Market Like a Fintech

Today I’m chatting with Gihan Hyde, founder of Communique and ESG communicator. She has experience leading ESG campaigns with organisations such as Barclays, HSBC, M&S. With experience in 8 sectors over 6 Countries, Gihan A.M.Hyde’s ESG campaigns have impacted over 150,000 employees, 200,000 customers and resulted in £300M investment deals in the past 15 years.

Communique is a social enterprise startup that specialises in communicating strategies that focus on environmental, social and governance. They work with organisations to develop communication strategies and campaigns that align the business with investors, employees and clients.

Gihan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gihanam/
Communique's website: https://communique.global/

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.

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/

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/

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/