The Operating Model for Marketing in Financial Services: How to Structure Teams for Growth

For decades, many financial services companies treated marketing as a support function that was siloed from growth strategy. That era is ending. As customer expectations rise, distribution models fragment, and data become both an asset and a liability, marketing is being asked to drive enterprise growth while simultaneously remaining deeply embedded in individual lines or business. 

Many firms are discovering this isn’t an easy balance to achieve. Even well‑resourced marketing functions struggle when they are overly decentralized, loosely governed, or structurally disconnected from strategy and data. The challenge leadership teams face is not just to modernize marketing to keep up with evolving tech stacks but how to structure the function so that it can scale impact without breaking trust with the business. 

The number one problem many marketing organizations face is the lack of a cohesive enterprise marketing strategy. Many lines of business within financial services organizations have their own marketing plans, but there is often a lack of consistency across the entire firm. While this may mean the individual lines of business are well served for immediate needs, such as product launches or sponsorships, without a unified system, it can also lead to duplicative efforts, inconsistent branding, and unclear ROIs. It also often means that little to no information sharing is done across business lines, so there is relatively no knowledge consistently passed across units.  

To reconcile these issues, organizations often aggressively centralize, putting branding, media, analytics, and more into a core team. But this leads to a loss of local or regional relevance, slower execution and responsiveness, and complaints from business unit leaders that feel marketing isn’t serving them as well as they used to.  

To strike the right balance, the strongest marketing functions we have observed design themselves as a system, not a collection of sub-teams, and they structure themselves with three core components:  

• A strong enterprise spine  
• Proximity to the business  
• Shared metrics and clear decision rights 

From this core, marketing organizations can build and branch as needed but typically some level of centralization is necessary for success.  

Not all marketing capabilities scale in the same manner. Product lines or regional marketers may do it through proximity to the customer while Branding is through consistency and influence. What sets high-performing organizations apart is that they are clear about which elements to centralize and which to decentralize.  

Capabilities that almost always sit at the enterprise level include: 

• Brand strategy and governance: This team defines the purpose, positioning, and narrative as well as the guardrails that enable the company to flex across business lines and audiences without fragmenting them.  
• Data, analytics, and measurement: Marketing needs a single source of truth, which is impossible if every business line measures success differently. Shared enterprise-wide KPIs and dashboards are key.  
• Marketing operations and MarTech: Platforms, vendor strategy, and operating standards must scale. Fragmented ownership here leads to cost, risk, and complexity. 
• Sponsorships, media, and narrative: These types of investments deliver value when they are well orchestrated and measured at scale. 

When these capabilities are dispersed across business units or regions, marketing is busy (and often running duplicative efforts) but not accountable. But when they are centralized, their value compounds. 

However, it’s important to note that centralization doesn’t mean distance from business lines or customers. Line of business marketers stay close to customers, are accountable to local KPIs, and can quickly respond to product demands. But these marketers must also operate as dual citizens, keeping one foot in the business line and another as part of the centralized global function. This means transparent planning and prioritization, clear decision-making authority between the centralized function and the business line, and KPIs that aren’t exclusive to either (though there may be some differences in the business line metrics).

Whom the CMO reports to is often debated and varies across organizations. In some it is the CEO—this is typical in more mature, brand-led organizations. For this reporting line to work well, the CEO must have the capacity to engage with the function, an understanding of marketing, and both enterprise and business line clarity on the brand as a strategic asset.  

In other financial organizations, the CMO reports to another C-suite leader, such as the Chief Growth Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, President/COO, Chief Administrative Officer, or Chief Human Resources Officer. To determine the right reporting line, leadership teams should start by asking three questions:  

• Does the marketing function have enterprise authority? 
• Is the CEO actively sponsoring marketing? 
• Can the CMO balance priorities between businesses? 

In a recent global study of more than 500 growth leaders, Egon Zehnder found that proximity to the CEO was important, but it was the relationship between them that mattered most. In growing organizations, 74% of marketing, commercial, or customer‑focused executives described their relationship with the CEO as a strategic thought partnership.  

Whether it is the CEO or another C-suite leader that the marketing leader reports to, they must empower the marketing organization and offer back-up when trade-offs need to be made. 

If marketing cannot prove its value across the business, even the most well-designed structure will not be enough. Ultimately, the function’s ability to showcase its impact is what enables marketing to actively drive growth for the organization. And shared goals and KPIs are key in demonstrating that value. Without alignment on what to measure, marketing  will be pulled into endless debates over spend, creative, and channels instead of the more strategic ones.  

Some best practices for ensuring that both the global, centralized function and the business line or regional marketers are aligned are:  

• Tie brand investments to downstream outcomes—even if they are a long end-game 
• Use shared dashboards to see what is being spent across the marketing funnel 
• Make trade‑offs visible and data‑driven 

Demonstrating this shared impact enterprise-wide takes the perception of marketing as a cost-center to a value-driver.

For financial services firms evaluating their marketing structures, a good place to begin is to answer these four questions (in close partnership with the marketing leader): 

Define which capabilities require consistency, scale, and shared infrastructure, such as brand, data/analytics, MarTech, and measurement, to avoid duplication and ensure a single source of truth. Central ownership should enable enterprise-wide standards, investment discipline, and cross-channel optimization. 

Clarify where proximity to customers and products drives differentiation (e.g., segment marketing or campaign execution) while still operating within enterprise guardrails. The goal is to enable agility and relevance without undermining consistency or efficiency. 

Establish a clear enterprise owner for measurement, including KPIs, dashboards, and attribution, while defining how accountability is shared with business lines for performance outcomes.  

Ensure the marketing leader has the mandate, reporting line, and executive backing to enforce standards, reallocate investments, and drive change across the enterprise and lines of business. Without both formal authority and sustained leadership support, even well-designed models may not take hold. 

The answers then inform not just the org chart but the operating model: reporting lines, metrics, decision-rights, investment priorities, and the relationship between enterprise and business-line marketing. 

For leadership teams, the implication is clear: Marketing is not an operational function whose oversight is delegated to whatever C-suite leader has capacity. The most successful marketing organizations in financial services are not the most centralized or the most creative. They are the most intentional about the design of their function. Marketing is a strategic lever that should be aligned to both the enterprise and people strategy, ensuring that every initiative supports broader business goals and enhances employee engagement. The focus on creating coherence across brand, data, technology, and execution without sacrificing the local insight that makes financial services personal and trusted. Organizations that recognize this elevate marketing to a system that compounds their growth.