Fintech Marketing Strategy: A UK Operator's Playbook
Most fintech marketing fails for the same reason. It leads with the platform. The pitch tries to say everything the product can do, which commercially means it stands for nothing specific to anyone reading it. Regulated buyers do not respond to breadth. They respond to proof that you understand their exact problem, and proof takes longer to build than most marketing plans allow for.
I ran into this directly at Contis, a PE-backed banking-as-a-service business later acquired by Solarisbank. The platform genuinely could do almost everything in payments and BaaS. That was the problem, not the asset. The brand was outdated, marketing was fragmented, inbound was weak, and there was little traction in the fastest-growing part of the market. The task was to win significantly larger customers and make the business more valuable ahead of a sale. The instinctive brief would have been "generate more enterprise leads". That would have missed it entirely.
Work backwards from where you can win
The starting point was not a demand plan. It was a question: which markets does this platform solve an identifiable, valuable problem for, right now, better than the alternatives? That is a smaller list than the sales deck implies, and finding it means breaking the proposition down by vertical and use case rather than pitching the full platform to everyone at once.
Crypto was the clearest opening. Fast-growing crypto and trading businesses were struggling to find banking infrastructure that understood the sector well enough to serve it properly. We built a specific proposition aimed at large European trading platforms, then applied the same logic to banking and lending sub-verticals once the crypto model proved out. This is slower to set up than a generic campaign. It is also the only version of the pitch that survives contact with a compliance team.
The result of the crypto push was Binance, Bitpanda and NagaPay as clients, all won through the same verticalised approach. Across the period the business grew customers from around 200,000 to two million and revenue from roughly £15m to £30m, alongside a strategic sale to Solarisbank. I led marketing through that period and those numbers reflect the wider team and business effort as much as any one function, but the sequencing, vertical choice and channel plan were mine to get right.
Match channel to audience, not to what is easy to run
Once the vertical was chosen, the channel plan followed the buyer rather than the marketing calendar. For crypto and trading accounts, that meant specialist trade PR where credibility mattered more than reach, combined with targeted digital and an account-based approach on the specific organisations worth chasing. We built digital ABM programmes around named Tier 1 accounts, agreed jointly with sales, with paid social, PR, SEO, content and outbound all pointed at the same commercial targets rather than running as separate workstreams with separate goals.
That last point is where a lot of fintech marketing quietly falls apart. Channels get run in isolation because they report to different owners or budgets, and nobody notices that PR, paid and outbound are chasing three different lists. Aligning the account list first and picking channels second sounds obvious. It rarely happens, because it requires marketing and sales to agree the target list before either function has built a plan around it.
The team itself had to change to run this properly. We rebuilt around stronger B2B demand and PR capability, and ran a full rebrand so the market proposition matched the businesses being chased. The alternative was asking those businesses to squint to see themselves in positioning built for a different buyer.
Trust is the constraint, not awareness
Regulated categories do not have an awareness problem in the way a consumer app does. They have a trust problem, and trust in fintech is earned through evidence a buyer can defend internally: named clients in their own vertical, compliance credentials, a track record with institutions like theirs, and proof the vendor understands the specific risk and regulatory context they operate under.
The compliance layer belongs inside the go-to-market plan. The FCA's March 2026 review of consumer understanding says firms should treat communication design, testing, monitoring and governance as one end-to-end process under Consumer Duty. The FCA Handbook still requires relevant communications and financial promotions to be fair, clear and not misleading. Where those rules apply, proposition, proof, targeting and approval time are part of channel strategy, not a final legal check.
That is why the vertical-first approach compounds. A crypto exchange evaluating banking infrastructure wants to see that you already bank crypto exchanges, ideally ones they respect. A generic platform pitch cannot produce that signal no matter how well it is written. A specific proposition backed by two or three credible named wins in the same category produces it immediately, and every subsequent deal in that vertical gets easier because the proof point already exists.
The result was inbound tripling and 88% of new clients coming through the new engine rather than legacy relationships or inbound of unclear origin. That shift did not come from a bigger budget. It came from replacing a platform-wide pitch with a small number of sharply proven verticals and building the channel mix around each one deliberately.
Where this applies beyond BaaS
The same discipline held at Penfold, a digital pensions business, and at Uncapped, a revenue-based lender, though the specifics differed. In both cases the honest question was not "how do we generate more leads?" but "where can this business actually win, and what does the buyer in that segment need to see before they will trust a regulated financial product with their money or their company?"
Fintech founders often resist narrowing the pitch because it feels like leaving money on the table. In practice the opposite tends to be true. A platform pitch that speaks to everyone converts nobody quickly, and in a regulated category, quickly is the only speed that funds the next round of growth. Pick the vertical you can prove fastest, build the evidence, then expand from proof rather than promise.
If your fintech marketing is producing activity without producing named wins in a specific segment, the fix is rarely a bigger budget or a new agency. It is usually a narrower proposition and a channel plan built around the accounts you actually want, agreed with sales before the campaign brief is written. Let's talk.
