Q&A: CMO of PensionBee on AI’s Role in Marketing

In the financial services industry, it can be challenging to know how to use AI in a marketing strategy while maintaining regulatory compliance. 

According to Jasper Martens, Chief Marketing Officer of PensionBee, while keeping people in the loop is crucial when it comes to implementing AI across the marketing function, the technology can make things significantly more efficient – when used responsibly.

Ahead of his panel ‘The Future of AI in Marketing’ at the CXO Summit, Jasper shares his perspective on the changes AI is making to the marketing function, and how the technology is supporting marketers within the financial services industry. 

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Please introduce yourself and your role. 

I'm Jasper Martens, Chief Marketing Officer at PensionBee. I joined back in 2015, when we were a small team trying to convince people that managing a pension didn't have to be confusing or boring.

Since then I've run marketing across the business, and for a good stretch I also had product under my remit, which gave me an unusual view of how customer experience and brand actually connect.

I led our push into the US market and, more recently, our "Born to Retire" campaign here in the UK. 11 years in, I still think pensions are one of the hardest things in financial services to make people care about. That's still the job.

In an industry with strict compliance rules, how do you manage implementing AI while still maintaining brand trust and regulatory accuracy?

We treat AI the way we'd treat any new channel or tool: useful, but not exempt from the same scrutiny as everything else we put in front of customers.

In practice, that means human review stays in the loop before any high-risk financial promotions go live.

The FCA hasn't written new AI-specific rules. It is applying Consumer Duty and the Senior Managers Regime to make sure AI-assisted communications still meet customers' information needs and lead to fair outcomes.

AI can, however, help you do the checks. A tool such as Adclear has dramatically cut back the time it takes to do the financial promotion reviews. 

Where have you seen the biggest wins from AI use across marketing operations?

With regards to compliance as just mentioned, we have seen some real wins. AI has also helped us to produce our new Born to Retire campaign. The idea itself was not AI, but storyboarding and planning productions can really be sped up by using AI. 

AI is genuinely good at compressing the time between an idea and a usable draft. Fully AI-run, end-to-end campaigns are still more promise than practice for most of the industry.

How would you say PensionBee balances automation with brand integrity?

Our starting point has always been that pensions are personal and often confusing, so whatever we automate has to make things clearer, not just cheaper or faster to produce.

We use digital tools to make information easy to access and pension management straightforward, but we've deliberately kept a human element alongside that, because some conversations about someone's retirement savings need a person, not just an interface. 

What is one key piece of advice you would give marketing leaders looking to integrate AI into their workflows?

It’s not scary, especially if you’re able to use AI to help improve and speed up administrative processes and tools to get you to the desired campaign results.

Do not automate or use AI for your creative thinking. The best ideas still come from a piece of paper with a pencil. AI will give you an average, not the eureka idea. So never automate that! 

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