using these tools but can simply focus on capturing high-quality images for their videos.

From property photos to engaging real estate reels with Pippit

Pippit is another tool that simplifies creating engaging videos from property photos and videos for agents to use on social media platforms.

Step 1: input any property link, media, or photo

To begin, select “Video generator” from the left-hand side menu in Pippit. You can input your idea, paste a link to the property listing, or add media such as photos, a PDF, or a video tour of the home. Next, click “Generate.”

Pippit will automatically generate video drafts based on the media added.

Step 2: Personalize your video

Pippit displays the chosen media and property details in a video format after generating the video using the media uploaded in the previous step. You can select your video style and customize settings such as avatar, voice, ratio, language, and length.

In the video editor, you can customize the video reel by adjusting video clips, text overlays that highlight features, transitions, visual effects, and background music.

Step 3: Save the video

When the video is ready, click “Export.” You can also publish the video reel directly to social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, or save it for later use. This way, agents can promote their listings on multiple platforms without needing to edit the video again.

Creative reel ideas for real estate agents

Some creative reel ideas that can be employed by real estate agents include:

1. Property walkthrough highlights

Short videos can be used to create quick transitions between rooms to show the overall layout of the property.

1. Neighborhood lifestyle clips

Videos can be used to show the lifestyle that is offered by the property’s neighborhood.

1. Transformation and staging reels

Videos can be used to show the transformation that is possible with the property.

1. Quick feature showcases

Videos can be used to show the features that the property has.

These types of videos can be used to keep the content fresh and interesting while catering to the interests of different types of customers.

Building a recognizable real estate video style

A big part of the success of any real estate video marketing campaign is the element of familiarity that is built into it. This is because, over time, the audience becomes accustomed to the style and is able to recognize it as that of the real estate agent.

By using the same style and type of video across multiple reels, the real estate agent is able to create a recognizable style that is associated with them.

Turning social media engagement into real buyers

Not only do engaging reels entertain, but they also inspire action. An engaging video on real estate can inspire potential buyers to learn more.

Adding a call to action in the video, such as asking the viewer to schedule a showing or visit the listing page, can also help convert potential buyers into actual buyers.

When engaging reels are informative, visually engaging, and easy to share, they can be great tools for attracting potential buyers.

Sell homes faster with engaging reels powered by Pippit

The real estate market is a dynamic industry, and video content is one of the most effective tools for capturing the attention of potential buyers in the market. Scroll-stopping reels are great tools for connecting with potential buyers instantly.

Pippit is here to make it easier than ever to turn your property photos, clips, and details into engaging video reels, perfect for the modern social media landscape.

Ready to turn your real estate listings into engaging video reels that capture the attention of potential buyers? Try Pippit today and start creating engaging reels that can help your listings sell faster.

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Creating Scroll-Stopping Real Estate Reels That Sell Homes Faster

Tesco has suffered a significant setback in the long-running equal pay battle being waged by tens of thousands of its shop floor staff, after the Court of Appeal threw out the supermarket’s challenge to the way an Employment Tribunal had been assessing the value of jobs carried out by its customer assistants.

In a judgment handed down on 12 May 2026, the Court of Appeal dismissed Britain’s biggest grocer’s appeal against the Tribunal’s approach to determining the job facts of customer assistants and warehouse operatives, a critical step in the so-called “equal value” process that underpins the entire dispute.

The ruling comes mid-way through a separate Employment Tribunal hearing in which Tesco is attempting to justify paying its predominantly female store workforce less than its largely male distribution centre staff. The supermarket has leant heavily on the argument that the differential reflects “market rates”, a defence lawyers at Leigh Day, who act for more than 16,000 claimants, insist cannot lawfully stand.

At the heart of the appeal was Tesco’s attempt to stop the Tribunal from relying on the company’s own training manuals and operational documents to establish what customer assistants and warehouse operatives are required to do day-to-day. For Britain’s SME employers and retail bosses watching closely, the Court of Appeal’s response will make uncomfortable reading.

