A bank without branches is mostly invisible. It has no corner doorway to pass on a walk, no counter where a familiar face hands back a receipt, no vault-shaped architecture announcing permanence. It lives behind a phone screen, summoned when a client needs to move money and forgotten when the screen goes dark. For the person responsible for marketing that bank, invisibility is both the advantage and the assignment.
Natalie Jones has that assignment at Tangerine. As Chief Marketing Officer, she leads the work of making a digital service feel present in Canadian life. The evidence is less a single grand campaign than a series of concrete gestures: a free day on Toronto's bike-share system, a rebate for an airline baggage fee, a partnership built around basketball devotion, and a Pinterest idea that reduced forbidding financial goals to small “inchstones.” Each puts the bank somewhere people can feel it.
It is practical marketing for an abstract product. The bank talks about removing hoops. Jones's campaigns look for a hoop in daily life and, when the fit is right, remove one.
Make the promise visible
Consider the baggage carousel. In January 2025, Tangerine offered the first 7,500 eligible clients a $40 rebate when they charged an airline baggage fee of at least $39.55 to an eligible Tangerine card. There was no receipt to upload. The credit would arrive automatically. The offer was limited, but the story was compact: a bank associated with no-fee chequing was paying a fee that travellers particularly dislike.
“This offer aligns with our mission to simplify banking and provide real savings in unexpected areas of life, like travel,” Jones said at the time. The sentence explains more than the promotion. It reveals a test for the brand's work. The saving should be real. The circumstance can be surprising. The mechanism should feel simple.
“In today's world, saving for bigger financial goals can seem out of reach, but tackling smaller milestones can make a big impact over time.”Natalie Jones on Tangerine's “inchstones” campaign
The same logic appeared on Pinterest in 2024. People visit the platform to plan weddings, rooms, meals and futures. Tangerine met them there with “inchstones,” a playful alternative to the solemn language of financial milestones. A home deposit may be too distant to motivate today's action. A first thousand dollars, a month of automatic transfers or a trimmed recurring bill is close enough to begin.
Jones described the appeal plainly: smaller milestones can make a large goal seem reachable. The cleverness was not merely the pun. It was the choice of scale. Money marketing often shows the reward at the end of the road. “Inchstones” focused attention on the next patch of pavement.
The inchstone effect · progress becomes easier to see
A career built close to the product
Jones did not arrive at the CMO title through a sudden turn toward advertising. Her public career record begins at Capital One in 2007, after a Bachelor of Commerce at Queen's University. She moved through a succession of brand marketing positions there, from associate and manager roles to senior marketing manager. The titles suggest an apprenticeship in how regulated financial products become consumer choices.
In 2017 she joined Scotiabank as Director of Marketing for Primary Customer Growth. She later led marketing for deposits and investments and advanced to vice president. Those are revealing portfolios. Deposits are where the promise of a bank meets the most ordinary customer behavior: money arrives, waits, earns, leaves. Investments introduce longer horizons and a greater need for confidence. Customer growth forces the marketer to connect a message to an actual decision.
Begins at Capital One and advances through brand marketing roles.
Joins Scotiabank in primary customer growth marketing.
Leads deposits and investments marketing, then becomes a vice president.
Is promoted to Chief Marketing Officer of Tangerine.
When Scotiabank reshaped its senior leadership in August 2023, Jones was promoted to Tangerine CMO. She inherited a distinct proposition inside a much larger banking group. Tangerine had begun as ING DIRECT Canada in 1997, was acquired by Scotiabank in 2012 and continued to operate as a digital bank. The orange brand was familiar. The continuing job was to keep its promise of simple banking useful to a new generation of clients.
The city becomes a branch
A digital bank still needs places to show up. For Tangerine, one of those places has been Toronto's public bike network. On Bike For Free Day in June 2025, the bank covered unlimited 90-minute rides on both classic and electric bikes for 24 hours after activation. Jones linked the partnership to movement in two senses: around the city and with money.
The wording fits the experience. A free ride is immediately legible. It asks almost nothing of a person except that they go somewhere. It also gives a branchless bank a physical footprint made of stations, orange bicycles and trips through neighbourhoods. The product remains digital, but the relationship briefly has wheels.
Another place is the arena. Tangerine is the official bank of the Toronto Raptors and their fans. For the 2025-2026 season, that relationship expanded with Fangerine Fridays, a program around Friday home games involving prizes, merchandise, digital experiences and client access to pre-game shootarounds. The campaign line “Never Too Invested” turns a finance word into a fan's condition. Jones supplied the natural bridge: “At Tangerine, we know you can never be too invested in your team.”
These activations do not all do the same job. One demonstrates savings, one supplies urban access and one borrows the collective emotion of sport. Yet each makes “digital bank” less clinical. Jones's work repeatedly takes a concept that could remain trapped in an app or a media plan and gives it an object: a suitcase, a bicycle, a basketball, a small marker on the way to a goal.
Community as participation
The physical-world strategy also extends beyond customer offers. In October 2024, Tangerine became a national partner of motionball and the first presenting partner of motionballU for the 2024-2025 school year. The university program brings students together with Special Olympics athletes through sporting and social events, developing campus leaders while raising money and awareness.
Jones framed the match around shared commitments to young leaders and inclusion. Her quote was about growing “this community of change-makers,” language that places the bank as a participant rather than the centre of the story. The distinction matters. A community partnership is most credible when the partner's existing work remains visible.
That approach is also consistent with Project Forward, Tangerine's community investment platform focused on empowering young Canadians. The through-line is agency. The “inchstones” idea gives a saver a smaller action. Bike For Free Day gives a rider access. motionballU gives students a role in organizing inclusive events. Marketing is attached to something a person can do.
“Both Tangerine and Narcity put our customers first, so combining financial literacy with ways to save while enjoying life in the city was an awesome way to partner together.”Natalie Jones on a 2023 content partnership
Useful can still be playful
None of this requires financial life to become grim. Tangerine's 2025 research into FinTok surveyed 1,000 Canadians who used social media for financial advice. It found both benefit and risk: 89 percent said the content improved their financial literacy, while some respondents reported losing money after following advice. Amid warnings about scams and mass-market guidance, Jones offered an intentionally ordinary reminder: “Sometimes you have to live your life a little and treat yourself.”
That line could be dismissed as light, but it completes the picture. Financial empowerment cannot only mean deferral. A bank enters people's lives because money connects the present to the future. The job is to make those trade-offs understandable without turning every coffee, ride or trip into a moral verdict.
By 2026, Tangerine's leadership page still listed Jones as CMO. The bank highlighted more than 2.5 million clients, a 4.8 average app rating and consecutive first-place finishes among Canadian banks in Forbes' World’s Best Banks rankings for 2025 and 2026. Those are company outcomes, not personal trophies, and Jones herself shared the recognition by thanking clients and congratulating the team.
That choice of emphasis is fitting. Marketing at a bank is collective work across products, operations, analytics, service, agencies and partnerships. Jones's public credits and comments place her within that system. Her contribution is easiest to see in the pattern: translate an institutional promise into a human-scale action, then put it where people already are.
For a branchless bank, presence has to be designed. Sometimes it is a useful piece of advice appearing in a feed. Sometimes it is forty dollars returning after a flight. Sometimes it is a bicycle unlocking or a Friday crowd getting closer to the court. The screen remains the bank. Jones's marketing gives it a world outside the screen.