Ep 131: The Intelligence Behind Reputation - Daniel Munslow

Michael Avery (0:00)

Welcome to The Monocle Banking Podcast, brought to you by Monocle Solutions. The old Crisis Comm's plan was simple, break glass, call legal, issue holding statement and pray. That playbook is toast. In a world of deepfakes, social media pylons and real-time reputational risk, Daniel Munslow from Absa joins us to ask, how do you spot the fire before everyone else smells smoke?

Well, for years, corporate crisis communications could more or less be kept in a red folder. Something goes wrong, you assemble a crisis team, then legal comes into the room, someone drafts the holding statements, you brief the CEO, nominate a spokesperson, update the Q&A, monitor the hostile media, and hopefully contain the damage. Wasn't necessarily a bad system, but it was designed for a far different world, because today, the crisis may already be several million impressions old before the crisis committee has found a meeting room. A customer posts something, an employee leaks something, geopolitical event changes the meaning of a business relationship overnight, or a deepfake of your CEO starts circulating. Now, the world is absolutely changing, and it raises an uncomfortable question about whether the traditional crisis communications playbook is becoming obsolete. There's also a rather interesting parallel here with South Africa's FATF experience. And someone who's had his fair share of dealing with crises is Daniel Munslow, Managing Executive for Group Communications and Reputation at Absa Group. He joins us now on The Monocle Banking Podcast. Daniel, welcome. You joined Absa back in August of 2023, so three years ago, within a few months, Jason Quinn, your CFO and a former interim CEO left for Nedbank. Then in 2024, the bank went through much more intense scrutiny around leadership and transformation, ultimately Ari Rotenbach's early retirement. So you've really had to live the argument that we're discussing today.

What did that experience teach you that no crisis communications textbook could?

Daniel Munslow (2:17)

That's very true, Michael. Thank you very much for having me. It really is great to be here. I think you're spot on as you positioned in the introduction. I think the organizations that will be the most resilient are not the ones that respond well when the crisis breaks. They're going to be the ones that I think build enough trust, intelligence, they bank the trust equity so that fewer issues reach a crisis point in the first place. And if we take a step back to the point that you made around the traditional crisis playbook not being sufficient anymore, I think you're absolutely right. And I think there are a couple of very good reasons for that.

I think the old model, the one that's been taught for decades, which is students studying communications, is that it was built for, let me call it a slower world, a world that was defined by incidents and very defined news cycles. You would wake up, the crisis would break, there would be a seven o'clock news bulletin in the evening, you've got time to make your way through that news cycle. But today's environment has changed fundamentally. You made the point about a million impressions on something before you actually get to the crisis. And the reality is we have continuous scrutiny on everything that somebody does, whether it's a crisis like the one you introduced at the beginning, whether it's something that might happen in a branch that you need to respond to. But the reality is you're under constant scrutiny. And issues nowadays can escalate before an organization has entered that crisis mode that you described, where you assemble the team, you write the statement, you formalize the statement, you get all of the sign-offs. So traditional crisis is still important. I do believe that the principles still have merit. But the truth is it's no longer sufficient in its own right.

Michael Avery (3:57)

I mean, to say, what does that then mean for the banks? Yeah, banks run security operation centers. They're looking continuously for cyber threats, that you've got the fraud team that's monitoring your transactions continuously. I did a very large one for provisional tax this morning. I got a little ping. All of that. Why wouldn't a large organization effectively need a reputation operation center? Not necessarily a physical room with people in it, but kind of always on capability, looking for weak signals constantly in real time, across customers and employees and social media and operations. Is that kind of where you see this moving to?

Daniel Munslow (4:32)

Well, I think that's exactly where it's moving to, because where I was talking about the fact that you've got to build trust, that it's always on reputational resilience.

So we need to think about the fact that you can't build trust under pressure. You accumulate a trust bank on a regular basis through consistent behavior, through transparency, through delivery, through the proof at the end of the day. So in a crisis, if you've built enough trust in the trust bank, then in a crisis, stakeholders aren't only going to judge the organization on that incidence, they're going to judge you against your history holistically, how people actually feel about you, how they've engaged with you, how they've perceived you. So you talk about a bank reaching out to make you aware of cyber fraud that builds trust in the trust bank, that you're building reputation ahead of time, that you're engaging the customer to make them feel, I can trust this organization, they've got my best interests at heart. So when does the crisis, an individual is going to say, has this organization been transparent with me before? What have they delivered in the past? Have the leaders been credible, as an example? So it really is about, to your point, and we can maybe unpack this in a bit more detail, where we talk about what it means to build reputation as a strategic business asset, but it really is about making sure that you've got an always on approach and that you've built trust equity in the trust bank long before a crisis actually materializes.