Regulated firms must explain risk clearly without undermining trust. Matthew Leopold from LexisNexis sets out how marketers can educate clients, present solutions, and avoid alarmist messaging.
Matthew Leopold is Head of Brand, Content and PR at LexisNexis, where he leads top-of-funnel engagement across brand, corporate affairs, social media, and communications for legal technology products.
His career spans B2C and B2B marketing at British Gas, aviation, and unified communications technology before LexisNexis, where the challenge is shifting a trusted legal content heritage brand towards a technology-led future without losing credibility.
Matthew explores how regulated professions communicate risk in marketing and operations, balance transparency with fear-based tactics, and use AI without creating new data and trust problems.
Watch the full episode above, or view the interview on YouTube.
Created from episode transcript
Leopold argues that much regulation in regulated professions exists to educate clients about risk and the steps they can take to reduce it. Clearer risk communication supports informed decisions rather than surprise later.
Why Risk Communication Shapes Trust In Regulated Marketing
Communicating risk is not only a compliance task. Leopold describes it as central to brand loyalty and realistic expectations when firms are upfront about what could go wrong.
That transparency can cost individual sales, but it builds longer-term trust. Few brands, he notes, would list trust as something they do not care about.
For teams delivering sensitive information digitally, the same principle applies: clients need to understand what they are opening, what could go wrong, and what controls exist. Firms reviewing that balance may find practical context on cybersecurity in digital customer communications useful alongside marketing and compliance work.
Three Ways Risk Appears In Client-Facing Communications
Leopold breaks risk messaging into three overlapping patterns that marketers and compliance teams both touch.
Warning Clients About Activity Risk
The first is operational communication: explaining risk before a client invests, travels without insurance, or takes another consequential step. In professional services this often supports formal offline advice.
Being clear about downside can feel commercially uncomfortable, but Leopold treats it as a core trust mechanism, not an optional disclaimer.
Marketing Products That Manage Risk
The second pattern is insight-led marketing: identifying a risk in the client's work and showing how a product or process helps manage it. Examples range from antivirus software to legal research tools that reduce the risk of out-of-date advice.
Law firms face reputational, indemnity, and cash-flow consequences when advice is wrong, so risk-led positioning can be powerful when grounded in real workflow pain.
Clarifying Risk To The Expert
The third is liability clarity: the expert explains limits of guidance so the client makes their own decision. Tone matters here. Leopold recalls British Gas billing research where too much detail looked like concealment, while oversimplification looked like hiding information.
"The better we communicate those risks, the better that they can be at minimizing the impact of those risks on them."
Regulated sectors sometimes slide into fear-led campaigns when teams want to stress urgency. Leopold's counter is context: explain when and how a risk might arise, how it relates to the product or service, and what the client can realistically manage.
Marketers should educate rather than alarm. Sensationalist language and newspaper-style scare tactics create anxiety without improving decisions.
Choosing The Right Customer Channel?
Read our research on portals, logins, email, and post before deciding how customers should receive important documents.
He pairs risk explanation with benefits, safeguards, and expertise. Data, case studies, and proof points add credibility when quantifying likelihood or impact is possible. Where data is thin, language choice becomes even more important, often pulling marketing and compliance in opposite directions.
Context turns isolated threats into manageable decisions clients can act on.
Leopold shares a customer services complaint about an email he sent on a key risk topic: the reader found it too close to the bone and said it added to their mental burden. He apologised, but took it as a signal that the topic resonated and that tone, and the balance between risk and solution, needed refinement.
Emphasising the risk of not buying a product is a familiar sales pressure, he says, but blended campaigns that also explain benefits tend to work better than fear-only routes.
"Regulated firms need marketing and client communications that explain risk honestly without pushing people back to channels they do not trust."
Technologies such as AI open routes to sharper, more personalised risk insight drawn from CRM data, calls, or public signals. Leopold sees rich content opportunities, but also intrusion risk when a supplier appears to know a client's problem before the client does.
Generative tools can produce spoke thought leadership for a specific segment, yet data security, GDPR, IP ownership, and cross-client data separation raise new marketing and compliance questions. At early maturity stages, those risks need explicit guardrails.
Questions For Marketing And Compliance Teams
Does this message educate the client on risk and next steps, or mainly create anxiety?
Is the level of detail appropriate for the channel, or does it look like concealment or a disclaimer dump?
If you use client data for personalisation, do you have clear permission, protection, and segmentation rules?
Practical Takeaways For Regulated Marketers
Leopold's closing advice for professionals in regulated sectors is to lead with transparency and realistic expectations. Open risk discussion in marketing materials signals honesty and helps clients differentiate firms that understand industry complexity.
Support risk conversations with proof where you can, keep tone professional rather than hyperbolic, and balance risk with the benefits and safeguards your product or service provides.
FAQs
Who Is Matthew Leopold?
Matthew Leopold is Head of Brand, Content and PR at LexisNexis. He specialises in top-of-funnel brand and communications for legal technology, with prior roles in B2C and B2B marketing across British Gas, aviation, and unified communications technology.
Why Is Communicating Risk Important in Regulated Marketing?
Leopold explains that regulated professions often require firms to inform clients about risk and mitigation steps. Clear communication supports trust, realistic expectations, and better client decisions, even when transparency may slow some sales.
How Should Marketers Balance Fear-Based Messaging and Transparency?
He recommends educating rather than alarming: provide context for when risks arise, avoid sensationalist language, pair risks with solutions and proof points, and use a professional tone that does not exaggerate negative outcomes.
What Role Does AI Play in Marketing Around Risk?
AI can enable more personalised risk insight and targeted thought leadership, but it also raises data security, privacy, IP, and cross-client separation concerns that marketers must address alongside compliance teams.
Sam Kendall works on digital marketing at Beyond Encryption, helping build B2B marketing activity around research, first principles, and sustainable growth. He writes about marketing effectiveness, positioning, customer communications, and digital culture, with longer-form work published at ATNL.net.
Sam Kendall
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