Market Like a Fintech

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

Everyone in marketing will talk to you about the importance of building a brand.

Why you should build brand equity, figure out brand positioning, communicate your brand effectively to potential and current customers.

But putting it in practice is not straightforward. That’s because a brand is not just a nice logo and a cool website. It’s the soul of a company, it’s your mission and purpose and values.

Most companies outsource this exercise or don’t give it too much thought. But we’re in fintech, where a lot of companies care a lot about their brand. And there are some fintech companies where brand is really at the core of what they do. For one, it’s so important, that they have their own in-house brand team working alongside them.

This company is Pleo, known for its minimal, attractive and yet strong and recognisable brand. Pleo is a B2B fintech that offers smart company cards that automate expense reports and simplify company spending. 

In this episode I’m chatting with Luke Richardson, Director of Brand and Communications at Pleo. We chat about setting up outdoor campaigns, Pleo’s global summit at the end of the year and how he’s set out to build a successful in-house brand team.

Our conversation was highly focused on brand, so I would say the content in today’s episode is especially useful to both B2C and B2B fintech companies that know they want to have a strong brand and are unsure who to hire in-house and what to outsource to an agency.

Pleo's website: https://www.pleo.io/
Pleo's digital summit: https://www.pleo.io/en/forward
Luke Richardson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukestephenrichardson/

Fintech is supposed to be about financial education, empowerment and literacy.

But I think we can all agree, that sometimes there’s more talk than action. Or even worse, hypocrisy. When it comes to education, it can be a little unclear what that means. Does it mean Youtube videos? Blog posts? Webinars? Books?

The good news is there are some fintech companies that are taking the financial education challenge head on. They’re not just publishing a few blog posts about budgeting, but instead are designing curriculums, hosting virtual events and building a community.

One of those companies is Public.com, an investing platform where members can invest in stocks and also share ideas within a community of 1M+ investors. The Public.com team understood right from the beginning that the number one barrier to investing is psychological, and therefore the best way to overcome this is with a community.

We’ve talked about community before on the podcast, specifically about how to build a community through a Slack group. But Public.com has taken a different approach and made community literally part of the product. 

Today I’m chatting with Katie Perry, VP of marketing at Public.com. We walk through three different marketing plays at Public: their recent program for NCAA student athletes, how they’re focusing on financial literacy and community, as well as their recent drops, which are individual campaigns designed to make a statement about who they are.

I found this chat with Katie to be very insightful and relevant, especially for B2C fintech companies that are targeting mass market customers, so I think you’ll enjoy. 

Public website: www.public.com
Katie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherineperry/
Public.com's drops: www.public.com/drops

Community, community, community.

Everyone in the marketing world is talking about it. Even everyone in the fintech world seems to be talking about it. 

A combination of the pandemic, going online and even crypto seemed to have weirdly brought us together with the power of online communities.

But what does community really mean? If you’re a founder or marketer, should you be trying to build a community to attract and retain customers? And what does a successful community look like?

Today, I explore answers to those questions with our guest, Graham McBain. Graham is the community manager at Moov, a B2B payments API company. He’s in charge of the Moov Slack community, which currently has over 2,500 members, is super active, and by all measures, a success. 

Communities are hard to build. The time and energy commitment is high, but the reward and upside is infinite. In this episode, we dive deep into how Graham went about growing the Slack community, how he maintains it, and his own thoughts on the future of community.

It’s full of practical and tactical tips and advice, so hope you enjoy! 

Moov website: https://moov.io/
Graham McBain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahammcbain/
FMH Slack group: fintechmarketinghub.com/slack

When’s the last time you read a report?

I don’t mean skim. I mean seriously sat down, and truly thought through the report you were reading.

If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while. I usually download the white papers, reports and put them in a folder, often never to be opened again.

Why is that? 

We all know the answer: because they’re boring. The font is small, the paragraphs are thick and the words are often confusing. Even when you do force yourself to read it, you’re often left more confused than before.

Is this how you want your prospects and customers to feel when they read a report you’ve commissioned? Probably not. But how can we make research interesting? How can we make it engaging, and most importantly, useful?

I’m delighted to talk to Gunny Scarfo from Nonfiction Research today. Nonfiction is a research company that (and I quote) “gleefully violates the norms of traditional research, in a crusade to understand the informal, unfiltered lives of customers”. Their research includes everyone from prisoners, to sex workers, to bankers and the average person, and they’ve worked with brands like Disney and Public.com.  They also recently published a fascinating report on the secret financial lives of Americans.

My aim with this episode was to explore how Gunny and his team do their research, and most importantly, how they make their reports interesting. Because they are really interesting, and as I mention on the episode, one of my favourite types of reports to read. Not only that, but their research techniques means they truly understand customers. 

