Sitecore has just acquired Scrunch, an AI search optimisation platform, and the move is worth paying attention to – not because of the deal itself, but because of what it reveals about where digital experience is heading.

Before a prospect reaches your website, fills in a form, or speaks to a salesperson, they may already have an opinion of you — formed not from your carefully crafted homepage or your latest campaign, but from an AI-generated answer inside ChatGPT, Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot.

If your brand appeared in that answer, clearly and accurately, you’re already in the conversation. If a competitor appeared instead — or if you were misrepresented, or simply absent — the evaluation may already be over.

That’s the problem Sitecore is moving to solve. And it matters well beyond the Sitecore ecosystem.

The content estate problem

Most enterprise brands running a DXP like Sitecore have spent years building substantial content estates. Product pages, FAQs, thought leadership, case studies, regional variants, campaign content. The investment is real and the content is good.

The problem is that most of it was built for human visitors — rich, interactive, layered with JavaScript, personalisation engines and media components. AI agents don’t experience any of that. They retrieve, parse and compress. If your content isn’t structured clearly enough to be retrieved and understood, it won’t be cited — regardless of its quality.

Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform addresses this directly. It creates a lightweight, machine-readable version of your site that AI agents can actually use, running in parallel with your existing experience rather than replacing it. Your human visitors get the full digital experience. AI agents get a clean, structured layer they can parse, trust and cite.

Sitecore has confirmed that Scrunch’s recommendations will be built into its AI Content Management, Content Marketing and DAM workflows — which means the insight and the action sit in the same place, rather than in a separate dashboard nobody has time to action.

Where AEO and GEO come in

At Remarkable, this connects to work we’re already doing with clients on Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Experience Optimisation. The principles are consistent regardless of platform: content needs to be structured for retrieval, entities need to be clearly defined, answers need to be findable, and the content estate as a whole needs to be coherent enough for AI systems to trust it.

The questions worth asking are practical ones:

• When a buyer in your sector asks an AI to recommend a shortlist, do you appear?
• Which prompts do your competitors win that you don’t?
• Is your most valuable content structured in a way that makes it citable — or is it buried in a PDF, behind a form, or wrapped in a component an AI agent can’t parse?
• Where is your content estate fragmented, outdated or contradictory in ways that undermine your credibility with AI systems?

The Sitecore acquisition signals that these questions are moving from specialist SEO territory into the mainstream of digital experience strategy. For digital leaders already managing complex content estates, the audit of AI readiness is becoming as important as the audit of human experience quality.

What to do now

The opportunity isn’t to rebuild everything. It’s to understand where the gaps are — which content is working hard in AI search, which is invisible, and which is actively undermining your position — and to close those gaps systematically.

That’s a content and DXP conversation as much as it is an SEO one, and it’s one Remarkable is well-placed to help with.

Talk to us about AEO, GEO and AI search readiness

The post Sitecore acquires Scrunch – and your content estate is the point appeared first on Remarkable.

There’s a version of this conversation that the asset management industry has been having with itself for about a decade. It usually starts with something like “digital transformation is coming” and ends with a refreshed website and a new app that nobody uses. The consultants go home, the PowerPoint slides are filed, and the real business (mandate management, fee negotiation, relationship dinners) continues almost entirely as before. 

That era is ending. Not gradually. Fast. 

The challengers that have spent the last five years building digital infrastructure are now scaling it. The fintech disruptors that were once dismissed as “interesting but not really our market” are now sitting in front of the same clients. And the arrival of genuinely autonomous AI agents, not AI as a feature but as a real layer of investment intelligence, is about to change the way firms compete in this industry in ways that legacy players are structurally unprepared for. 

This isn’t a piece about technology adoption. It’s a piece about strategy. Specifically, about why so many traditional asset managers keep making the same category of mistake, and what it reveals about how they think.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Technology. It’s the Strategic Frame. 

Ask the digital or transformation lead at any established asset manager what they’re focused on and you’ll hear a familiar set of themes: operational efficiency, client portal experience, data and analytics, maybe something about AI in the back office. These are real programmes, with real budgets, often led by genuinely capable people. 

But they share a defining characteristic: they are defensive. They are designed to protect existing relationships and reduce cost-to-serve, not to fundamentally rethink what the firm offers or how it competes. They treat digital as infrastructure rather than as a strategy. 

Challengers don’t make this mistake because they can’t afford to. When you’re building from scratch, with no legacy custody arrangements, no inherited client reporting stack, no 30-year-old model that just needs to be left alone, you must build something that’s better. That necessity produces genuine innovation. At scale, it produces a structural advantage. 

The traditional asset manager’s digital budget is almost always a fraction of the technology spend already committed to keeping existing systems running. The challenger’s entire capital base is pointed at building the new thing. 

That asymmetry doesn’t resolve itself. It compounds.

What Challengers Are Actually Getting Right 

The temptation when writing about “fintech disruption” is to focus on the product layer: the slick interface, the lower fees, the frictionless onboarding. These things matter, but they’re downstream of something more fundamental. 

