PR doesn't produce a neat number you can point to. It's hard to go into a budget meeting and say "we got X pieces of new business from that Bloomberg quote." If a finance director asks how much business the firm won from PR this year, it will always be a harder question to answer than how many deals the sales team closed. (Side note: if you want to understand PR’s role in your brand positioning based on real data, ask us about the Brand Barometer brand tracking service from Rostrum).
But the "luxury item" framing of PR is increasingly out of date. And in financial and professional services, where reputation is a commercial asset, where trust is built over years and lost in days, and where the way clients discover and evaluate firms is changing faster than most communications strategies have caught up with, the case for specialist PR support has never been stronger.
Here is the honest version of the answer.
What is a PR agency and what does it actually do for financial and professional services firms?
A PR agency in financial and professional services is not a press release factory. The right agency is your strategic communications partner: helping firms define and articulate their positioning, identify and pursue the media opportunities that build genuine authority with target audiences, navigate reputational risk, and ensure that what the market says about the firm reflects what the firm actually is.
In practice, this means media relations across trade, national business, and financial press. It also means counsel on what to say, when to say it, and when to say nothing at all. It means thought leadership around moments of genuine market relevance, not a content calendar filled for the sake of filling it. It means someone senior enough and independent enough to tell you when your instinct is wrong.
Three reasons that PR is not a luxury in financial and professional services.
1. When things go wrong
In a reputational crisis, PR is not a luxury. It becomes the most important function in the building.
In financial and professional services, the reputational stakes are higher than in most sectors. Regulatory scrutiny, enforcement actions, leadership changes, data incidents, high-profile client disputes; any of these can generate media attention that moves faster than an internal team can respond to without preparation, relationships, and experience. The firms that navigate these moments well are almost never the ones improvising. They are the ones with established external counsel, pre-existing journalist relationships, and a communications infrastructure that functions under pressure.
The cost of a reputational crisis that is handled badly almost always dwarfs the annual cost of the agency that could have helped manage it.
2. Visibility in the age of AI
More prospects are now getting their first impression of a firm from an AI-generated answer, not a website. When a potential client asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews about firms in your category, the answers those platforms produce are stitched together from whatever the model trusts: credible media coverage, clear proof points, authoritative sources, consistent external presence.
If your firm is not part of that footprint, if you have not built the kind of sustained, credible media presence that AI models draw on, you are simply less visible at the precise moment prospects are forming a view. That is not a soft problem. It is a commercial one.
This is the argument that has changed most in recent years. The firms that invested in building genuine media authority over time are now benefiting from AI visibility that firms with thinner external profiles simply cannot buy quickly. Consistent, credible PR is now a component of AI discoverability.
And here is the thing about AI as a substitute for a PR agency: it is not. AI can write you a LinkedIn post. Only an experienced comms adviser can tell you if posting it will improve or harm your profile.
That is not a small point. Knowing what to publish, when, in what tone, and in which forum requires judgement that is built from years of understanding how regulated markets work, how journalists think, how clients and prospects respond to different kinds of communication and what the downside looks like when it goes wrong. AI has none of that context. A good PR agency has little else.
3. PR is often noticed by its absence
This is the quieter argument, but in some ways the most important one for B2B firms to understand. Firms without sustained PR presence do not always notice the cost immediately. They notice it when a competitor is consistently quoted in the coverage they wanted to be in. When a journalist calls a rival for comment on a story that should have been theirs. When a prospective client mentions they had not heard much about the firm recently. When a thought leadership piece lands with less traction than expected because the firm has no existing media relationships to amplify it.
The absence of PR is rarely a sudden crisis. It is a slow erosion of position in media, in AI visibility, in the minds of the clients and prospects who are forming views constantly, whether or not your brand is part of the conversation.
What a PR agency can do that an inhouse team or AI tools cannot
The argument for inhouse communications is real. A good internal team knows the firm deeply, is embedded in its culture, and is available continuously. The internal team will almost certainly manage your own industry media - and rightly so. AI tools can produce content quickly and at scale. Neither of these things is the argument against specialist PR support and the best outcomes usually come from inhouse and agency working together as an extended team.
But there are things a specialist external agency provides that are structurally difficult to replicate internally.
Genuine independence and senior counsel. An inhouse team, however talented, is always under pressure from capacity, internal politics, hierarchy and the instinct to protect rather than challenge. A good external agency will tell a firm's leadership when an idea is a bad one, when a planned announcement will land poorly, or when the moment to speak is not now. That independence and the willingness to give honest advice regardless of what the room wants to hear is frequently the most valuable thing an agency provides. It is also the hardest thing to replicate internally.
Hard-won media relationships. Journalist relationships in financial and professional services media are built over years. They are based on trust, reliability, and a track record of providing genuinely useful information rather than self-serving copy. A specialist agency brings a network of established relationships with the correspondents, editors, and specialist reporters who matter in this sector; relationships that cannot be replicated by a new hire or an AI tool, and that make the difference between a story landing and a pitch being ignored.
Deep sector expertise. Understanding the regulatory environment, the competitive landscape, the language of the sector, and the sensitivities of a regulated market is not a generic skill. It shapes every decision: what to pitch, how to frame it, which outlet to approach first, how to handle a journalist's follow-up questions, what to say in a crisis and what not to say. Agencies that work exclusively in financial and professional services bring this expertise as a baseline.
Creative thinking from outside the building. Firms that have operated in their own sector for a long time often struggle to see their own story clearly. What feels obvious internally is frequently invisible externally and vice versa. An external agency brings the creative distance to find the angles, narratives, and stories that an internal team, too close to the subject, may not see.
Breadth and capacity. A senior partner at a specialist agency brings strategic oversight, sector relationships, and communications experience that would cost significantly more to hire permanently and that is available when needed rather than committed to full-time at full cost.
The questions financial and professional services firms should ask themselves
Before deciding whether PR agency support is right for the firm, marketing and communications leaders should be able to answer the following honestly:
If a significant reputational issue emerged tomorrow, do we have external counsel with established media relationships ready to support us or would we be starting from scratch under pressure?
When AI platforms are asked about firms in our category, do we appear and if so, how? Is that presence built on sustained media authority or on very little?
Are our key spokespeople consistently quoted in the coverage that matters to our target clients or are competitors filling that space?
Do we have someone senior enough and independent enough to tell us when our communications instincts are wrong?
When we publish thought leadership, does it reach the right audiences through established relationships or does it rely on us to amplify it ourselves?
Has our firm's external profile kept pace with our growth, our ambitions, and the way our clients are now discovering and evaluating firms like ours?
So: do you need a PR agency?
If you judge PR purely by immediate lead volume, it will always look expensive relative to what it appears to produce. That framing is understandable but incomplete.
If you judge it by risk management, by authority in a competitive market, by visibility in an AI-driven discovery environment, and by the value of senior independent counsel (especially in a sector where reputation is the primary commercial asset) it starts to look much more like core infrastructure than a luxury line item.
The firms in financial and professional services that consistently punch above their weight in media, that navigate reputational moments without permanent damage, that are visible to clients and prospects at the moments that matter most. They are almost never the ones doing it without specialist support.
PR is noticed most by its absence. By the time that absence becomes obvious, some of the cost has already been paid.
Rostrum is a PR and communications agency specialising in financial and professional services. If you would like an honest conversation about what your firm's external communications are and are not achieving, we are happy to have it. Contact us here.
