Earlier this year, I noted that Reckitt Benckiser had embarked on an unusual, if overdue, corporate rebranding exercise (Blog, 14 July). Unusual because RB had set itself up as a cheerleader for FMCG talent. Capitalising on the implosion in financial services marketing after the credit crunch, it has been trying to persuade young marketers that their future lies not in being the overpaid chief of "flower-arrangement" at some retail bank, but in packaged goods, the motherland of marketing.

It's a good story, credibly told by a company that practises what it preaches in an exemplary way. But I now wonder whether the premise is actually true. What I mean is that financial services, far from being the career cul-de-sac it appeared to be a few months ago, is in need of marketers as never before. Indeed, in a reshaped financial landscape, it is precisely marketing that may give a new set of players the edge.

Here's why. Although the political class in the US and Britain have shown no real appetite for radically re-engineering the global financial system, some "unbundling" is definitely on the way. Bancassurance - the unswerving belief that bigger is best and that retail, commercial and investment banks should be allied wherever possible to the insurance business - has met its Waterloo. Or, in the case of the UK, had its RBS moment.

The question is, what to do about these wounded leviathans that litter the financial landscape. The US response to troublesome "too big to fail" institutions, such as Citigroup and Bank of America, seems to be fixated on "fail-safe" remedies for the future, rather than break-up now. It's a policy aptly summed up by one well-known financier as providing the Titanic with extra lifeboats. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are all for tinkering with the relatively inexpensive Titanic refit model, but it's not that easy. Ranged against them is a defiant and irremovable governor of the Bank of England, who has openly called for utility (retail banking, low- level commercial lending) operations to be split off from the "casino" (investment banking) end of the business. More importantly, Mervyn King's judgement seems to be backed by the powers that be in Brussels.

Only last week Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, ruled that ING Group, a classic bancassurance model, was to be broken into its component parts and the US direct savings arm hived off. Societe Generale may, in due course, find itself swallowing the same medicine.