We went very deep in this episode, and here you’ll find insights on how to truly understand your customer (hint: not with focus groups), what immersive research really means, and how to make research useful and publish your findings in an interesting way.

NonFiction's website: https://nonfiction.co/
NonFiction's report, The secret financial lives of Americans and the future of financial services: https://nonfiction.co/nonfiction-research-secret-financial-lives-of-americans
Gunny Scarfo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunnyscarfo/
FMH Slack group: fintechmarketinghub.com/slack

Hiring a fintech's first CMO can be scary. Becoming a first-time CMO can be daunting...

Often, you’re the only marketing person in the company. Often, you are hired to manage everything from content, to paid, to PR and branding. Often, you are hired right when a company is in full growth mode. 

I hear so many questions from fintech founders and even marketers in the fintech industry about CMOs, such as: when is the right time to hire a CMO? Where do I find one? How much should I pay them?

And for those who want to become CMOs: how do you know when you’re ready? What does a day to day look like? How do you balance short-term and long-term success? What should you prioritise?

In today’s episode, I’m looking for answers to those questions by chatting with the new CMO of Thunes, Irina Chuchkina. Thunes is a payment service provider that enables global payments via their payment network. They’re based in Singapore, and cater to banks, money transfer operators, e wallets and more. 

Thunes' website: https://www.thunes.com/
Irina Chuchkina's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinachuchkina/
FMH Slack group: fintechmarketinghub.com/slack

As marketers, we forget that often our job is to inspire.

To inspire potential customers to be a better version of themselves, to inspire our community to join forces and work together, to inspire members of our team, who want to solve important problems.

At the Market Like a Fintech podcast, we realised we could do a better job at inspiring fellow fintech marketers to maximise their potential as marketers.

Because the truth is, the fintech industry needs us. The hardest part of growing a fintech company is acquiring customers — without them, you’ve got nothing. But most fintech founders are technical product builders who are focused on working on important issues such as financial inclusion, transparency and accessibility. 

But without customers, without reaching the right people, these products are unable to fulfill their purposes. As fintech marketers, we are helping fintech companies reach the right people and solve these important problems.

I’ve taken a step back to figure out how we can do a better job and inspire marketers, while remaining actionable and useful. This allowed us to figure out our mission, which is to inspire fintech marketers fulfill a fintech’s purpose, by uncovering the different ways fintech companies are choosing to build relationships with customers. As the host, I’m taking you on a journey to find out how other marketers do this, and how you can do this too. We all want the same thing: to democratise finance. 

Ani's website: https://www.apmarketingsolutions.co/
Araminta's website: https://www.mintcopywritingstudios.com/

Talk to the customer.

Be customer-centric.

Do your customer research.

These are words we hear a lot in the marketing world, especially the fintech one where customer-centricity is one of the unique selling points of fintechs when compared to incumbents. 

So - how well do you know your customer? The truth is, we often overestimate how well we understand our customers — me included. “A 30 year old male software engineer with 2 kids who lives in the suburbs and his challenge is figuring out the best way to save for retirement”, doesn’t mean knowing your customer. You know you understand your customer well when you can predict what their next move is. 

And often to reach that point, you need to do research. That means doing qualitative and quantitive research. You need to send out surveys, get on calls with them and talk to your sales or support team. Then you start to understand your pain points.

In this episode, I’m chatting with the Head of Content at Attest, Sarah Hollinshead. Attest is a consumer research platform that aims to make consumer research fast, simple and affordable. They’ve worked with big companies like Klarna, Wise and others we mention on this podcast.

Attest website: https://www.askattest.com/
Sarah Hollinshead on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-hollinshead-72056360/

In this episode I’m chatting with Valentina Kristensen, Director of Growth and Communications at OakNorth. Valentina has helped grow OakNorth to the billion dollar company it is today, is a founding editorial board member of Influencer magazine and is a self-professed fintech nerd.

What is OakNorth? OakNorth is a UK bank that provides fast, flexible and accessible debt finance to fast growing businesses. It’s been nominated the fastest growing business in Europe by the Financial Times, has lent over £5bn to hundreds of UK businesses and has been turning a profit since 2017. It is currently valued at $2.8bn dollars.

OakNorth: https://www.oaknorth.co.uk/
Follow Valentina Kristensen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentinakristensen/

This episode is brought to you by VC Innovations. 

VC Innovations is a full-stack marketing services agency dedicated to innovation industries with a special focus on Fintech. They work with businesses across 3 key areas of marketing infrastructure, demand generation campaigns and event properties including the must-attend Fintech Talents Festival. Check out www.vcinnovations.co.uk to find out more.