What's useful, keeps moving
Scotia Insights has been running for ten years now. I keep turning that number over, because almost nothing else I built in the same period has survived this long. Campaigns don't make it to their second quarter. Platforms get renamed the moment a new exec wants a launch deck of their own. And yet this one is still going, under a different team, in a different world, on subjects I never planned for. I wanted to understand why, because I don't think ten years is an accident, and I don't think it's simply that the work was good.
The closest thing I can compare it to is a reaction that only keeps running while it has something to react with. You can build an elegant piece of chemistry, but if the reactants run out, the reaction stops, no matter how well you designed it. What keeps a reaction going isn't the initial spark. It's whether the environment keeps supplying what it needs. I think platforms work the same way. The ones that last aren't the best-produced. They're the ones still connected to something that keeps replenishing itself; in this case, a need that never actually goes away.
I joined Scotiabank in 2015. Within six months, we launched Scotia Insights. For part of that period I was also General Manager of the Scotiabank Foundation, the philanthropic arm for Scotiabank International, and holding both roles at once changed how I saw the work. Marketing wasn't only communication. Communications wasn't only reputation management. Philanthropy wasn't a kind gesture sitting politely off to the side with its own newsletter. All three were producing the same public signal, whether anyone had planned it that way or not.
At the time you could have called Scotia Insights a speaker series, and you wouldn't have been wrong exactly, in the way you wouldn't be wrong calling a house a collection of walls. It just wouldn't have told you anything useful. The format wasn't the point. The job the format let the bank do was the point.
Here's the thing that struck me after ten years in consumer goods and then a move into financial services: the decisions people are making are intimate — buying a home, protecting a family, keeping a business afloat — but the language the industry uses to talk about those decisions is institutional. The response to that mismatch is usually more information, carefully assembled by people who understand it perfectly and can't quite tell that nobody else does. Information isn't the same thing as understanding. Understanding happens when someone can place their decision inside a wider pattern, when a business owner can hear from someone who's lived through the same problem, when a hard question can be asked out loud without feeling like a private exam. That's what we were actually trying to build a room for.
I didn't fully trust that instinct until I saw it tested against something harder than a good news cycle. A few years in, the regulatory environment around philanthropy tightened considerably, and the Foundation had to shift from a broad donation model to a much narrower partnership model. That kind of change is delicate, because social investment isn't administrative to the people receiving it — it touches community and trust and an expectation that support, once given, keeps being given. Handled badly, it becomes a reputational problem. We used Scotia Insights instead to bring the actual expertise into the room — finance, compliance, governance, risk — and help non-profit partners understand the environment they were now operating in. Not to turn them into bankers. Just to make the new rules legible enough that they could adapt to them. What could have read as the bank withdrawing support read instead as the bank helping partners get ready for what was coming. That's the difference between a platform that only works when the news is good and one that can actually hold pressure. I trusted it after that.
Scotia Insights kept going, through a pandemic, into subjects I never planned for — cybersecurity, business resilience, mortgages in a completely different rate environment. I think that says more about the people who inherited it than it does about the original build. They didn't treat it as something to preserve exactly as they found it, and they didn't discard it just because someone else had started it. Corporate life rewards the visible new thing far more than it rewards the discipline to keep an old thing alive by giving it better conditions. Carrying a platform forward without needing to erase the person who built the first version is a quieter kind of leadership, and I think it's the harder one.
None of this happens on its own. A platform like this needs an actual operating structure behind it: a standing budget line that survives the year someone in finance asks why marketing is spending money on a room instead of a media buy, a cross-functional intake — comms, risk, compliance, the business line whose clients are actually in the room — that meets often enough to know what question is live right now, and someone senior enough to say no to the version of the request that turns it into a product pitch with a sunrise on the slide. Without that scaffolding, the format survives one launch and then quietly becomes a quarterly obligation kept alive by a spreadsheet. With it, the format can move from entrepreneurship to economic uncertainty to a regulatory shift without becoming a different thing, because the centre was never the topic. The centre was always the work of helping someone understand what they were already carrying.
I don't think ten years proves the platform was excellent, and I'm wary of treating longevity itself as the achievement. Plenty of things last simply because removing them would require a meeting nobody wants to schedule. The better test is whether the thing is still doing work, and on that measure Scotia Insights still passes — it gave clients a way to think through a decision with more context than they walked in with, and it gave the bank a way to do difficult work in public without turning it into theatre.
I built the first version. I don't think that's the interesting part of the story anymore. The interesting part is that it kept being useful long after I stopped being the one deciding what it was for.