Below the Fold is the monthly newsletter from Cognito, an independent PR and communications agency specialising in financial services and technology, with a team based in Sydney.

This post is part of our newsletter archive series, sharing insights and observations from our monthly Below the Fold editions. This one is from August 2025 — some of the market specifics have moved on, but the thinking behind them hasn’t.

I’m starting a newsletter.

My vision is to create something compact and readable; something that is useful to the marketers, communicators and business leaders I’ll be distributing this to, and something actionable that doesn’t get left forgotten and unopened in inboxes.

Let’s see how I go.

It will be distributed monthly and capture the things that we, as PRs and communicators, find interesting and useful as we advise clients, and therefore should be interesting to you, too. At least, that’s the idea.

• Narratives Down Under: What captured the eyes, hearts and minds of Australian audiences this month, and what do we think is in store for the next
• Communicators Callout: PR successes (or nightmares) that are worth either digesting further or taking learnings from
• Coffee with a Journalist: On-the-ground insights from our meetings with local media, as well as any noteworthy media industry updates

This will also be my way of communicating all the fantastic things that go on at Cognito ANZ, where I can (proudly) say, we produce some market-leading outcomes for our clients.

All this being said, if the newsletter doesn’t seem right for you, or if you’d prefer not to receive these moving forward, please feel free to unsubscribe or drop me a note, and I’ll remove you from our lists.

On the other hand, if the content resonates with you, please stick around, refer a friend, colleague or industry fellow, and give me some feedback on what you’d like to see for next month’s edition.

Until next time,

Jonathan Buxeda, Director, Cognito ANZ

Narratives Down Under

As observed by Scott Schuberg, Managing Director, Cognito ANZ

Productivity & tax reform: Canberra put on some quality theatre in August by way of Australia’s Economic Reform Roundtable. It was a public display of relationship posturing between government, big business, unions, economists and regulators as soundings were taken across all involved. It was also, perhaps, an opportunity for Treasurer Jim Chalmers to create context for taming his aggression on tax reform. My pick of the coverage is from the AFR’s John Kehoe, who kicked off his roundtable wrap-up with a 1980 quote from Singapore’s founding father LKY, that Australia was then at risk of becoming “the poor white trash of Asia.”

RBA Card Surcharging: Consultations on the feedback for the elimination of card surcharges relating to merchant fees on credit/debit cards closed in late August. Whether consumers will ultimately save the estimated $1.2b in fees charged annually or not remains up for debate! The ABC’s Emily Stewart has probably got it right, highlighting the unintended consequences of this revenue bad manifesting in other ways, like banking fees and reduced loyalty program value in her multi-voice piece here.

Atlassian’s Farquhar draws head on AI data mining: Wearing his Tech Council of Australia hat, Farquhar forgot to brush up on his Sun Tzu before he stepped into the ring with Sarah Ferguson on ABC’s 7:30. Rather than evade Ferguson’s assertions that AI carte blanche crawling of music artist assets was IP theft, he bit down hard and may not be welcome at live concerts for some time. The response on socials was pretty wild, and you can watch the full interview here.

Client Spotlight

Building targeted media campaigns around complex financial and technology topics is central to what Cognito ANZ does — and this month was a good example of that in practice.

Unless you were hiding under a rock, you would’ve noticed that the debate around card surcharges heated up again last month.

We were onboarded for a one-off project to bring QR-code payment provider Pyng into the conversation, and popularise the concept of QR and account-to-account payments, which, despite their enduring popularity throughout Asia, have yet to really make a dent on Australian soil.

Given that payment technology isn’t necessarily the sexiest of topics, our approach was to bring the issue closer to home for a mainstream audience — by involving popular CBD lunch spots that, if forced to absorb payment costs as per the RBA’s recommendations, would be forced to raise prices.

We hit our audience exactly where it hurts — their wallets and their favourite lunch spots.

The result was a first step in what is hopefully a long education campaign on the role QR code transactions can (and should) play in Australian society.

Check out the full Sky News interview here.

Communicators Callout

The PR team at Commonwealth Bank is always fighting some kind of fire, which I guess comes with the territory at Australia’s largest bank.

But what continues to impress me is the way they remain quick on their feet and seem to navigate situations with the agility of a much smaller entity.

The latest situation that caught my eye was CBA’s U-turn on AI job cuts, for which the decision to back down was delivered at the recent Economic Reform Roundtable.

CBA CEO Comyn was the only CEO in attendance at the event and took his chance to share news of the reversal.

Perks of being the biggest bank, I guess, but what a way to shoehorn what could have been a relatively awkward media release into a much more casual moment.

Unsurprisingly, the bank escaped reputationally unscathed. A mark of another job well done by the PR team and all involved.

Separately, I’m always an admirer of communications teams that push against the status quo and try something new, which is why I wanted to call out the recent launch of Mastercard’s ‘In the Loop‘ series — a new way for the company to share news and updates, formatted as a kind of ‘owned’ video news segment.

Likely, we’ve all seen the stats on video content being the preferred medium these days, but putting the theory into practice, particularly in a B2B setting, is tricky to achieve.

Looks like Mastercard has done it, and well, too.

While the press release is far from dead (sorry), I’d love to see more initiatives like this in the B2B communications toolbox, and owned video production is certainly something that I hope we’ll see more of.

On that note, if you missed Cognito ANZ’s recent vodcast series, ‘That’s What You Think’, we’ve given it a go ourselves — [Episodes one and two — links to be added].

Coffee With a Journalist

Building strong journalist relationships is central to how Cognito ANZ approaches financial services and technology PR in Australia. This month, Anisha from the Sydney office caught up with Matt Bell, the freshly minted markets reporter at The Australian Financial Review, to get a behind-the-scenes look at how he approaches the daily news cycle and to hear his honest take on how we can better engage with finance journalists. You can read it here.

The team also met with another new joiner at the AFR stable — Isabella Freeland, who prefers to go by Bella.

She has just joined the AFR as a cadet after finishing her studies.

She’s spending her first three months with the Wealth team before rotating desks in October.

She expects to move into general business later this year, but hopes to end up on the markets desk. She came across as enthusiastic, approachable, and eager to build her knowledge of different companies and sectors.

Cognito is an independent communications and PR agency specialising in financial services and technology, with offices in Sydney, London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and other major financial centres around the world. If you’d like to work with a team that understands your sector, get in touch at [email protected].