What the best challengers have built is a channel model that fits how modern clients behave. They don’t think about digital as a service delivery mechanism, the kind of portal you log into for information that used to arrive in a PDF quarterly report. They consider it the primary relationship. The data model, the communication logic, the investment narrative: all of it is designed around continuous, personalised, multi-channel engagement. 

That’s not a UX decision. It’s a strategic one. It requires a clear point of view on your client segments, a distribution model built to serve them at scale, and an operating model that can execute without grinding to a halt every time three people in the relationship team need to sign off on a piece of communication. 

Legacy firms tend to have excellent individual client relationships managed by excellent people who are entirely unreplicable at scale. Challengers tend to have scaled relationships that are less warm but far more efficient, and they are closing the quality gap quickly. 

The firms genuinely winning in the middle ground, the Schroders, the Nuveens, the Man Groups of the world, are the ones that have figured out how to scale without losing the human element. That’s a hard organisational problem, not a technology one.

AI Is Not Arriving. It’s Already Here. Just Not Evenly Distributed. 

The industry conversation about AI in asset management has, until recently, been dominated by two narratives that are both somewhat misleading. 

The first is the productivity narrative: AI will help analysts process more data faster, help compliance teams review documents more efficiently, and help client service teams draft communications more quickly. This is true and largely underway. It’s also table stakes. Every firm, legacy or challenger, is doing some version of this. 

The second is the risk narrative: AI in investment processes creates model risk, regulatory uncertainty, and fiduciary exposure. Also, true. Also, not the real story. 

The real story is AI agents operating as a client-facing intelligence layer, autonomous systems capable of monitoring portfolios, identifying opportunities or risks, generating contextualised commentary, and initiating communication without a human trigger. Several challenger platforms are already deploying early versions of this. The client experience isn’t “you can log in and ask our AI a question.” It’s “our system noticed something relevant to your portfolio this morning and has already surfaced it with context.” 

For a traditional asset manager, this creates a genuinely uncomfortable competitive position. Their value proposition, in its simplest form, is that they have smart people who make good decisions about your money. AI agents don’t replace that. But they do make it possible to deliver a version of that proposition at a fraction of the cost, at a speed humans can’t match, and at a level of personalisation that a human-led relationship model can only approximate. 

The firms that will lead in five years are those asking right now: what does our value proposition look like when AI agents are a commodity? What are we, specifically, still better at? And how do we build a digital model around the genuine answer to that question, rather than the answer that makes us feel most comfortable? 

Those are strategy questions, not technology questions. Very few traditional asset managers are treating them as such.

Channel Optimisation Is Where the Battle Is Actually Being Fought 

One of the persistent blind spots in legacy asset management is treating distribution as a separate function from client experience. The distribution team does its thing: managing intermediary relationships, running roadshows, handling institutional sales. The digital team does its thing. Occasionally, they coordinate. Often, they don’t. 

The challengers are laughing at this. Not unkindly, but genuinely. 

Because what the best digital firms have understood is that distribution and experience are the same thing now. Every touchpoint is a channel moment. The way your investment updates are structured is a distribution strategy. The way your client portal presents performance attribution is the distribution strategy. The way your thought leadership reaches a CIO at a pension fund before anyone from your firm has called them is a distribution strategy. 

SEO, content depth, structured data, AI-optimised copy: these aren’t marketing department concerns. They are how your firm’s ideas reach the right people at the right moment in the right context. A well-researched, authoritative piece of content that ranks for the right professional search terms will reach more relevant prospects than a hundred relationship dinners. That’s not speculation; it’s visible in the data for firms that have chosen to look. 

Channel optimisation in 2025 means understanding how your ideas travel: through search, through generative AI surfaces, through social distribution among professional communities, through recommendation. Legacy firms typically have one strong channel (the institutional relationship) and a scattering of underinvested ones around it. Challengers are systematically building the architecture to compete across all of them. 

The point isn’t that relationships don’t matter. They absolutely do, especially at the institutional end of the market. It’s that they increasingly exist within a competitive context where your digital presence either reinforces or undermines the relationship long before the meeting happens.

The Consulting Paradox 

There’s a final dynamic worth naming directly. 

Many of the large traditional asset managers have spent considerable sums on strategy consulting over the past decade. They have roadmaps, transformation programmes, centres of excellence, and innovation labs. They have done the work on paper. 

What they often haven’t done is change. 

This isn’t a criticism of the individuals involved. It’s a structural observation. Legacy asset managers are, in many cases, partnership cultures built around investment excellence. The culture is calibrated to protect the alpha generation engine, and rightly so. But it is also often calibrated to kill off transformation at the point where it starts to feel genuinely disruptive. 

A challenger doesn’t have that cultural antibody. It has survival pressure. Those are very different operating environments. 

The firms that have successfully navigated this (and there are some) have done it by treating digital strategy as a CEO-level priority, not a technology initiative. They’ve accepted that the discomfort is the point. They’ve built external partnerships not to outsource the thinking but to maintain external pressure on a culture that will, left to itself, default to “let’s do this incrementally.” 

