DMFS NEW YORK SUMMIT | Day 1:
7:30 am
REGISTRATION & NETWORKING BREAKFAST: BUILD COMMUNITY CONTACTS
- Start your day off right and connect with financial marketing leaders.
- Get to know your industry peers and colleagues over a delicious breakfast.
- Source practical tips, discuss best practices, and prepare for the day ahead.
8:30 am
WELCOME FROM STRATEGY INSTITUTE
8:35 am
OPENING REMARKS FROM THE CHAIRPERSON
Gain insight into today’s sessions so you can get the most out of your conference experience.
8:45 am
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: BUILDING BLOCKS FOR BRANDING
How to Elevate Brand Strength at Every Touchpoint of the Member Experience
Discover how a truly effective brand is built far beyond campaigns. You will walk through touchpoints members experience to identify friction points, strengthen cross-functional alignment, and ensure that every channel reflects the ideal brand experience. Take away specific solutions to:
- Strengthen every touchpoint, which includes website, applications, service channels, underwriting, and communication SLAs.
- Perfect marketing, operations, lending, and technology to reduce friction and improve outcomes.
- Achieve organizational buy-in by demonstrating how brand experience directly impacts marketing performance.
Master the foundational building blocks that transform your marketing from producing campaigns to shaping an experience-driven brand that earns loyalty, trust, and measurable growth.
9:15 am
KEYNOTE PANEL DISCUSSION: INTELLIGENT CONTENT ENGINE
How to Use Data-Driven Creation and Distribution for Maximum Relevance
Accelerate content ROI by using audience insights and performance data to guide every stage of your creation and delivery. Develop a blueprint to:
- Leverage customer behavior and search trends to pinpoint high-impact topics and formats.
- Master AI-assisted tools to draft, optimize, and adapt content for different channels at scale.
- Achieve automated distribution workflows — email, social, and web — to deliverthe right message to the right audience at the right time.
Enrich your content strategy with a data-informed engine that drives measurable engagement and ongoing relevance.
9:45 am
SPEED NETWORKING! MAKE MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS
Grow your network by meeting like-minded individuals to share your latest ideas and projects with:
- Enjoy a quick icebreaker, exchangeLinkedIn information, and build lasting business relationships.
- Achieve your conference networking goals in a fun and agile fashion.
- Join a communityof marketing leaders and gain invaluable support.
10:05 am
INDUSTRY EXPERT: BEYOND GEO
Orchestrating Advocacy Across the Consumer Journey
Financial consumers are turning to AI for what they want: personalization. They ask, compare and decide inside AI conversations, shaping a “brand of one” from every answer, agent, and interaction. Earning their trust starts with understanding the key moments in the journey that make the most impact.
GEO gets you into the answer. Advocacy gets you chosen.
In this session, Jonathan Gagliano and Wayne Cichanski of iQuanti share how leading financial brands are moving beyond visibility: anticipating their customers’ moments of decision, and showing up as their advocate across search, media, content and experience.
Three priorities for your 2027 plan:
- Know the consumer best. AI rewards the brand that understands each segment’s needs.
- Predict the moment of decision. Scattered signals reveal when, and how, your customers will ask.
- Orchestrate horizontally. One strategy, working in unison around the consumer.
10:35 am
REFRESHMENTS BREAK & EXHIBITOR LOUNGE: VISIT BOOTHS & SOURCE EXPERTISE
- Discuss ideas on how to transform your organization so it embraces innovation.
- Share your challenges in identifying transformative projects with peers.
- Schedule one-to-one private meetings for personalized advice.
11:05 am
CASE STUDY: BUILDING NARRATIVES THAT RESONATE
Turning Moments into Movements
Uncover how to build narratives that connect with your target audiences to earn client trust and loyalty. Walk away with clear strategies to:
- Bolster brand relevance by anchoring campaigns to the cultural moments your customers already care about.
- Strengthen cross-functional buy-in by tying storytelling investments to the metrics leadership tracks.
- Amplify customer loyalty by evolving one-off campaigns into movements that outlast the moment.
Deliver narratives that capture attention, build movements, and drive lasting brand loyalty.