The judges upheld the Tribunal’s approach, accepting that Tesco operates in a highly regulated environment, deploys sophisticated digital stock systems and maintains exhaustive training materials precisely to ensure work is carried out consistently across every one of its stores. The Court found Tesco had a “strong business need” for these roles to be performed in the same way throughout its operations, and that, absent clear evidence to the contrary, its own training documents could properly be treated as determinative of what staff were required to do.

The implications stretch well beyond Welwyn Garden City. The judgment effectively rejects attempts to force thousands of workers in mass equal pay claims to individually prove every nut and bolt of their roles when the employer has itself standardised the work. For any business with a structured operating model, supermarkets, hospitality chains, logistics operators and the wider SME retail community, the precedent is plain: your own training materials and operating manuals may be used as evidence against you.

The Court of Appeal also repeated earlier criticisms of Tesco’s evidential approach, raising concerns about both the nature and presentation of witness testimony deployed during the litigation. In a further blow to large employers, the judgment offered fresh guidance that tribunals in mass equal pay claims may, where appropriate, assess jobs more generically rather than insisting every single claim be picked apart on an overly individualised basis, a clarification that could substantially reduce the runway of delay and procedural complexity that often accompanies these disputes.

Kiran Daurka, employment partner at Leigh Day, said the ruling was a significant moment for access to justice. “The Court of Appeal has recognised the importance of removing unnecessary hurdles that prevent everyday people from accessing justice in complex equal pay litigation,” she said. “This judgment is a welcome clarification that, in large-scale cases involving sophisticated respondents like Tesco and other large retailers, tribunals can take a practical and proportionate approach to assessing jobs, which then mitigates against unnecessary complexity to delay or obstruct claims.

“Our clients have always maintained that these cases should focus on the reality of the work being done, not on creating artificial barriers that make equal pay claims impossible to pursue. This ruling will help future claims progress in a more streamlined and accessible way.”

For Tesco, and for every employer with a workforce split between front-of-house and back-of-house operations, the message from the Court of Appeal is unambiguous. The defence of “that’s just what the market pays” is wearing thin, and the documents sitting on a company’s own intranet may yet prove to be the most powerful evidence claimants ever need.

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Tesco loses court of appeal fight over equal pay job assessment in landmark ruling for SME and retail employers

Waitrose is to put bottles of champagne behind locked glass before the end of the year, as the upmarket grocer escalates its fight against an unrelenting wave of shoplifting that has swept through Britain’s high streets.

The John Lewis Partnership-owned chain has told its 50,000-strong workforce of partners that it will pilot so-called “smart cabinets” to protect premium spirits and champagne, marking one of the most striking acknowledgements yet that organised retail crime has begun to reach into the aisles of Britain’s most genteel supermarkets.

The cabinets, already trialled at rivals including Sainsbury’s, typically require shoppers to navigate a multi-step process on a touchpad before the doors will release. Some retailers have gone further, demanding customers scan a loyalty card or enter a mobile telephone number to gain access, creating a digital paper trail that can later be cross-referenced if stock goes missing. The technology can also log how long a cabinet door has been open, flagging suspicious behaviour such as bulk emptying to staff in real time.

Waitrose has declined to disclose the precise mechanics of its own system, but the move comes alongside a broader package of measures: protective “meat nets” wrapped around premium joints, reinforced screens at tobacco counters to deter the increasingly common practice of vaulting kiosks to grab cigarettes, and an expanded rollout of body-worn cameras for staff on the shop floor.

In an internal communication to partners, Lucy Brown, the John Lewis Partnership’s director of central operations, framed the investment as proof that the business was not “standing still” in the face of what she conceded had been characterised as “a tide of retail crime and epidemic of shoplifting”. She acknowledged the frustration felt by staff who watch thieves walk out unchallenged, but warned that intervention was rarely the safer option.

“It may feel like standing back is us not acting, but this isn’t the case,” Ms Brown wrote, urging partners to resist their “first instinct” to detain suspects or wrestle back stock. Detaining “potentially volatile” individuals in front of other customers, she said, risked escalating an already fraught situation.

The guidance follows a bruising month for Waitrose’s public image. The retailer faced sharp criticism in April after dismissing Walker Smith, a 17-year veteran of the chain, who said he had been sacked for confronting a shoplifter attempting to make off with Easter eggs. The Partnership declined to comment on the specifics, citing employment confidentiality, but said it had followed “the correct process” and pointed to the “serious danger to life in tackling shoplifters”.