Incrementalism is a perfectly rational strategy if you have time. The evidence increasingly suggests that traditional asset managers have less of it than they think. 

What Comes Next 

The next 18 months in asset management will be revealing. AI agent capabilities will move from experimental to structural. Challenger platforms with genuine digital maturity will start winning mandates that would previously have been unthinkable for them. Regulatory frameworks around AI in financial services will start to crystallise, reducing uncertainty for firms bold enough to have already built for it. 

The firms that enter this period with a genuine digital strategy (not a digital team, not a digital programme, but an actual view on how technology changes their competitive position and a plan to respond to it) will be very well placed. The firms still treating it as a back-office efficiency story will find themselves having a much harder conversation with their boards. 

Remarkable is currently conducting a comprehensive analysis of digital maturity across UK and international asset managers, closely examining what the leading firms are doing, where the real gaps are, and what good looks like in this context. It’ll be out shortly, and the findings are starker than the consensus would suggest. 

Watch this space. 

The post The Quiet Crisis in Asset Management: Why Legacy Firms Are Losing the Digital Race appeared first on Remarkable.

Content teams have always faced the same pressure: publish faster, stay on-brand, and don’t let quality slip. For many organisations, that tension results in copy that goes out the door slightly too long, slightly off-tone, or littered with inconsistencies that only a second pair of eyes would catch – except, nobody had time to look.

Sitecore’s AI features are designed to close that gap – not by replacing your writers, but by giving them a smarter editing environment.

What the AI actually does

Working inside the Sitecore Page Builder editor, editors can select any content component and trigger the AI optimisation panel from the right-hand sidebar. From there, a range of actions are available immediately: improve writing, fix spelling and grammar, make shorter, make longer, summarise, change tone, and translate. There’s also a free-text prompt field, so editors can give the AI a specific instruction (for example, “update Remarkable to Remarkable Group”) and have it applied across the entire component in seconds.

The AI generates an optimised version of the content while keeping the original intact. Editors can toggle between the two side by side, accept the change, or discard it, so nothing is pushed to the live site without a deliberate action.

For teams that want to go further, there’s an A/B test option built directly into the same workflow. Editors can set the AI-suggested version running against the original without leaving the page builder, feeding directly into Sitecore’s testing and personalisation engine.

The AI also extends to metadata. When editing page content settings, it can analyse the page and suggest relevant tags — in the video, it recommended both “Case Study” and “Events” based on the content — reducing the manual effort of correctly categorising pages at scale.

Why this matters for your team

The value here isn’t novelty; it’s time. For marketing and content teams managing dozens or hundreds of pages across complex digital estates, the overhead of reviewing, editing, and tagging content is substantial. When those tasks live inside the same tool editors are already working in, rather than requiring a copy to be pasted into a separate AI tool, revised, and pasted back, the friction disappears.

There are also brand governance implications worth taking seriously. Custom AI instructions mean you can encode your brand preferences — terminology, tone, naming conventions — and apply them consistently across the team, without relying on each editor to remember every rule.

For organisations already on SitecoreAI, these features are available now. For those evaluating their DXP options, they represent a meaningful shift in what “ease of use” looks like for content editors in 2026 and beyond.

Want to see this in action for your own platform?

Remarkable is a Sitecore partner with deep experience implementing and optimising Sitecore for enterprise clients. If you’re curious how AI-native content tools could work within your existing tech stack, we’d love to talk.

The post Your CMS Can Now Write Your Copy. Here’s What That Means for Your Website. appeared first on Remarkable.

We’re thrilled to announce that four members of the Remarkable team have had their Optimizely Most Valuable Professional (OMVP) status renewed for 2026: Issy Stephen, Robert McGovern, Riann Smith and Matthew Dunn.

And in even bigger news — Robert McGovern has been upgraded to Gold OMVP!

The OMVP programme recognises practitioners who go above and beyond in contributing to the Optimizely community, through thought leadership, technical innovation, peer mentorship, and sustained engagement with the Optimizely ecosystem. Renewal isn’t automatic; it reflects continued impact and community contribution year after year.

A team of recognised Optimizely experts

Having four OMVPs in-house is a rare distinction, and Rob’s Gold upgrade places him among an even more select group globally. Together, Matt, Issy, Rob, and Riann represent an exceptional depth of expertise across optimisation, experimentation, and digital experience — and their OMVP status is independent recognition of the real-world impact they’re delivering for clients.

This renewal builds on the momentum from last year, when Rob and Riann were first named Silver Strategy OMVPs and joined Matt, our Optimizely Practice Lead, who holds Platinum status. Remarkable is now home to some of the most decorated Optimizely talent in the UK.

What this means for our clients

When you work with Remarkable on your Optimizely programme, you’re working with a team that doesn’t just use the platform — they shape how it’s used across the industry. Our OMVPs bring hands-on experience from some of the most complex and ambitious Optimizely programmes in the market, and they’re constantly feeding the latest thinking back into the work they do for clients.