11:05 am
CASE STUDY: PLAYING OFFENSE IN A DEFENSIVE RATE MARKET
How to Use Creative Product Design to Your Advantage
What happens when you connect a CD to something people already care deeply about? Adopt best practices to:
- Achieve a deposit product that stands out.
- Tap into local partnerships and fan loyalty to drive engagement.
- Refine both the product design and messaging based on what actually works.
Walk away with ideas to rethink your product playbook.
11:05 am
CASE STUDY: DIY AI
How Small Marketing Teams Can Build Like Big Ones
AI can help a marketing team do more than produce content faster. It can help redesign repetitive workflows, test useful tools, and create better client and customer experiences. Jordy Foy, Vice President of Marketing & Digital Innovation at HFG, shares practical examples from his work applying AI across marketing, participant education, and digital experiences.
This practitioner-led session explores:
- Where AI creates meaningful value
- How to evaluate build-versus-buy decisions
- Why human judgment remains central
- How to determine whether the work actually made a difference.
11:35 am
INDUSTRY EXPERT PRESENTATION: SEEING WHAT YOU CAN’T
How to Win the Next Generation of Wealth
- You have more data than any generation of marketers in history, but your tools face the wrong way. Relying on internal CRM data and traditional demographics creates blind spots that leave incumbent banks out of touch with the next generation of wealth.
- This session explores how to eliminate these blind spots using Outsight. We will look at external signals from audiences, competitors, and platforms to see what your internal data misses.
- Audience Blind Spots: Your CRM cannot tell the difference between a loyal customer and one already moving to a challenger bank. We will track the open-web behaviour of the mass affluent self-investor to show where their attention is actually going.
- Content Blind Spots: We will break down the volume-without-traction problem by looking at the exact performance gap between Big Five owned content and digital-native competitors.
- Competitive Blind Spots: We will quantify a 43-to-1 spending gap where incumbent paid media failed to match the organic engagement of challengers. Then we will look at how those challengers used specific creator partnerships to win.
The brands that win the next five years will be the ones that see what others cannot. We will show you how to step outside your internal analytics to find the growth you are missing.
11:35 am
INDUSTRY EXPERT: DECODING AI SEARCH
How LLMs See, Cite and Retrieve A Financial Services Brand
AI search is quietly reshaping how financial services brands get discovered, evaluated, and trusted. This session breaks down what actually happens behind the interface of large language models and why traditional SEO thinking falls short.
The focus is make it as actionable as possible. You will walk away with a clear view of:
- What makes a financial brand retrievable and citable in AI systems
- How to design content that gets included in answers, not just ranked
- Where to build authority beyond your website to influence AI outcomes
For teams operating in a regulated, trust-driven category like financial services, this is no longer an edge case. It is quickly becoming the primary layer of discovery. This session is about understanding that shift early and building for it deliberately
11:35 am
INDUSTRY EXPERT: HOW AI IS MAKING MARKETING A GREENFIELD OPPORTUNITY
Experimentation at Scale
You’ll learn how finserv marketing teams are getting around the engineering dependency and turning siloed analytics into real business intelligence across customer touchpoints. You’ll also see how they run experimentation at scale and rebuild marketing ops to make the most of new AI capabilities.
12:05 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: FROM BRAND STRATEGY TO REVENUE STRATEGY
How to Drive Growth
Position your brand as a direct revenue driver to align brand with commercial outcomes. Walk away with actionable insights to:
- Amplify where brand investment is driving revenue.
- Align internal stakeholders around a brand strategy that delivers both immediate results and sustained growth.
- Enrichthechannels, campaigns, and activities that generate the highest return on brand investment.
Turn your brand strategy into a revenue-driving function that delivers measurable impact and growth.
12:05 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: MARKETING TO THE NEXT GENERATION
How to Shift Strategies and Engage Younger Generations
Revamp your content, channels, and messaging to win the loyalty of Gen Z and younger millennials without alienating legacy audiences. Source practical tips to:
- Increase platform-native tactics like short-form video, creators, and interactive tools that drive authentic engagement on social media.
- Master values-driven storytelling frameworks that align financial products with younger consumers’ priorities.
- Strengthen measurement and feedback loops.