Jason Tarry, the John Lewis chairman who joined from Tesco last year, has since written in The Telegraph that the answer to the crime wave was emphatically not to “encourage” workers to take on thieves themselves. Trained security personnel would “intervene to challenge shoplifters”, he said, “but only if they’ve been trained and it’s safe to do so”.

The retreat into hardened technology reflects the scale of the problem confronting British retailers. Industry body the British Retail Consortium has repeatedly warned that shop theft has reached levels not seen in a generation, with the cost to retailers running into the billions and assaults on shop workers rising sharply. For a chain such as Waitrose, whose brand has long traded on a relaxed, customer-trusted shopping experience, the optics of placing Bollinger behind a touchscreen-controlled glass door represent a notable cultural shift.

A spokesman for John Lewis confirmed the direction of travel: “We are currently investing in a range of advanced technology, including smart technology to deter theft. As part of this we are planning to pilot lockable smart cabinets for areas such as spirits and champagne soon. We already use smart shelf technology in our health, beauty and spirits aisles, which are able to sense unusual customer behaviour, so this would provide an additional layer of security.”

For Britain’s SME retailers, who lack the capital to deploy comparable systems, the message from Waitrose is sobering. If a chain of its size and security spend has concluded that its most prized stock now needs locking up, the implication for the independent off-licence or village convenience store is uncomfortable indeed.

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Waitrose places champagne under lock and key as retail crime wave bites

British food marketers have been handed a stark warning after the advertising watchdog banned two high-profile campaigns promoting domestic beef and milk, ruling that the carbon footprint claims at their heart could not be substantiated.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint brought by Chris Packham, the broadcaster and environmental campaigner, against the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) over its taxpayer-funded Let’s Eat Balanced campaign. The decision is likely to send a chill through the marketing departments of food producers, processors and trade bodies that have increasingly leaned on green credentials to drive sales.

At issue were two adverts trumpeting British beef as having a “carbon footprint that’s half the global average” and British milk as producing emissions “a third lower than the global average”. Both campaigns referenced the “full lifecycle” of the produce, a phrase that has now proved their undoing.

The AHDB, which is funded by a statutory levy on farmers and growers, argued that consumers would reasonably have understood the figures to relate only to the journey from farm to retail. The board pointed to independent consumer research, commissioned after the investigation began, suggesting the majority of respondents interpreted the adverts in precisely that way.

The ASA disagreed. The regulator concluded that the adverts implied a cradle-to-grave assessment encompassing farming, retail, consumption and disposal, and that the evidence supplied fell short of supporting claims on that basis. The watchdog acknowledged the practical difficulty of producing post-retail emissions data but said that, where environmental claims are made, the burden of proof rests squarely on the advertiser unless caveats are made plain.

“We acknowledged the potential difficulties in producing post-retail emissions data,” the ASA said in its ruling. “The claims in the ads suggested those emissions were included, and we therefore expected the evidence provided to also include them. We therefore concluded that the evidence presented was insufficient to support the full life cycle claims in the ads, which was how the average consumer was likely to interpret them.”

Mr Packham, the long-standing presenter of BBC’s Springwatch, had also alleged that the adverts misrepresented British beef as typically outdoor-grazed and made claims that could not be substantiated. The watchdog rejected five of his six points, ruling that images of cows in green pastures amounted to a “generic reflection” of British farming rather than a blanket assertion that all cattle live outdoors.

Will Jackson, the AHDB’s director of communications, struck a defiant note in response to the ruling. “Let’s Eat Balanced is doing what it was designed to do, providing clear, factual, evidence-led information about British food, nutrition and farming standards,” he said. He added that the board’s own consumer research “supports our belief that consumers were not misled by the information we shared in these two specific adverts”.

For the wider SME landscape, however, the ruling carries lessons that extend well beyond the farm gate. Small and mid-sized food businesses, from artisan cheesemakers to regional butchers, have increasingly built marketing around lower-carbon, locally produced credentials. The ASA’s intervention signals that broad-brush green claims, particularly comparative ones, will face robust scrutiny regardless of whether the advertiser is a multinational, a government-backed body or a family-run producer.