Whether you’re looking to accelerate your experimentation programme, improve your content lifecycle management, or get more from your Optimizely investment, we’d love to talk.

The post Remarkable’s OMVPs Renewed for 2026 appeared first on Remarkable.

Who’s running the experience play?

The CEO of the company building some of the most powerful AI in the world is the one sounding the alarm. Dario Amodei of Anthropic told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, specifically naming finance, consulting, and law, warning that AI’s “cognitive breadth” means it will not disrupt one industry at a time, leaving workers with fewer options to switch fields.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia disagrees. He has argued that overheated rhetoric discourages young people from pursuing fields the economy still needs, calling such comments “not helpful” and suggesting some executives slip into a “god complex.”

Both men are talking about labour. Neither is talking about the customer.

That is the gap this piece is about.

The efficiency play is real, and incomplete

The financial services industry’s relationship with AI has, until very recently, been shaped by one question: where can we cut costs? It is a legitimate question. The numbers behind it are serious.

McKinsey predicts agentic AI could help banks reduce operational workloads by 50 to 60%. Firms like Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo are reporting strong profits while reducing headcount, with AI cited as a contributing factor, in areas ranging from back-office compliance work to front-office transaction processing. The pressure to automate is structural, not cyclical, and any leadership team that pretends otherwise is not doing its job.

But efficiency AI and experience AI are not the same investment, and they do not produce the same outcomes. The sector has been running one of them hard. The other is largely unbuilt.

While you were automating, your customers were forming views

Here is what has been happening on the customer side of the ledger during the same period.

46% of consumers say AI-powered customer service either rarely or never leads to successful outcomes. Consumer trust in AI fell from 62% in 2023 to 59% in 2025. The share of consumers describing AI as “very untrustworthy” more than doubled in that period, from 5% to 12%.

74% of FSI executives say their customers expect personalised interactions, yet only 36% of the customer journey is currently personalised. That gap is most visible in early-stage discovery and research, precisely where future growth is shaped.

Read those two data points together. Customers expect more. They are getting less. And trust is declining as spending increases. That is not a technology failure. It is a strategy failure, a failure to ask the right question before deploying the capability.

The AI your customers encounter is not the AI that reduces your fraud losses or accelerates your compliance reporting. It is the chatbot that cannot answer their pension transfer query. It is the onboarding journey that still feels like it was designed in 2017. It is the experience that deflects rather than resolves, that contains rather than serves.

74% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after a single frustrating experience. In financial services, where switching costs are real but so is long-term loyalty, attrition does not always show up immediately. It shows up in NPS, in renewal rates, in referral behaviour, the metrics that compound quietly until they become a crisis.

The sector knows. It has just not acted.

The evidence that this is a known problem, not an unknown one, is everywhere.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s 2026 Global AI in Financial Services Report found that while four in five FSI firms are deploying AI at some level, only 14% currently see AI as transformational to their organisational strategy and competitive advantage, pointing to a significant execution and business integration gap.

KPMG research across more than 17 million firms found that 99% of companies plan to put agents into production, but only 11% have done so, with implementation challenges around data, governance and security cited as the primary blockers.

That 88-point gap between intention and execution is not a shortage of ambition. It is a shortcoming of the operating model. Organisations know what they want to build. They do not have the architecture to build it within the constraints that financial services impose, and those constraints are unlike those of any other sector.

FSI is not just another vertical

This is the point that most agentic AI vendors, however well-capitalised, will either underestimate or ignore entirely.

The FCA’s financial promotions regime does not bend for product velocity. Consumer duty requires demonstrable, evidenced outcomes. Vulnerability flags are a regulatory obligation with real consequences, not a UX consideration. Release cycles in most institutions are gated by compliance forums that no amount of agile methodology can circumvent. Suitability, consent, life-stage segmentation: these are not data preferences; they are regulatory duties.

Leading institutions are not choosing between speed and governance. They are redesigning operating models to ensure governance is embedded from the start.

That redesign does not come from a platform vendor. It comes from people who understand both the technology and the regulatory environment in which it operates. Strategy and consulting is not a wrapper around the technology in FSI. It is the foundation on which every other capability rests.

Sequoia partner Julien Bek framed the broader market opportunity in a way that resonates here: for every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services. [10] In financial services, where the services layer carries compliance complexity that general enterprise AI was not designed for, that ratio is almost certainly higher. The organisations that will win are not the ones with the best model. They are the ones with the best operating model, and those are not the same thing.

What the customer needs from your AI

Think about the last time a financial services experience genuinely surprised you. Not with a feature. With judgment.

A customer trying to understand their pension options does not want a chatbot. They want confidence that the person or system they are dealing with knows their situation, respects what is at stake, and provides information they can use. That is an experience problem before it is a technology problem, and it requires a fundamentally different set of disciplines working together than most FSI AI programmes are currently running.

