What Could Fund Marketing Learn From Crypto?

Crypto is a higher-risk asset class than most regulated investment funds. And yet, it communicates more clearly, more engagingly, and more memorably than most funds manage. 

Gareth Malna and Giles Swan dig into why… and what fund managers should take from it without losing the discipline that regulation requires.

Want more in-depth insights on fund marketing? Head to episode five of The Roadmap to £10bn Podcast, where Zeyro's Gareth Malna is joined by Giles Swan: public policy and regulatory consultant and former UK financial regulator.

Let’s get into it.

The Test Most Funds Fail

Gareth opens with a simple challenge: name three investment funds. Most people struggle to name one. Compare that to the recall most people have for a retail brand, a car, a pension provider, and the gap becomes pretty clear.

Part of the reason, Giles argues, is that funds default to relying on the brand of the manager or the name of the management company rather than building a real narrative around the product itself. 

"It's almost like you've got this clique of people, and all they want to rely on is the name," he says. "One BlackRock fund to another, one Aberdeen fund to another." But the name alone doesn't tell an investor anything about what they're actually buying.

Why Crypto Communicates Better

Crypto is unambiguously higher-risk than most regulated funds, yet its marketing tends to be sharper, more visual, and more engaging.

"The type of content that those crypto firms produce for, frankly, let's face it, a higher risk asset than a fund is bonkers, right?" Giles says. "They've really understood the way that people engage with marketing content." Crypto firms are digitally native, built for social platforms and app-first communication, rather than adapting into the digital era the way asset management has had to.

We've seen this dynamic play out from the other side too: our post on Web 3.0 and the problem with questing platforms covers how crypto's own marketing playbook can overreach when engagement gets prioritised over substance. The lesson for funds isn't to copy crypto wholesale. It's to borrow the clarity and pace, while keeping the discipline funds already have.

Compliance Teams Can Release the Handbrake

There's a comfortable excuse fund managers reach for: compliance won't let us say this. Giles pushes back on how much of that is actually true.

"Compliance teams do need to start releasing that handbrake a little bit," he argues, "and allowing content teams, marketing teams, distribution teams to be able to be more creative."

The regulatory documents themselves, the KID being the clearest example, are described by regulators as marketing materials, not risk disclosure documents. 

"That document is primarily designed to allow investors to compare funds side by side when they're thinking about subscription decisions," Giles explains. Managers often default to "professional investors only" as a reason to skip retail-facing marketing altogether, even when that same content inevitably reaches retail investors via their advisers anyway.

Any marketing produced under this banner still needs proper financial promotion approvals. Understanding what actually counts as a financial promotion in the UK is a useful first step before assuming your content is more constrained than it actually is.

Risk Disclosure Is Crowding Out the Pitch

A recurring theme: fund communications are heavily overweighted on risk, at the expense of explaining the outcome. 

"Nobody reads a prospectus of a fund," Giles notes bluntly. 

If risk warnings dominate 90% of a document, the 10% that actually explains what the fund does and why it exists gets buried: and an investor who doesn't understand the product in the first place has no context for the risk warnings anyway.

The FCA's Consumer Composite Investments regime signals where regulators want this to go: layered information, visual risk indicators instead of paragraphs of disclosure text, and a much sharper, more digestible core message. We go into this shift in more depth in Understanding the CCI Regime: Consumer Composite Investments and Why the FCA Is Changing CCI Rules, and What They Want. The direction of travel is toward more effective communication, not less regulation.

Performance Alone Isn't a Marketing Strategy

"Most fund managers, I would say, rely too heavily on performance as their way to market," Giles says.

Performance without a top-of-funnel awareness strategy behind it means there's no one paying attention when the numbers are good. 

"If you don't have the top of the funnel, then you're not going to get enough into the second level of the funnel to convert into an investment in due course."

Good marketing and communications support makes sure people are aware of the fund and understand it well enough to care about the performance data once it arrives.

Where to Start

If your fund's messaging is heavy on disclosure and light on narrative, The Roadmap to £10bn sets out how to rebuild that balance, from positioning through to the materials that actually convert interest into allocation. For a closer look at the framework regulators are steering the industry toward, The Fund Entry Diagnostic is a practical place to check how your current materials measure up.