The decision also lands at a sensitive moment for British agriculture, which is grappling with the phasing out of EU-era subsidies, mounting input costs and growing consumer pressure on the environmental footprint of meat and dairy. Sector bodies will now need to weigh up whether the marketing benefits of headline carbon comparisons justify the regulatory risk, or whether more conservative, narrowly framed claims offer a safer path.

For marketers across the SME economy, the practical takeaway is straightforward enough. Lifecycle language must be backed by lifecycle evidence; comparative claims must be supported by robust, like-for-like data; and where caveats are required, they must be clear enough that the ordinary consumer cannot reasonably misread them. As the ASA has made plain, the test is not what the advertiser intended to say, but what the average reader took away.

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ASA bans British beef and milk adverts after Packham complaint over carbon claims

Suzanne Ashman, one of London’s most prolific early-stage venture capitalists and the daughter-in-law of Sir Tony Blair, has been appointed managing partner of the government’s £500 million Sovereign AI fund, a vehicle designed to channel patient capital into Britain’s homegrown artificial intelligence champions and loosen the country’s dependence on Silicon Valley.

The appointment, confirmed on Tuesday, places Ashman at the helm of one of the most closely watched pots of taxpayer-backed money in the UK technology ecosystem. Launched in April, the Sovereign AI fund is chaired by James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital, and is tasked with co-investing alongside private backers in companies the Treasury views as strategically important to Britain’s long-term competitiveness.

Ashman, who married Euan Blair in 2013, has cut her teeth at two of the capital’s most respected seed and growth investors, LocalGlobe and Latitude, where she sat as a general partner. In its statement, Sovereign AI described her as “one of the most respected venture investors in the UK”, crediting her with “a decade backing the founders who have come to define a generation of British technology”.

Her track record at LocalGlobe and Latitude offers a window into the kind of bets the new fund is likely to favour. She led the firms’ investments into Motorway, the used-car marketplace now valued at more than $1 billion, and into Open Cosmos, a fast-growing satellite manufacturer and operator working on Earth-observation missions. Both are textbook examples of the scale-up stage British venture capital has historically struggled to finance without bringing in American or Asian lead investors.

The family dimension to the appointment is hard to ignore. Euan Blair has himself become a fixture of the British technology scene since founding Multiverse, now the country’s largest apprenticeship provider, in 2016. The combination of a high-profile political surname and one of the most active venture investors in London moving into a government-funded role will inevitably attract scrutiny, even though Ashman’s investment record stands comfortably on its own.

Ashman arrives just as the fund discloses its third investment. Sovereign AI has joined the latest funding round for Isomorphic Labs, the London-headquartered drug discovery business spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021 by Sir Demis Hassabis. Isomorphic announced it had raised $2.1 billion from a syndicate that includes Thrive Capital and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, alongside existing backers Alphabet and Google Ventures.

Isomorphic said the proceeds would underpin an aggressive hiring drive and help it commercialise its “drug design engine”, which uses AI to predict how candidate medicines will behave in the human body, a process the company believes can compress years out of the conventional drug development timeline. The Sovereign AI fund declined to disclose the size of its cheque, though the vehicle typically writes tickets of between £1 million and £20 million.

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Alphabet and Google, said: “Isomorphic Labs has already made extraordinary progress in harnessing AI to accelerate drug discovery and we are excited by this momentum and the early promise of the technology platform.”

For SME-watchers, the Isomorphic deal is a useful indicator of how the fund intends to deploy its money. Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, said: “Isomorphic is one of the most consequential companies being built anywhere in the world today and it’s being built in Britain. Sovereign AI exists to invest in the companies that will shape what this country becomes next.”

The political stakes are equally clear. Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, called Isomorphic’s work “AI at its very best”, arguing that it could “reshape completely how medicines are discovered, cutting years off development and giving real hope to people living with devastating diseases”.