Content must be built for explainability, not persuasion. In pensions, investments, and insurance, a customer who does not fully understand what they have been told is not a marketing problem. They are a conduct risk. Serving them well means modular, pre-approved content that can be assembled intelligently around their specific situation rather than broadcast at them. That is not a content management task. It is an editorial and compliance architecture.

The channels where most FSI customers make their most consequential decisions are still assisted ones: advice appointments, broker conversations, and call centres. The digital estate should build trust and frame the context that makes those conversations easier, not replace them prematurely. The highest-value optimisation in most institutions is not acquiring more digital traffic. It is converting the existing intent through better reassurance at the moments that matter.

The data layer underneath all of this is where the FCA lives. Consent is not a checkbox. Suitability is not a tag. Vulnerability is not a segment. These are obligations that must be woven into the data architecture from the start, not retrofitted, which is why so many well-intentioned personalisation programmes stall before they reach the customer. The model is right. The infrastructure underneath it was not built to carry it.

And none of this works without the people closest to customers being equipped to work alongside intelligent systems with confidence. Role-based training for authors, approvers, and advisers. Clear accountability for regulated content. Ongoing education on what AI can and cannot do within a conduct framework. Agentic AI in FSI without that human layer is not an operating model. It is a liability.

Remarkable’s Revolution model for FSI was built specifically for this shape of problem: strategy and consulting, content and experience, channel optimisation, platforms and operations, and CRM and data, running in concert with agentic orchestration at the centre. Not sequentially. Not in isolation. Together, because the customer does not experience your org chart.

The signal that should sharpen your timeline

Anthropic announced the formation of a new AI-native enterprise services firm alongside Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman, backed by a consortium including Sequoia Capital, Apollo, and GIC, with Anthropic engineering resources embedded directly within the team.

The stated mission: to help leading businesses deploy AI at the speed and scale their competitive positions require.

Goldman. Blackstone. Sequoia. Anthropic. These organisations do not form consortia speculatively. They move when they believe the market has reached an inflection point. And the market they are moving into is yours.

By the end of 2026, the industry will be re-segmented not by who adopted AI, but by who made it work in practice. Early adoption no longer confers advantage. Execution does. [12]

The experience play is still available. Not for much longer.

Remarkable is offering a free diagnostic call for FSI organisations ready to move from intent to operating model. We will not pitch you a platform. We will ask the right questions, map your current gaps across strategy, content, channel, data, and platforms, and give you an honest view of where to start.

Get in touch today to book your free FSI diagnostic call! https://remarkable.global/contact/

The post FSI has gone all-in on AI for efficiency, but is the customer footing the bill? appeared first on Remarkable.

As an Optimizely Platinum Solution Partner – one of the first in the UK, no less – the team at Remarkable are always keenly anticipating the latest Optimizely platform updates. And the most recent CMS update is one of the biggest updates in years.

Optimizely CMS 13 marks a significant evolution in how digital experiences are created, managed, and optimised. It’s more than just a typical version upgrade, representing a strategic shift toward AI-driven, composable, and marketer-friendly content management.

It is a cloud-first, headless-capable content management system built on .NET 10 with Visual Builder, Optimizely Graph integration, and composable architecture within the Optimizely One ecosystem. For marketing teams, the update impacts everything from campaign speed to personalisation and omnichannel delivery.

Here are the five key things every marketer needs to understand.

1. It’s a cloud-first, headless-ready platform

At its core, CMS 13 is built as a cloud-first, headless CMS powered by modern architecture. Content is decoupled from presentation and delivered via APIs using Optimizely Graph, enabling brands to distribute content across websites, apps, and emerging channels seamlessly.

For marketers, this means greater flexibility. You’re no longer constrained by a single front-end experience. Content can be reused and adapted across multiple touchpoints, supporting true omnichannel strategies. It also allows marketing and development teams to work more independently, speeding up execution.

2. Visual Builder puts marketers back in control

One of the standout features is the introduction of Visual Builder, a drag-and-drop editing experience designed specifically for marketers.

This tool removes much of the dependency on developers for page creation and layout changes. Marketers can now design, preview, and publish pages in real time, dramatically reducing time-to-market.

In practical terms, this shifts control of the digital experience closer to marketing teams, allowing faster campaign launches, easier experimentation, and more agile iteration.

3. AI is now embedded into everyday workflows

CMS 13 doubles down on AI with deeper integration of Optimizely’s AI capabilities, including content generation, optimization, and automation tools.

From generating copy to suggesting improvements and automating tagging, AI becomes part of the daily content workflow. This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about scaling personalisation and improving content performance at speed.

For marketers, this means less time spent on manual tasks and more focus on strategy, creativity, and optimisation.

4. Optimizely Graph is the new primary backbone

A major architectural shift is the move to Optimizely Graph, which replaces legacy search and indexing systems. It acts as the central driver for content delivery, search, and integration.

Think of it as a unified content engine that sits between your systems (CMS, DAM, commerce) and your channels (web, apps, AI). It enables faster, more intelligent content retrieval and supports advanced capabilities like semantic search and AI-driven discovery.