Perfect a next-gen playbook that future-proofs your brand and captures the attention of tomorrow’s most valuable customers.
12:05 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: SEO VS GEO
The Battle for Visibility in the AI Search Era
As AI-powered search transforms how consumers discover brands and information, financial marketers must adapt their visibility strategies beyond traditional search rankings. Explore how SEO and GEO work together to ensure your content is surfaced, trusted, and referenced across both search engines and generative AI platforms. Walk away with a clear framework to:
- Identify the content, authority, and trust signals that influence AI-generated responses
- Develop measurement frameworks that account for visibility beyond clicks and traffic
- Build a future-ready search strategy that balances SEO fundamentals with emerging GEO opportunities
Take away practical strategies for increasing brand visibility and authority across both traditional and AI-driven search experiences.
12:35 pm
NETWORKING LUNCH & EXHIBITOR LOUNGE VISITS
- Meet interesting speakers and pick their brains on the latest industry issues.
- Expand your network and make connections that last beyond the conference.
- Enjoy great food and service while engaging with your financial marketing colleagues.
1:35 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: GRASSROOTS MARKETING
How to Create a Home-Grown Marketing Strategy That Speaks to Your Brand
Engage the local community to drive engagement beyond digital platforms. Source your plan of action by:
- Establishing campaigns that connect withthe community and build organic relationships that convert into new clients.
- Creating a story that involvesthe consumer in a journey, creating increased customer loyalty.
- Gaining a competitive edge by establishing yourself asthe preferred, trusted local partner for financial needs.
Increase your ability to create a regional brand that really connects to the local community and attracts the loyalty of its consumers.
1:35 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: MARTECH CONSOLIDATION
How to Cut Tools While Lifting Performance
Eliminate redundant platforms, reduce costs, and boost your campaign ROI by streamlining an overgrown tech stack. Master the success factors to:
- Optimize a proven audit framework to identify overlaps, under-utilized tools, and hidden licensing drain.
- Strengthen data-driven criteria for deciding which platforms to sunset, replace, or elevate.
- Perfect management tactics to migrate users, centralize data, and reinvest savings into high-impact capabilities.
Achieve a leaner, smarter martech stack that lowers spend and elevates your performance across every marketing channel.
1:35 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: AUTOMATION POWERHOUSE
How to Eliminate Repetitive Tasks to Free Up Teams
Unlock your team’s creative potential by automating routine marketing workflows and freeing up time for strategy and innovation. Achieve a step-by-step action plan to:
- Identifyhigh-value automation opportunities to eliminate manual bottlenecks.
- Adapt and integratethe right tools, such as RPA and marketing automation platforms.
- Transform governance andmonitoring to ensure automated workflows maintain quality, compliance, and brand consistency.
Transform your department into an automation powerhouse that drives creativity, agility, and superior marketing outcomes.
2:05 pm
INDUSTRY EXPERT: HUMAN CONNECTION AS A FINSERV GROWTH STRATEGY
Most financial services marketing sells rates and features, but people choose where to bank the way they choose a doctor: on trust. In this moderated conversation, Merritt McNeely (CEO) and Olivia Hyatt (VP of Strategy) of Flock and Rally share the story of their partnership with Palmetto Citizens Federal Credit Union. Moderated by Thomas Peroutka of Atmosphere TV, the panel shows how a regional financial institution can compete against national brands and grow into new markets without losing the personal service that sets it apart. Whether your institution manages $5 million or $50 billion, you’ll leave with practical ideas you can use right away.
- Market the relationship, not the product. Members aren’t really buying a checking account or a car loan; they’re looking for relief from quiet fears about money and protecting their family. Messaging that speaks to those fears builds lasting trust.
- Local partnership is a budget strategy. A regional institution will never outspend a national bank. Local agencies and partners bring faster insight, fewer wasted dollars and credibility in the community that national ad spend can’t buy.
- Growth is a trust transfer. Members who come in through a branch acquisition or a new market inherit a relationship they didn’t choose. Keeping the same tone, faces and community presence in every market, big or small, is how a brand keeps its hometown feel as it scales.
