Market Like a Fintech

We talk a lot about community on this podcast, as well as in the Slack group.

Having a community for your product is incredibly useful: it creates brand evangelists, helps with customer acquisition and product feedback.

But there is one benefit that isn’t talked much about: it helps you understand your customers a lot more. When you’re chatting with your customers day in and day out within a community, you see their pains and struggles first hand. The result? You build a much more customer centric product.

In today’s episode I’m chatting with Holly and Laura, founders of a financial education app, community, Instagram page and blog for women called Financielle. It started as an Instagram page, but over time evolved into a product that helps people manage their finances.

What I love about Holly and Laura’s story is that it is totally organic and their app is completely bootstrapped. They have used their community and the profits from their app to build a startup that is growing and very customer centric.

In this episode, we talk about the pain points of the people in their community, how they manage their Instagram page (including some tips on how to make finance memes) and how they are monetising and planning on growing their business.

I loved this chat, and I hope you do too. If you want to attend our events in the future, please join us at fintechmarketinghub.com/slack.

Financielle website: https://www.financielle.co.uk/
Holly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollyhollandfinancielle
Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurapomfret/

You’ll often hear in the marketing and startup world “targeting everyone is like targeting no one”. 

That’s because targeting everyone doesn’t work. No one identifies with your product and when you’re a startup, that means no one buys. 

Many fintech products are essentially applicable to everyone or a lot of different industries, and it’s tempting to therefore market to everyone.

But obviously, this doesn’t work. So one way to approach this is to segment your marketing — also called Account Based Marketing — which is essentially highly targeted marketing. This is what Argyle, a B2B fintech company based in New York, does with their marketing. 

Argyle provides a single global access point to employment data. That means providing the worker with a single overview of all their employment history and therefore allowing businesses to examine a worker based on multiple income sources. 

You know how you have an Apple or Android Wallet or for all your flight tickets? Imagine that, but for income sources and employment history.

ABM is a big part of their marketing mix, and in today’s chat I’m talking about exactly that with their Head of Marketing, Eva Sasson. She comes from a developer marketing background, and has been with Argyle for over a year. 

We chat about the difference between developer APIs and fintech APIs, how Argyle is cutting through the noise with content and how they’ve managed a fully distributed team since 2018.

Eva Sasson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esasson/
Argylle website: https://argyle.com/

As marketers, we often fall trap to only taking care of acquisition. 

So much so, that we forget that there is often a much cheaper and easier way to acquire customers, such as mining your own database or focusing more on retention.

That’s what TrackStar AI, a fintech based in the US, helps banks do: check their own databases. It integrates with lenders and banks, and helps them uncover opportunities to reactive customers who haven’t completed an application or were not eligible. In other words, use alternative data to acquire new customers. 

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Diane Myer, Head of Marketing at Trackstar. She has an incredible amount of experience in the marketing sector, having worked with companies like Kimberly-Clark, Ferrari and Mizuno. 

Trackstar's website: https://www.trackstar.ai/
Diane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diane-myer-brown/

In Eric’s words, a great fintech brand is human and makes meaningful connections with consumers.

That means, it is purpose-led, story-oriented and customer centric. 

Ideally, you want to build a brand around something that you can authentically and consistently stand for. 

That’s the beginning of Rival’s marketing framework, a marketing agency built by Eric that helps companies think, act and grow like challengers.

Eric Fulwiler used to be COO and CMO at 11FS, the fintech consultancy based in London. Now, he’s the founder of his own marketing agency, Rival.

This episode is a recorded virtual event we hosted in November through our Slack community. For the first thirty minutes, Eric and I chatted about branding and how Rival is helping companies build human brands. Afterwards, we opened the floor to participants to ask questions.

We cover topics about fintech branding, what it means to be a challenger brand, as well as tips for marketers who are hiring.

The event was great fun and our plan is to host these types of events once per month starting from January. You can learn more and stay tuned at fintechmarketing.com/slack.

 
Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericfulwiler/
Rival's website: https://wearerival.com/

Building in public takes guts. Being truly transparent takes guts.

That’s because it’s easy to be transparent when everything is going well. But what happens when things don’t go so well? Like when you’re having to delay projects? Are you transparent then?

Curvo is an investment app based in Belgium that has been building in public for two years. Their founders, Thomas and Yoran, have been bootstrapping the company, which means they are learning everything they can about marketing, product, regulation and investing themselves, and taking their audience along the way. Their build in public approach has helped them build trust with customers as well as helped with marketing their product. And yes, they have been transparent even when projects were delayed.

In this episode, I’m chatting with one of their founders, Thomas. We talk about the initial days at Curvo, and what their most effective customer acquisition channel is to date. We also talk about why they are so transparent, how they’re educating people and how leveraging the audiences of influencers helps them gain more reach. Finally, we chat about the regulatory obstacles Curvo faced and how the team cleverly overcame them. Thomas also explains why they’re deciding to bootstrap rather than raise money for the time being.

I have a huge amount of respect and awe at what the team at Curvo is doing, and what they’ve managed to achieve in the past two years. They just recently launched their app a few months ago, and are steadily acquiring customers. It’s super exciting to follow their journey, and the plan is to check in with them in another year or so. Thomas is very transparent about how they do things at Curvo, which makes this podcast episode particularly useful to other fintech marketers.

Thomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-ketchell/
Curvo website: https://curvo.eu/

Crypto can be a tricky market to build a product in.