For marketing teams, the benefit is twofold:

• Faster, more accurate search and content discovery 

• Better visibility and optimisation for both traditional search engines and AI-driven interfaces

This shift also future-proofs content for emerging discovery channels, including AI assistants and LLM-powered search.

5. It’s built for composability and connected ecosystems

CMS 13 is designed as part of the broader Optimizely One ecosystem, integrating seamlessly with tools like Digital Asset Management (DAM), Content Marketing Platform (CMP), and experimentation solutions.

This composable approach allows organisations to plug in the tools they need while maintaining a unified workflow. Marketers benefit from:

• Centralised content and asset management 

• Connected data across campaigns and channels 

• Streamlined collaboration across teams

Additionally, features like Content Manager provide a search-first interface for managing large content libraries, improving efficiency at scale.

Final thoughts

The launch of Optimizely CMS 13 signals a clear shift toward marketer empowerment, AI-driven workflows, and composable digital experience platforms. It’s not just about managing content, it’s about accelerating how content drives business outcomes.

For marketers, the opportunity is clear: faster execution, deeper personalisation, and the ability to operate across an increasingly complex digital landscape without being held back by technology.

Those who embrace these capabilities early will be better positioned to deliver high-performing, data-driven experiences in a world where speed and relevance are everything.

The post The five things every marketer needs to know about the Optimizely CMS 13 launch appeared first on Remarkable.

Another year, another SUGCON Europe in the bag. This year didn’t disappoint, with forty talks from Sitecore and the wider community across three tracks: Tech, Marketing, and—new this year—a Customer Showcase stage. Safe to say, there was plenty to get your teeth into. The energy across all three tracks was palpable, reflecting just how much momentum has built up in the Sitecore ecosystem over the past twelve months.

Remarkable representing

Remarkable was delighted to be a Community Plus sponsor of the event this year as it’s one of the most valuable events on the global Sitecore calendar, and—even better—this year it took place in our hometown of London! Hosting the conference here gave the whole event a special feeling, and it was gratifying to welcome so many international colleagues to a city we know and love.

The Remarkable team was out in force with Ian MacArthur, Global Chief Strategy Officer; Matt Dunn, VP of Platforms; and Peter Clisby, SVP of Technology and AI all in attendance. Having such a senior cross-functional group present meant we could engage meaningfully with clients, prospects, and fellow practitioners across both strategic and highly technical conversations throughout the day.

Both Peter Clisby and I took to the stage. Peter spoke about Sitecore use cases for Microsoft Agent Framework and related Multi-Agent Architectures consuming models privately hosted via Microsoft Foundry. The session drew a strong response from the audience, sparking plenty of questions about practical implementation and how organisations can begin to adopt these patterns within existing Sitecore environments. My talk revolved around the AI features of SitecoreAI and how they have evolved from the pre-SitecoreAI tools of Sitecore Stream and XM Cloud. It was a chance to put the rapid pace of product development into perspective, and to give attendees a clearer picture of where the platform is headed as AI becomes ever more central to the Sitecore proposition.

As Platinum Sitecore partners, this was a fantastic opportunity for us to showcase our knowledge and re-affirm our standing in the global community.

Topics being discussed

Most of the talks and sideline discussions this year revolved around the potential of Agentic AI in some form. Whether the conversation centred on content authoring, personalisation, or back-end orchestration, the thread of intelligent automation ran through virtually every session on the programme.

Some of our highlights included:

• A keynote from Sitecore Global Vice President of Market Strategy and Growth, Scott Liewehr
• A panel with Sitecore’s Sean Broderick (Senior Director of Customer and Community Marketing), Ruadhán Barry (VP of Product Management), and Jacqueline Baxter (Director of Content Strategy and Content Design)
• A main stage look at the future of agentic workflows from Richard Potter, Director Digital Strategy at Microsoft Worldwide.

It was also fantastic to catch-up with our client George Chang, Senior Director of Digital Experience and Technology at Hexagon AB who spoke about the incredible journey that the company has been on over the last few years with rebuilding its entire digital platform on SitecoreAI alongside Remarkable.

George delivered some impressive statistics for how Hexagon’s digital transformation has resulted in a 35% reduction in campaign launch cycles, a 30–40% expected cost savings on future brand rollouts through the shared design system, and a 45% increase in platform engagement due to improved UX, relevance and Sitecore Search. These figures go to show why Hexagon and Remarkable won the ‘Innovative Use of Sitecore’ award at the Sitecore Digital Impact Awards in 2025. Hearing George speak so candidly about the challenges and breakthroughs along the way was a highlight of the conference, and served as a compelling reminder of what is possible when ambition, the right technology, and a strong delivery partnership come together.

If you missed out on catching up with us at SUGCON Europe, feel free to get in touch and see how we can help you navigate the changing world of DXPs together. Whether you’re evaluating Sitecore for the first time, planning a migration, or looking to make more of the AI capabilities already available to you, we’d love to have the conversation.

