Finance marketers launch UK’s FIRST digital agency exclusively for finance brands

• Balance is the UK’s only digital performance marketing agency dedicated exclusively to helping financial brands grow their online presence.
• Headed up by Alex Murphy, a digital marketer of 20 years, who was previously Marketing Director at Admiral and Head of Performance at GoCompare.
• The new agency goes live as the FCA releases Consumer Duty, which affects how UK finance firms communicate online.
• Balance joins as the newest member of the Liberty Marketing Group – an agency collective of 40+ digital marketers.

Balance, a new marketing consultancy and agency dedicated to financial services, has launched to help businesses hit their online growth goals and better serve prospective clients.

The agency is being headed up by Alex Murphy – one of the most experienced finance marketers in the country, with 20+ years of financial services marketing experience with brands such as Admiral, The Royal Mint, and GoCompare.

Alex is joining forces with Co-Founder Gareth Morgan, another marketer with over 20 years experience, most of it in financial services. As CEO of the wider Liberty Marketing Group, Gareth has worked alongside dozens of finance clients such as Admiral, Target, Aviva, and MotoNovo.

This launch sees Balance become the newest agency in the Liberty Marketing Group, alongside Liberty and Foundation. It boasts a joint resource pool of more than 40 specialist marketers who offer services including SEO, paid media, content creation, social media management, digital PR and digital strategy.

Alex Murphy says:

“I absolutely loved my marketing leadership roles in financial services, but it’s undeniable that it’s a very tough sector to market in. Marketing teams tend to be relatively under-resourced and under-budgeted in relation to the size of the business. They often have grand transformative multi-year goals, but zero-compromise short-term targets, and the strict regulation, whilst very important, can make it challenging to navigate while pursuing growth.”

Gareth Morgan says:

“15 years ago, when managing digital marketing for a firm in the mortgage sector, I was getting frustrated with agencies that either didn’t understand compliance and the massive difference this makes to how finance brands market themselves, or they were too scared of regulations to suggest work that would cut-through such a competitive space and gain attention. 

“Chatting to Alex last summer, I realised this is still a huge issue for in-house marketers. He agreed that there was a big gap in the market, and he’d been feeling the same way for years as well. That’s why we’ve launched Balance – an agency that is both creative and compliant.”

The business launches at the right time with the FCA releasing Consumer Duty later this year. These higher standards will put the spotlight on the communications that all financial services brands have with customers, much of it focusing on the web.

As part of the launch, the team at Balance have conducted research into 50 household-name finance brands and scored them against the measurements that both the FCA and Google judge them on, finding that many are failing best practice guidelines on how to communicate online.

Alex Murphy says:

“We’ll be releasing this research in the coming weeks to help guide both internal marketing teams and compliance teams in areas where they could do better.

“We’re here to help them fix these issues and make sure all future content and campaigns please the regulator, the search engines, and most importantly, their customers at the same time.”

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About Balance

Balance is the UK’s first and only financial services digital performance agency, set up by Alex Murphy and Gareth Morgan in 2023 as part of The Liberty Marketing Group. The agency provides consultancy, as well as SEO, PPC, PR, content and social for a wide range of businesses in the financial sector.

About The Liberty Group

The Liberty Group, based in Cardiff, holds Liberty Marketing, Foundation and Balance under it’s Umbrella. Liberty Marketing is Wales’ largest specialist agency, with over 40 employees and was set-up by Gareth Morgan in 2008.

In 2020, Foundation was set-up by Gareth Morgan; a digital-marketing agency specifically for those in the beauty and skincare sector, and also provides services such as SEO, PR, PPC, content and social.

About Alex Murphy

Alex Murphy boasts 20+ years working in marketing teams across financial services brands including Marketing Director at Admiral, Head of Performance Marketing at GoCompare, Marketing Manager at The Royal Mint and Online Marketing Manager at University of Glamorgan, and now heads up Balance.