It’s still quite niche, which means a big part of your marketing is helping it go mainstream. It’s also not so obvious just yet what the pain points crypto solves for many consumers. 

And yet Wirex, a crypto company that allows customers to buy and exchange crypto on its app, is doing a good job of standing out and leading the market, by branding itself as an innovator and by having a clear target audience. They’ve been around since 2014, and keep releasing interesting features in the DeFi and crypto space.

In this episode, I’m chatting with their product manager, Marija Riba, who also used to work as their marketing project manager. We talk about the difference between being a product manager and a marketer, what pain points Wirex is focusing on, Wirex’s recent Crypto Female Power list campaign and what they look for in people when it comes to hiring. 

Wirex website: https://wirexapp.com/en-gb
Marija on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvriba/

Managing the brand of a B2B fintech isn’t always straightforward.

As a brand, you want to have enough personality that the other fintechs you’re targeting want to work with you. But you also have to be professional enough so incumbents and larger players will take you seriously. 

Many B2B fintech companies are often too corporate or dull. While others are too playful and immature. But Tribe Payments seems to have found the balance. And today, I’m lucky enough to be chatting with their VP of Marketing, Helen Owen.

Tribe is a B2B fintech company that does payment processing for issuers, acquirers and fintechs, as well as Open Banking APIs, fraud and risk monitoring and a lot more. With Helen, we chat about Tribe’s core target audience and her approach to creating content for them, how Tribe is standing out and cutting through the noise (and why they love being a Tribe), and finally the current challenges with hiring and how Tribe is attracting talent. 

In today’s episode, you’ll further hear me experiment with a different structure where we focus on three key aspects of marketing a fintech company: customer acquisition, messaging/branding and hiring/building a team. I’d love to hear any feedback on what you think of this approach. 

Tribe Payments: https://www.tribepayments.com/
Tribe Payment Fintech Five by Five report: https://www.tribepayments.com/fintech-5x5-report-summer-2021
Helen Owen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenowenem/

If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard it before: video is an essential part of the marketing mix.

Video has proven to help increase conversions and build your brand awareness, and is a no-brainer for anyone wanting to connect with prospects and customers. 

But video is also hard. Video requires having a reasonable budget. It requires a well thought out strategy. It requires knowing what you want and need. 

Today I have the pleasure of chatting with Gabriel Whitehead, managing director at Finance Shoots, a creative agency focused on fintech and financial services. I had a lot of questions about video and video production, and Gabriel kindly and patiently answered all of them. We even had a chance to cover a few of the questions some people asked in the Slack group.

Specifically we talk about attribution — can it be measured with video, and how? We also talked about: how does a startup get started with video: what do they need to already have in place, should they do animation or interviews and what are the 3 most important videos a fintech startup should do — as well as some examples of fintech companies doing a great job with video.

Anyway, it’s an episode absolutely jam packed with valuable information, and I really appreciate Gabriel going into so much detail. Anyone who’s getting started with video will love this!

Finance Shoots website: https://www.financeshoots.com/
Gabriel Whitehead on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrieljwhitehead/

As marketers, our job is to get our solution in front of the right people who have a problem that we can solve.

In order to do that well, you really need to understand the problem. 

That means doing interviews with your target market. Observing how they interact with your product. Even going as far as participating in their day to day life. 

Essentially, you want to fall in love with the problem you’re solving. 

That’s exactly what Benjamin Fernandes, founder and CEO of NALA Money, says is the most important when starting and growing a company.

NALA Money is a money transfer app that lets people send money securely, quickly and for low cost between the UK, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Benjamin himself has a fascinating personal story: He was the youngest African to be accepted into the Stanford Graduate of Business and after working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he returned to Tanzania to launch NALA Money. 

NALA Money is the number one finance app in Tanzania, and has 250,000 customers in Uganda and Tanzania. NALA was also accepted into Y Combinator and apparently came in as the company that had achieved the most amount of traction with the smallest number of resources.

In today’s chat, I’m talking with Benjamin about how he fell in love with the problem he was solving (which is very connected to his personal story), why he’s working so hard to unite everyone under one purpose of increasing economic opportunity for Africans worldwide, how he’s built an outstanding team which got him incredible investors and produce high quality output.

Benjamin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminf7/
NALA Money website: https://www.nala.com/

When no one’s heard about your product and it’s the first of a kind, how do you describe it to a cold audience? How do you educate and reach them?

When BigPay, a consumer facing neobank based in Malaysia, launched four years ago, no one knew what a neobank was. At that time, digital banks were still a very new thing.

The first marketing play BigPay relied on was referrals. And as you’ll hear from Jonathan, Head of Marketing at BigPay, referrals worked very well. Especially, when certain travel bloggers realised they could make money referring readers to BigPay. One blogger referred over 8,000 people. Jon says himself, these bloggers did a lot of the heavy lifting to get BigPay off the ground and acquiring customers. When no one’s heard of your product type, it seems referrals are still the way to go. 

In today’s episode I chat with Jon about how BigPay implemented referrals when they first started, the recurring payday campaigns they implemented and why he thinks content marketing is so difficult and why BigPay has struggled with it as an acquisition strategy. 

I’ve known Jon since 2019, when I was living in Kuala Lumpur for a few months and I even helped BigPay myself with some of their articles and website copy. So it was really nice to connect with him again. Jon is a great marketer and a very inspiring person. I highly recommend checking out his Medium.

BigPay's website: https://www.bigpayme.com/
Jonathan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathannyst/
Jonathan on Medium: https://medium.com/@jonathan.nyst