The post Remarkable’s Highlights from SUGCON Europe 2026 in London appeared first on Remarkable.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

10 April 2026

Remarkable Unveils ‘Revolution’ – A New Operating Model for AI-Driven Growth

The customer experience consultancy introduces a perpetual growth model connecting strategy, technology, creativity, and data to help enterprise brands deliver measurable growth.

LONDON, 10 April 2026 — Customer experience consultancy Remarkable today announces the launch of Revolution, a new operating model designed to help enterprise organisations turn fragmented systems, siloed data and disconnected teams into a single, high-performing growth engine.

Revolution connects strategy, technology, creativity, and data into one integrated system, with artificial intelligence embedded throughout. It is built for enterprise brands looking to accelerate acquisition, improve retention, and increase customer lifetime value in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.

The launch addresses a familiar challenge: the gap between digital ambition and execution. When systems do not integrate, data is underutilised, and teams operate in silos, customer experience suffers and growth slows. Revolution is designed to close that gap by creating a continuously optimised model for performance.

Five things Revolution does that traditional transformation programmes do not:

• It connects, rather than replaces. Revolution integrates strategy, technology, creativity and data into one continuously improving system, rather than running them as parallel workstreams that rarely align.

• It embeds AI across the entire model. Rather than treating AI as a discrete initiative, Revolution deploys intelligent automation and AI agents wherever they will have the greatest operational impact -reducing overhead and freeing teams for higher-value work.

• It compounds over time. Insight from each cycle informs the next. Customer experience improves continuously, and transformation accelerates rather than stalls.

• It covers every growth lever. From CRM and data to channel optimisation, content, platforms and human enablement - Revolution spans the full stack of digital customer experience capability.

• It is measurable. Revolution is built around commercial outcomes: up to 40% efficiency gains in channel performance, up to 30% higher content engagement, a 20-40% uplift in CRM and data ROI, and up to 50% faster speed to market through modernised platforms.

Paul Stephen, CGO of Remarkable, said:

“The organisations winning today are not the ones with the biggest budgets — they are the ones that have learned to connect strategy, data, technology and creativity into a system that gets smarter over time. Revolution is that system. It is how we help our clients stop doing transformation and start doing growth.” 

Revolution is available to enterprise clients across financial services, retail and technology sectors. It operates as an ongoing engagement model, combining Remarkable’s consulting, platform, content and data capabilities into a single, integrated approach.

For more information, visit: https://remarkable.global/revolution

About Remarkable

Remarkable is a customer experience consultancy helping organisations achieve measurable digital growth. Through its Revolution programme — a cyclical, evidence-based approach to digital transformation — Remarkable works with clients across financial services, manufacturing and beyond to build the cross-channel capabilities that drive sustainable commercial performance. Remarkable has been navigating the digital landscape for over 50 years.

Media Contact 

Harriet Barley, Head of Marketing and Communications, Remarkable  

harriet.barley@remarkable.global

The post Remarkable Unveils ‘Revolution’ – A New Operating Model for AI-Driven Growth  appeared first on Remarkable.

We are proud to share an information security update from Remarkable!

We’ve just completed another highly successful Continuing Assessment Visit with NQA for our ISO 27001:2022 certification, and we’re delighted to say that we continue to meet the highest standards for information security management. The audit report highlighted that “The organisation’s context is well defined, leadership has been effectively demonstrated and commitment levels are fully evident.”

As we continue to mature our Information Security Management System, this assessment is also a valuable opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made over the past year. Our ongoing commitment to maintaining a robust security posture includes regular internal audits, structured risk assessments, proactive monitoring, and continuous improvement initiatives — all of which help ensure that our security controls remain aligned with both ISO 27001:2022 and industry best practice.

Marie Heinsen, VP for Agency Services, said “A huge thank you to everyone involved — maintaining this certification is truly a cross-team effort, and it reflects our commitment to protecting our clients’ data with rigour and care.”

Alongside this, we’ve also renewed our Cyber Essentials certification, strengthening our resilience even further and ensuring we continue to demonstrate robust security controls across our digital environment.

These accreditations are more than just badges — they inform our processes, enhance our operations, reinforce trust, support our clients, and help us stay ahead in a landscape where cyber threats continue to evolve. This year, we’ve also focused on broadening awareness and training across the business, ensuring teams have the knowledge they need to identify risks early and uphold best-in-class security practices. Our ISMS places great emphasis on staff understanding their responsibilities, from secure access control to incident reporting, helping us maintain a culture where security is embedded into everyday decision-making.

Sangeeta Brady, COO said “I’m incredibly proud of the team for their continued dedication and discipline throughout this process. The team really do care about the security of both Remarkable and our clients’ data”.

As organisations increasingly navigate complex digital ecosystems, the need for strong, adaptable security frameworks has never been greater. Whether you’re looking to assure stakeholders, meet growing regulatory expectations, or simply build confidence in the resilience of your systems, investing in solid security foundations can unlock long-term value and reduce operational risk.

If your organisation is looking to strengthen its digital maturity, enhance security, or accelerate growth through smarter use of technology, Remarkable’s digital consultancy team is here to help.