2:05 pm
INDUSTRY EXPERT: WINNING BUYERS BEFORE THE SHORTLIST
Why You’re Missing Early Demand (and the 3-Part Framework to Fix It)
92% of B2B buyers choose a vendor from a shortlist they created before formal research began. For financial services marketers, the opportunity is not just capturing active demand—it is reaching buyers while their perceptions are still being shaped.
Join NetLine as we analyze 7 million first-party buyer signals to show how credible content, trusted coverage, and always-on engagement help influence early vendor preference.
You’ll walk away with practical frameworks for:
- Aligning your content strategy to how buyers research and validate solutions
- Expanding coverage in the channels where buyer trust is built
- Measuring how early influence moves accounts forward
Use these insights to engage the right buyers earlier and improve the quality of the pipeline that follows.
2:05 pm
CROSS-SELL IS A DECISION PROBELM
Using Audience Intelligence to Drive Smarter Growth
Most financial institutions approach cross-sell as a campaign problem, promoting the next product based on what customers already have. Despite more data, digital channels, and automation, results often plateau due to mistimed outreach, low relevance, and inefficient spend.
This session reframes cross-sell as a decisioning problem. Instead of asking “what should we sell next?”, leading organizations are identifying who is actually ready, and why. By leveraging audience intelligence built from first-party data, behavioral signals, and real-world engagement patterns, marketers can prioritize high-value opportunities and activate them across digital and offline channels at the right moment.
Walk away with a practical framework to:
- Distinguish customer eligibility from true readiness
- Use behavioral and first-party signals to improve timing and prioritization
- Align channel strategy (digital + direct) to audience intent
- Move beyond static segmentation toward adaptive, insight-driven growth
Using a real-world banking example, this session will demonstrate how shifting to audience-based decisioning improves conversion, increases efficiency, and drives more meaningful customer relationships.
Transform data insights into impactful marketing actions that drive measurable growth in a privacy-first, post-cookie world.
2:35 pm
WORKSHOPS (45 mins) (Please select one)
WORKSHOP A: ELEVATING ADVISOR POSITIONING IN WEALTH & ASSET MANAGEMENT
Strengthening Market Presence, Client Engagement, and Thought Leadership
In a competitive wealth and asset management landscape, advisors must differentiate themselves by building strong client relationships, leveraging thought leadership, and effectively navigating market events. Source strategic insights into crafting a compelling value proposition, positioning in local markets, and using content-driven storytelling to strengthen the advisor-client connection. Create a roadmap to:
- Define and communicate a value proposition that resonates with both clients and intermediary partners.
- Equip advisors with content and thought leadership tools to guide client conversations and navigate market events in real time.
- Align internal storytelling and brand positioning to enhance credibility and market presence.
Enrich advisors with the tools, narratives, and positioning strategies they need to stand out in the evolving wealth and asset management space.
Betsy Wolking, Director of Marketing & Communications, Foster & Motley
WORKSHOP B: FROM IDEA TO ACTION
Build Your AI Workflow Plan
Turn an everyday marketing challenge into a practical AI-assisted workflow. In this hands-on session, attendees will identify one recurring task, map where AI can help, establish human review points, and define how success will be measured. A prepared example and guided worksheet will help participants leave with a clear first test and an action plan they can take back to their teams. No coding experience is required, and the exercise can be completed without uploading company information or building a live application.
Jordy Foy, Vice President of Marketing & Digital Innovation, Hays Financial Group
WORKSHOP C: FINANCIAL ADVISOR MARKETING
How to Better Drive Sales and Brand Consistency
Discover how to provide advisors with the training, support, and technology needed to drive sales and branding in a crowded market. Adopt best practices to:
- Optimize advisors with branded content, digital platforms, and compliant marketing resources.
- Bolster data-driven personalization and tailored solutions.
- Perfect a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.
Transform your advisor network into a powerful growth engine by uniting brand consistency, marketing innovation, and sales enablement.
Jennifer Ballarin, Director, Plante Moran Wealth Management
3:10 pm
REFRESHMENTS BREAK & EXHIBITOR LOUNGE:ATTEND VENDOR DEMOS & CONSULT INDUSTRY EXPERTS
- Enjoy exclusive sponsor demos and experience the next level of financial marketing innovation firsthand.
