Harry Hamburg: proven financial copywriter with over eight years’ industry experience

If you look at the names of the companies I’ve worked for, it’s clear I specialise in financial copywriting:

  • MoneyWeek
  • Tilney Bestinvest
  • Saga Investment Services
  • Southbank Investment Research

But that doesn’t really give you the whole picture does it?

Why financial copywriting?

When I landed my first copywriting job at MoneyWeek, I was interviewed by its Managing Director at the time.

His question to me was disarmingly blunt: “Why do you want to work in finance?”

It’s been over eight years since that day, but my answer remains the same.

The reason I find finance so interesting is because it is the hidden story behind many of the world’s headlines.

Whether people realise it or not, finance and financial policies directly affect almost every area of their lives.

It’s not just meaningless numbers and charts. It’s the structure on which our society is built. Change that structure and everything else changes with it.

Showing how those “boring” facts and figures lead to real world events, which impact our lives and the lives of those we care about, is at the heart of good financial copywriting.

That’s what I’m interested in. And that’s why I chose to become a financial copywriter.

You can see how that turned out by taking a look at my portfolio.

From financial copywriter to Editor

Over the years, I inadvertently gained so much financial knowledge that I was asked to become an Editor at Southbank Investment Research.

For 18 months, I wrote a daily tech investment e-letter to 85,000 active subscribers, where I mainly wrote about tech investment, gold investment and financial independence.

(Check out my portfolio for a selection of those articles.)

And I later launched a monthly cryptocurrency publication, which gained around 8,000 paying subscribers.

(Again, you can find some issues of that in my portfolio.)

But I never lost my love of copywriting, or of discovering and writing about important ideas.

And then back to financial copywriter

When I moved out of London in August 2019, I chose to focus more on copywriting than editorial.

If you’re familiar with direct response copywriting in the financial niche, you’ll know that ideas – or rather “big” ideas – are the name of the game.

I wanted to give myself the opportunity to work with different clients from around the world and help them discover and write about their own big ideas.

Which brings us to today…

So if you’d like to work with a specialist financial copywriter, who appreciates how one great idea can change the fortunes of a company, or even a person’s life, drop me an email at: harry@harryhamburg.com and we can go from there.

Or, if you’d like to see some of my writing samples first, check out my portfolio – and if you think I’m up to scratch, then email me.

 A word about compliance

Well, it wouldn’t be financial copywriting without some concessions to compliance, would it?

Given just how intertwined compliance is with financial copywriting – or pretty much any financial writing for that matter – it’s definitely worth me mentioning it here.

All the companies I worked for in London over the previous eight years were regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Which means, everything I wrote had to be okayed by compliance. So over the years I’ve become fairly adept at ensuring my copy stays on the right side of regulations.

So if you’re worried working with me would lead to a compliance headache, then I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

In fact, I’ve had to resolve my own share of compliance fiascos before.

While I was working for SAGA Investment Services, they hired one of the big name London ad agencies to work on a direct mail piece.

The problem was, for all their awards and fancy pitches, this ad agency had no idea about the intricacies of financial regulations.

So after an ad spend in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, and an endless parade of meetings and edits, I ended up having to rewrite 90% of the campaign.

So I can definitely appreciate the importance of being able to write compliant copy when its required – without sacrificing its effectiveness.

And you can see exactly how I do that if you take a look at my portfolio.