Whether the Sovereign AI fund can move the needle for Britain’s wider population of AI-first SMEs, those without a DeepMind pedigree or a billion-dollar valuation, will be the real test of Ashman’s tenure. With £500 million to deploy and a remit to back companies the private market alone is unlikely to scale, the new managing partner has both the firepower and the political weight behind her. The question now is whether the fund can identify the next generation of British technology leaders before American capital does it first.

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Blair family link as Suzanne Ashman takes the reins at £500m Sovereign AI fund

Jamie Dimon has fired the bluntest warning shot yet at Westminster, signalling that JPMorgan Chase will walk away from its planned multibillion-pound Canary Wharf skyscraper if the political weather in Britain turns colder for the banking industry.

Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, the chairman and chief executive of America’s largest bank said the lender would “reconsider” the project should its UK tax bill climb “too much”, a pointed intervention as speculation grows in the City that Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is vulnerable and that a successor government could lurch leftwards.

“Not political instability, but if they become hostile to banks again, yes,” Dimon told the broadcaster when asked whether the febrile mood in Westminster was giving him pause. “I’ve always objected to the fact, we didn’t damage the UK in any way, we paid probably $10 billion in extra taxes by now. I don’t think that’s right or fair. If that happens too much we will reconsider.”

The proposed tower, which would span roughly three million square feet and accommodate up to 12,000 staff, was unveiled the day after Rachel Reeves delivered her latest Budget. The chancellor opted against raising taxes on banks after intensive lobbying by the industry, a decision that JPMorgan rewarded with one of the most consequential corporate property announcements London has seen in a generation.

Were it built, the skyscraper would rank among the largest office buildings in Europe. JPMorgan has put the construction-phase boost to the local economy at £9.9 billion, while the Treasury has dangled a business rates discount of “up to 100 per cent” to secure the investment. The bank, however, was careful to caveat its commitment at the time, stressing that the project remained “subject to a continuing positive business environment in the UK”.

Dimon’s latest remarks make plain what that small print really means.

Britain’s lenders are enjoying a profitable run. First-quarter results from the high street banks confirmed earnings continue to be flattered by higher-for-longer interest rates, themselves a consequence of the inflationary shock from the war in Iran. That combination, fat banking profits, squeezed household budgets and battered public finances, has long been a recipe for political appetite to raid the sector.

UK Finance, the industry’s lobbying arm, calculates that banks operating in Britain now shoulder the heaviest tax burden of any major financial centre, with an effective rate of 46.4 per cent last year against 27.9 per cent in New York and 38.9 per cent in Frankfurt. The numbers reflect a bank levy on balance sheets introduced in the 2010 emergency Budget after the financial crisis, layered with a corporation tax surcharge on profits brought in five years later.

CS Venkatakrishnan, the Barclays chief executive, captured the mood last month when he observed that “banks in the UK are more highly taxed than they are in other major jurisdictions.” Analysts at Jefferies told clients last week that they considered an increase in the bank surcharge to be “more likely than not”.

A retreat by JPMorgan from Canary Wharf would not simply leave a hole in the Docklands skyline. It would dent the supply chain of construction firms, fit-out specialists, security contractors, cleaners, caterers and software vendors that depend on big anchor tenants. It would also chill the broader signal sent to overseas investors weighing whether London remains, post-Brexit, a credible base for European headquarters, investors whose downstream spending touches thousands of British SMEs.

There is, equally, a financing dimension. Punitive levies on banks rarely stay confined to the banks themselves. They tend to manifest in tighter lending criteria, higher arrangement fees and a more cautious approach to small business credit, precisely the segment of the market that already complains loudest about access to capital.

Whether the warning lands depends on who occupies Number 10 by the autumn. Should Sir Keir survive, Treasury officials are likely to continue the delicate dance of squeezing revenue from elsewhere while keeping the City onside. Should he fall, his successor will inherit a fiscal hole, a restless backbench and an industry that, despite record profits, has become extraordinarily adept at signalling its mobility.

Dimon, who has spent the better part of two decades reminding politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that capital travels, has chosen his moment. JPMorgan’s tower is not merely a building. It is a bargaining chip, and the chancellor, whoever she or he turns out to be, has just been put on notice.

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JPMorgan threatens to scrap Canary Wharf skyscraper if Labour swings left on bank taxes