Our financial services partner Fred Duff Gordon takes time out to talk about how he works with financial services clients and special situations. He tells us about his areas of interest and expertise, and discusses emerging changes in the online reputation space and the implications for Digitalis and our clients.
I started out advising international banks on how to position their lending and trading businesses in the UK, and specifically how desks with overseas operations could project that expertise into the right UK markets. I also helped market infrastructure providers to navigate a remarkable period of regulatory-driven growth opportunity, working with market data and risk management providers across the capital markets. After eight years advising the ‘sell side’ at Moorgate Group, I switched to investment management at Prosek Partners, who have a fantastic reputation as one of the leading independent strategic communications consultants.
Digitalis had been spending more time in the investment management space, and I joined to help build on that, as well as to grow our business across the broader financial services industry and develop our Financial Services Practice. In the years since I joined Digitalis, we have developed a number of methodologies and new applications for our tech platform that help financial services clients with preparedness planning ahead of high-value events.
There have been huge changes in the way we consume media, with mobile now on the cusp of overtaking television as the principal source. TV, radio and print have continued to decline, but interestingly the consumption of information from desktops has actually grown in recent times.
Across the most popular mobile and desktop-enabled platforms, where we focus much of our attention in our work at Digitalis, the rapid growth of misuse and abuse sadly continues. We’ve seen more widespread adoption of inauthentic campaigning techniques across both the political and business spheres, fuelled by social media, and a massive rise in disinformation activity and fake news. This is affecting everything from political campaigns to vaccine drives, and is also increasingly occurring around high value corporate events.
We’re also seeing an increase in the extent to which hostile online activists and citizen media are mining private information from the internet and social media platforms to gather intelligence about individuals and families. This is impacting high-profile individuals and family businesses, and is something we’re increasingly tackling in our activity here at Digitalis by identifying what information is online, removing or replacing it where necessary, and training clients and their families in how to protect their online footprint.
I spend most of my time with large institutional investment managers in private and public markets. Having spent many years in strategic communications for the financial services sector, it’s an area I have developed deep expertise in, so it’s rewarding to be able to utilise that and help our clients mitigate risk and maximise their position in the online space. On any working day I may be providing strategic communications consultancy, enabling clients to identify emerging risks and to make the most of opportunities presented by the unregulated online environment, or helping them to advance their arguments towards harder-to-reach audiences as part of their pre-event preparedness planning.
Digitalis’s online narrative management toolkit is invaluable in this work, enabling clients to regulate the searchable narratives and to reach new audiences, as well as providing powerful leverage in battles to win the debate around a contended issue. When a client sees positive results, it makes all the hard work worthwhile.
On the risk management side, it’s rewarding to provide a robust level of assurance over what is essentially an unregulated information environment, and this has proved to be of immense value to our clients within the financial services sector.
Financial services organisations today have to engage with a growing number of stakeholders, and face scrutiny from a larger and more diverse base of commentators than ever before. Against this backdrop, we have a number of differentiated solutions to leverage their strategic communications and marketing activity.
In particular, engaging with existing and potential shareholders is becoming more complex – not least as private investors increase their participation in public equity markets. This raises new challenges around information risk and requires careful management. My approach is methodical, taking time to develop a complete understanding of a client’s objectives and challenges, and employing the best tools from Digitalis’s inventory to maximise the potential for that client. We also need to use a certain amount of creativity and apply principles from psychology, to ensure each client’s communications and marketing activity will give them the results they’re looking to achieve, reaching and landing well with their intended audience.
Private equity investors are facing particular scrutiny, and sometimes on a very personal, private level. We can very effectively help to mitigate this through our research and intelligence offering, and for me, seeing this process deliver tangible benefits to clients is always rewarding.
There has been a shift in the amount of personal information being reported by the nationals and sector trade media, with individuals working on large transactions being increasingly targeted. I expect this trend to continue, and it will become ever more important for financial services clients to be aware of it and take action to minimise the risks to their privacy, security and indeed to successful commercial outcomes for their business.
Parties seeking to disrupt the operations of their competitors, or to undermine a specific transaction, are increasingly using a variety of digital media as a vehicle for furthering their cause. The information they seek to amplify can take many forms, from unearthing historical material that may damage a company or individual, to propagating disinformation or one-sided opinion, and the methodologies used are also growing in number and becoming more sophisticated. I predict that as this weaponisation of digital media increases, we will see growing demand from organisations wishing to take control of the open source environment in order to safeguard brand value, and to better prepare for high-value events and transactions.
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email webrequests@digitalis.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to webrequests@digitalis.com