Financial Services & Institutions

10,000 fintechs. One underpriced asset: trust.

Didi Gluck, vp, editorial director, Manifest

There’s a persistent belief in marketing that the idea is the hard part, and that everything after it is just execution. Get the concept right and the rest will follow. But as a content and digital agency that’s worked with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen time and again that the top causes of delays and inflated budgets generally have nothing to do with the creative. They’re about things like the approval chain, misalignment, and asset management. Operational failures … every one of them.

According to a recent survey that ran in AdWeek, 98% of campaigns launch late and 70% exceed their production budgets. Yet most marketing organizations invest enormous energy developing their creative capabilities and almost none developing their operational ones. If this sounds like your organization, it’s likely costing you more than you realize.

The new competitive advantage in marketing isn’t just a distinct creative campaign. It needs to be paired with the operational infrastructure that gives a great idea a fighting chance.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, from Manifest’s project managers who thrive in the operational trenches every day.

Alignment is an ongoing discipline

Misalignment rarely happens at kickoff. It usually happens three weeks later, when someone makes a small call without realizing it changes something else and by then, the damage can be hard to undo.

“Most project failures are caused by misalignment, which compounds over time,” says Marissa Thompson, an account operations director at Manifest. A subject-matter expert brought in for one narrow decision, for instance, unintentionally steering the whole workstream off course weeks later.

The key is to confirm direction at every major inflection point, not just the beginning, asking whether the work still matches the brief, whether priorities have shifted, and whether anyone has an unvoiced concern. This process is baked into how we operate with every client.

Go back to your brief

Contrary to popular opinion, a brief doesn’t always have to be a formal document, it can live in a kickoff call, a project plan, or sometimes, a strategic, shared slide deck. “The format of the brief can be flexible,” Thompson says. “But the objective shouldn’t be.”

What must always be concrete is a mutually agreed-upon path forward. At Manifest, great work starts with a clear picture: what we’re making, why it matters, who we’re talking to, how we’ll know it worked, and the time and resources we’ll have to get there. Without these non-negotiables, even small deviations can send a project off course in ways that aren’t obvious until real harm has been done.

Create conditions for good work

Related to having a clear objective is having a well-defined way of working so you can bring your deliverables to life. Every marketer has been on a project where the work was good but the execution was chaotic. Things got lost. People didn’t know what they were supposed to do or when. That’s not the path to success. Getting the who, when, and where established at the start of every project creates the conditions for your team to do good work, says Emma Hecht, a project manager at Manifest. That means establishing who’s doing the work, how long they need, and where the resources live, so the team can stop guessing and start producing.

Edit your approval chain

Mapping the approval chain early provides protection from people chiming in at the wrong moments and causing unnecessary revision cycles, says Abisola Alade, a project manager at Manifest. And once a stakeholder has made a decision, it should be written down in a place everyone can find it. Nick Prayner, a project manager at Manifest, calls this decision logging. In a long project, that record is the difference between moving forward confidently and spending a meeting relitigating something that was settled three weeks ago.

Define done

“‘Done’ can be an expensive word if everyone on a project is picturing a different finish line,” says Eric Kanerva, a senior project manager at Manifest. That finish line needs to be the same for everyone on the project. Does done mean the assets are delivered? That the campaign is live? That the results are in? Defining done for each deliverable at the start of a project, not the end, eliminates a category of disagreement that reliably surfaces at the worst possible moment, when everyone’s tired and ready to move on.

Take temperature checks

Marketing is a high-pressure, deadline-driven, subjective business. When people don’t feel safe raising problems, they don’t raise them and errors that can cost time and money can happen. Regular live check-ins, along with the occasional unscheduled Slack message, turn potential crises into small talk—so they don’t end up needing crisis control.

Part 3

Geoff Director, executive vice president of strategy, Manifest

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how financial services companies were all lacing up to compete for America’s ocean of mass-affluent and next-generation investors, and how they needed to morph their approach to marketing to connect with these consumers.

Fintechs were born to fill the void left by traditional financial services organizations who were slow to design solutions around the needs of the common consumer (or to show genuine interest in them in the first place). So they should be in pole position to win the largest share of the mass-affluent wallet. But will they?

“I wish someone would tell me about a new fintech,” said no one recently.

According to Statista, there are now over 10,000 fintechs in the U.S. alone. Most of them specialize in solving one narrow consumer problem from payments to budgeting to trading and beyond. But consumers don’t want to deal with a scattered ecosystem of money apps any more than they want to subscribe to five different streaming services.

Consumers will want a holistic approach to their finances, so for fintechs to compete for that job with traditional organizations, we’ll see a vigorous convergence of these firms as they try to become the next super app. The fintechs that will eat, not be eaten, will be the ones that get to new levels of marketing maturity, and emerge out of startup mode first.