Get in touch to find out how we can support your next step forward.

The post Remarkable Celebrates Security Achievement appeared first on Remarkable.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  

Remarkable’s Top 20 UK Banks Digital Maturity Report 2026 finds a sector investing heavily in visibility while neglecting the infrastructure that drives revenue – and a challenger bank leading the entire industry  

LONDON, 5 March 2026  – Customer experience consultancy Remarkable today publishes the Top 20 UK Banks Digital Maturity Report 2026 – a comprehensive independent analysis of digital marketing performance across the UK retail banking sector. The research reveals a widening gap between the millions being invested in Digital infrastructure and the outcomes those investments are producing.  

Twenty banks were assessed across ten dimensions, from strategic commitment and search performance to customer satisfaction and real-world switching behaviour. Every metric was drawn from independent third-party sources. No bank was asked to self-report.  

The headline finding is stark: a few banks are building scalable digital capability. The rest are incurring costs.  

Monzo leads the overall rankings, achieving a score of 73.7%. The challenger bank, which now serves more than 10 million UK customers, recorded 82% overall satisfaction and 87% satisfaction for online and mobile banking. Lloyds and Starling Bank rank second and third respectively. The results suggest challenger banks are no longer disruptors — they are increasingly setting the standard for digital banking performance. 

Five findings that every bank should pay attention to:  

1. The gap between digital investment and customer outcomes is wider than the sector acknowledges. HSBC and Barclays both score 100% on marketing technology. Both also score below 62% on customer satisfaction. Across the study, the correlation between what banks spend on digital and what customers feel is weaker than any boardroom should be comfortable with. Infrastructure is necessary. It is not sufficient.
2. Content has stopped working as a differentiator. Nineteen of twenty banks produce the same content formats at broadly comparable quality. When an entire sector converges on identical outputs, content ceases to generate competitive advantage and becomes a cost of presence. Monzo is the only bank in the study producing video content – a format that 19 of 20 of its competitors have declined to invest in despite clear consumer appetite for it.
3. Paid search is haemorrhaging budget at the top of the market. Paid search spending is rapidly increasing, but the returns are declining. Santander is estimated to spend £5.62 million per month on paid search, generating fewer than 45,000 clicks, which leads to a cost per click of over £100. In comparison, First Direct achieves almost 100,000 clicks from only 408 keywords, showing that targeted strategies can be more effective than larger campaigns.
4. Switching data exposes retention problems that satisfaction surveys do not. Several banks report acceptable NPS-like satisfaction scores but lose thousands of customers each quarter through CASS data. Santander lost nearly 20,000 net customers in Q3 2025 – the largest net loss in the study – while spending an estimated £5.62 million per month on paid search. Halifax lost over 17,000 in the same period. Meanwhile, Nationwide gained a net 41,000 switchers in Q3 2025, outperforming every high street bank and every digital challenger, suggesting its proposition is landing in a way its modest marketing spend does not fully explain. RBS carries an overall satisfaction score below 50% – the only bank in the study to fall below that threshold - representing a retention risk that no digital investment programme has yet resolved.
5. Nine banks are failing a basic legal standard on their websites. Nine out of twenty banks fail their Core Web Vitals assessment. Only two banks – Monzo and Santander – offer multilingual capabilities, leaving eighteen banks effectively inaccessible to the eight million UK residents who speak a language other than English as their first language. With the European Accessibility Act now in force, low accessibility scores are no longer a performance issue. They are a compliance one.  

For banks already investing heavily in digital transformation, the report raises an uncomfortable question: are those investments actually improving customer experience and retention? 

Paul Stephen, CGO of Remarkable, said:   

“UK banking has undergone more digital change in the past decade than in the previous fifty years combined. Branch numbers have fallen by over 40% since 2015. Mobile banking among adults under 55 has exceeded 80%. By every traditional measure, this is a digitally mature industry. What this report reveals is that the infrastructure banks have built to attract and convert customers has not kept pace with the transformation they have been announcing. The banks treating this report as a benchmarking exercise will find it useful. The banks treating it as a brief will find it transformative. The difference between those two responses is the same difference that separates the top five from the rest of the table.” 

The Top 20 UK Banks Digital Maturity Report 2026 is available to download here. The full report includes individual bank profiles, metric-by-metric analysis, a top five deep dive, and recommendations and opportunities for every institution assessed.  

About Remarkable  
Remarkable is a customer experience consultancy helping organisations achieve measurable digital growth. Through its Revolution programme—a perpetual, evidence-based approach to digital transformation—Remarkable works with clients across financial services, manufacturing and beyond to build the cross-channel capabilities that drive sustainable commercial performance. Remarkable has been navigating the digital landscape for over 50 years.  

Media Contact  
Harriet Barley, Head of Marketing and Communications, Remarkable
harriet.barley@remarkable.global  

Data was collected during February 2026. Scores reflect a specific point in time and may have changed since then. Methodology details are available on request.  

The post UK Banks are spending millions on digital. New research reveals it isn’t working.   appeared first on Remarkable.