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 educati ..read more

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 B2 ..read more

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 w ..read more

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 rec ..read more

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 Yoren, 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 ap ..read more

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 chatt ..read more

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 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, acqu ..read more

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 l ..read more

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 transfe ..read more

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 8,00 ..read more