financial services marketing

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

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/

Today I’m interviewing Patrick Stal, global VP of marketing at N26. Patrick was previously a member of Uber’s EMEA leadership team, and has a decade of experience working with brands like TomTom, Asics, Gucci and Abercrombie & Fitch.

N26 is a global mobile bank, based out of Berlin and active in 25 markets. They have over 7 million customers and was recently voted as the best bank in the world. They recently raised $30 million at a $3.6 billion dollar valuation.

In this episode, Patrick and I chat about his learnings working for big grands, how to localise your product and marketing and why N26 decided to focus on partnerships as a growth method.

Patrick's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickstal/
N26's website: https://n26.com/

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. 

In this episode I’m chatting with Jeanniey Walden, CMO at DailyPay. Jeanniey has led marketing and growth for fortune 1000 companies, has authored several books and was recently nominated as transformational CMO of the year by the CMO Club.

DailyPay is an earned income software based in New York that integrates with large company payroll and time management systems, allowing employees to get paid on demand. 80% of Fortune 200 companies that offer on-demand pay partner with DailyPay, including Dollar Tree, Berkshire Hathaway and Adecco. As you’ll see in the episode, they also have exciting news to share.

In this episode, Jeanniey and I chat about how fintech companies can remain customer centric while focusing on the larger vision, how DailyPay markets to employers when the end user are employees and why fintech companies should prioritise brand awareness. 

DailyPay website: https://www.dailypay.com/
Follow Jeanniey Walden on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniey/

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. 

Kristina Shea is founder and CEO of KVision, a marketing consulting agency, and BlueSkys Life, a lifestyle brand. She is a senior executive with the passion to create a positive impact for both the consumer and the brand. She is a hands-on from ideation, strategy to execution. Kristina is a unique multi-disciplinary with extensive experience in business and marketing strategy, digital communications, branding, company culture, and project management. Proven track-record in reaching diverse audiences, delivering memorable stories to meet business objectives and goals. Passionate and inspired to always evolve and elevate brands to surpass the status quo.

She has an integrated mix of traditional and digital design combined with business/marketing degrees alongside a PMP designation.

To contact Kristina:
www.Kvision.ca
www.BlueSkysLife.com
Insta and FB handles
@BlueSkysLife

Email: kristina@kvision.ca
Email: kristina@BlueSkysLife.com

LinkedIN
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-shea-pmp-66a8b55/

An article on Kristina's new business:
https://www.prosperipress.com/kristina-shea-launches-blueskys-life-a-heart-centered-business-inspired-by-hope-and-optimism/

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If you'd like to talk to Terry McDougall about coaching or being a guest on Marketing Mambo, here's how you can reach her:

https://www.terrybmcdougall.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall
Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work: Career Happiness and Success on Your Own Terms is available at Amazon. 

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Here's how you can reach host Terry McDougall:

www.terrybmcdougall.com

www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall

Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work is available at Amazon

Anne Kritzmire is the lead independent trustee for the Thornburg Income Builder Opportunities Trust, a newly-formed closed-end fund targeting a mid-2021 launch. She spent over 21 years at Nuveen in various marketing and product management roles. Most recently, she was Head of Multi-Asset Marketing in which she led development and oversight of marketing strategy and programs to drive awareness, education, client acquisition and support for Nuveen’s expanding multi-asset investment and advice business.

Prior to that role, she was Managing Director of Closed-End Funds Marketing for over 10 years. Anne oversaw strategic marketing and support, financial advisor and investor education, industry relations and promotion for Nuveen Investments’ entire family of closed-end funds, which leads the industry in assets and support. She led an integrated program of advisor and investor support communications activities for closed-end funds and income investing, including the award-winning websites as well as advertising, educational initiatives, and sales support. She served as the lead spokesperson to the media on behalf of Nuveen closed-end funds, and also served as President of the Closed-End Fund Association, a national industry trade group.

Kritzmire joined Nuveen in 1999 as Vice President and Director of Client Development & Insights, to develop the firm’s customer relationship management strategy across multiple product platforms and sales channels. Previously in her career, she held senior marketing and product management positions with Abbott Laboratories and served in sales, engineering, and consulting capacities with IBM Corporation.

Ms. Kritzmire received an M.B.A. in marketing and finance with distinction from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and a B.S. cum laude in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. She is also a graduate of the Securities Industry Institute at Wharton, and held FINRA Series 3, 7, 24, 63, 65, and 79 licenses.

She is an elected Village Trustee for the Village of Long Grove, and previously served on the boards of the Chicago Children’s Choir and Chicago Public Media. She is a long-time volunteer and high adventure leader with her local Troop and Venturing Crew (affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America), enjoying many adventures with her two sons and daughter, and sings with her church and a community a capella group.

Reach Anne through LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/annekritzmire333
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If you'd like to talk to Terry McDougall about coaching or being a guest on Marketing Mambo, here's how you can reach her:

https://www.terrybmcdougall.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall
Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work: Career Happiness and Success on Your Own Terms is available at Amazon. 

******************************
Here's how you can reach host Terry McDougall:

www.terrybmcdougall.com

www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall

Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work is available at Amazon

Emilie Totten is Head of Marketing at Synthesis Technologies, a leading provider of data and content automation software and services to the financial sector.

Join us as we discuss what it's like to come into a "14-year-old start-up" as their first in-house marketer and develop a strategy to grow the company as the only marketer operating on a shoestring budget.

Emilie once dreamed of working in a big agency writing Super Bowl ads but is glad that she took a different route where her influence on the success of the business is critical.

She has used a relentless focus on strategy as well as creative approaches to developing strong and insightful client relationships help Synthesis reach a historical milestone for the company in 2020.

Contact Emilie at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilietotten.

Learn more about Synthesis Technology at https://www.synthesistechnology.com.

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If you'd like to talk to Terry McDougall about coaching or being a guest on Marketing Mambo, here's how you can reach her:

https://www.terrybmcdougall.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall
Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work: Career Happiness and Success on Your Own Terms is available at Amazon. 

******************************
Here's how you can reach host Terry McDougall:

www.terrybmcdougall.com

www.linkedin.com/in/terrybmcdougall

Terry@Terrybmcdougall.com

Her book Winning the Game of Work is available at Amazon