- Meet one-on-one with leading solution providers to discuss organizational hurdles.
- Brainstorm solutions and gain new perspectives and ideas.
3:40 pm
INDUSTRY EXPERT: WHEN TRUST IS LEARNED
When Financial Expertise Gets Personal
In financial services, buyers need more than compelling messages to make decisions. They need confidence in the information they receive, the options they consider, and the institutions they choose.
In this session, Kaltura’s SVP of Financial Services & Sales Steve Taylor explores how financial brands can turn institutional knowledge into personalized experiences that earn trust and drive action. Discover how interactive content, conversational AI, and adaptive user journeys help buyers navigate complex decisions, get guidance tailored to their needs, and move forward with confidence.
Key highlights:
- AI is transforming how financial institutions engage clients, moving from static digital experiences to real-time, personalized interactions.
- Technology can support relationship managers by making expertise and guidance more accessible, while preserving human touch.
- Agentic AI enables financial institutions to tailor experiences to individual client needs without increasing operational complexity.
- AI-powered client experiences must operate within clear guardrails, using approved knowledge and maintaining security, compliance, and institutional control
- Institutions that combine human expertise with intelligent, responsive digital experiences will have competitive advantage.
3:40 pm
INDUSTRY EXPERT: SEARCH IN THE AI ERA
A finserv marketer’s roadmap
AI has changed how investors search, and the impact is showing up everywhere: fewer clicks, rising acquisition costs, and a buyer journey with more touchpoints than ever. AI tools now act as a shortlist filter, and if your brand isn’t on that list, ranking first anywhere else doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, leadership sees how fast AI moves and asks marketing why results can’t move just as fast.
In this session, MDRN Capital’s Angele Fox, CMO, and Level Agency’s Josh Muskin, VP of Marketing Strategy, share how a newer, virtual RIA is competing for visibility against brands with decades of brand recognition. They’ll walk through two real examples from MDRN’s work: strategically mapping an answer engine optimization (AEO) approach to identify where a challenger brand has the right to win, and cleaning up fragmented media data so platforms optimize toward held calls instead of form fills. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for sequencing foundation work and making the case for it to leadership.
3:40 pm
INDUSTRY EXPERT: HOW TO CLOSE THE BLIND SPOT IN YOUR PAID SEARCH STRATEGY
A Home Equity Lender’s Playbook for Branded Term Defense and AI Search Readiness
You see your own bids and spend, not your competitors’ moves. Defend your branded terms and expand into real search opportunity. Take away a practical framework for account-level visibility, drawn from how a Home Equity lender closed this exact gap.
- Defend branded search terms against competitors hiding below Google’s radar
- Uncover competitor spend and bidding shifts your own account can’t show
- Preview the next blind spot already emerging in ChatGPT and AI search
Leave with real account-level visibility to close your blind spot, not just what Google chooses to show you.
4:10 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: SPEAKING THE BOARDROOM LINGO
How to Communicate Value to the C-Suite
Translate marketing’s impact into language that resonates with your CEO, CFO, and COO. Strengthen credibility and marketing’s voice in your boardroom to secure investment and enhance impact. Draw up a blueprint to:
- Increase communication of the ROI of marketing campaigns in terms your CEO will
- Achieve a deeper understanding ofthe metrics being utilized by the business layer.
- Adapt marketing metrics in financial terms and align campaigns with enterprise priorities.
Ensure marketing has a strategic seat at your leadership table through enhanced communication with the business layer.
4:40 pm
END OF DAY ONE SUMMARY & CLOSING REMARKS
Review the key solutions and takeaways from today’s sessions. Source a summary of action points to implement in your work. Discuss tomorrow’s highlights!
5:00 pm
EVENING RECEPTION: ENJOY GREAT CONVERSATION, MUSIC & NETWORKING
- Relax and unwind with tasty cocktails after a long day of learning.
- Don’t miss your chance to win fun prizes by scanning your badge at our exhibitor booths.
- Make dinner plans with your new connections and explore the best of what New York nightlife has to offer. Just be sure to set your alarm for Day 2!
6:00 pm