Growing out of growth hacking

According to Business of Apps, fintechs’ customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased 60% since 2020. And for what? Numerous studies are showing that ~90% of people uninstall after a month anyway. The era of growth hacking your way to app downloads through performance marketing is over. The novelty has worn off and these brands now have to work to grow like everyone else.

To win in “the great convergence,” fintechs will need to build real, substantive relationships with consumers. If business success is no longer defined by downloads, and is more about controlling a greater share of consumers’ diversified financial behaviors, this conversation can only start in one place: brand building — the lifeblood of long-term profitability and customer lifetime value.

Trust is now the #1 driver of fintech brand choice among Gen Z, outranking UX or tech features, according to The Financial Brand. In other words, the youngest, most tech fanatical cohort in our country prioritizes trust when evaluating fintech partners. Even they won’t hand you the keys to more of their financial world if you don’t mean more to them than a novel product feature.

The old, feature-centric, tech marketing playbook won’t get you there. This will require building a magnetic, differentiated brand strategy that lays out a vision for what you really mean to consumers, not just what you do for them. And more importantly, using it. Rewiring your entire marketing approach, from creative choices to budget allocation, to prioritize building and reinforcing your brand equity.

For advice on making the case for brand building to senior management, see Part 1 of this series.

Creating meaning with consumers

What drives trust if not the quality of the product or service? First, “feeling seen and heard.” Merely demonstrating that you understand the true fears and motivations of consumers, related to the financial world, is enough to elevate one brand over an otherwise identical competitor.

I would start by moving the focus of your messaging strategy from the inputs to the outcomes. That is, enough talk about “real time” and “embedded” and “automated,” and more about the emotional benefits one can expect from dealing with your brand.

The emotional territories available here are more nuanced and interesting than in virtually any other consumer category: seeking control and independence, conquering anxiety, reaching goals, avoiding mistakes, creating wealth. The creative potential in this space is extreme, and fintechs have the makeup to exploit it in ways that traditional firms don’t.

Find trusted media environments

If you’re going to prioritize brand equity in your marketing approach, understand that media environment is still as much a driver of trust as the message itself. Interestingly, the most trusted media happen to be the ones that fintechs most often overlook: traditional channels. Kantar found that TV, newspaper, magazine, radio, and cinema are the top 5 most trusted channels. Of the online channels, streaming TV, influencer content, and news sites are the most trusted.

What do these channels, whether online or off, have in common? You know who is behind the content you’re consuming. An organization you’ve heard of is creating and bankrolling it, and we assume exercising some judgment and discernment in so doing. In contrast to a bottomless scroll of programmatically targeted flotsam, traditional channels are high-trust environments. And if you’re trying to get someone to entrust you with more of their life savings, it’s good to have your logo in places consumers feel are legitimate and important. Don’t abandon digital performance marketing, just complement it with channels that reinforce your brand, not just reach your audience. Make trust part of your channel strategy.

Show some personality

The greatest “durable competitive advantage” that fintechs could have over traditional financial institutions (at least with respect to marketing), is that they don’t have to be boring. They’re not compelled by centuries of tradition, 65 layers of middle management, or the same level of public scrutiny to play it down the middle. Consumers trust what they can relate to, and they don’t relate to old, stoic suits.

Infusing every touchpoint with your brand personality — from your website and social channels to your content, advertising, executive communications, and customer experience — doesn’t just make you more memorable. It makes you more believable.

For decades, trust in this sector was built by communicating permanence and authority. But today’s mass-affluent consumers evaluate trust differently. They are looking for signs of authenticity, transparency, and relevance. They want to know that a brand understands the world they live in, not just the products it sells.

This is not about being funny on social media (although I wouldn’t advise you against it) or merely finding a slightly more interesting brand voice. There are three ways that studies are showing you can access trust via personality:

Plan for spontaneity. Counterintuitively, one way to avoid seeming contrived is to contrive some authentic, unplanned moments. It could be randomly celebrating one specific customer or employee. Get a thought leader in your organization to film a rant about something affecting your customer base. Give something away or do something artistic, just because.
Get in the culture. Everyone does an NCAA bracket and a Fourth of July post. But get your best creative thinkers in a room together at one time, and figure out just one context in which your brand can surf off popular culture, in a unique way.
Lose the polish. Own up to mistakes. Talk about failures and missteps. Nothing is as relatable as good old human fallibility. Can you imagine a fintech posting something on social like, “Apologies to Sheila in Denver. We just realized our budgeting tool was putting your Taylor Swift tickets in the ‘discretionary entertainment’ category. Those belong in ‘essential utilities.’ Didn’t mean to judge.”

The broad view

The irony in all of these recommendations is that fintechs were created to disrupt traditional financial institutions, which became too product-centric, bureaucratic, and disconnected from regular people they served. Yet the recipe for fintechs is defined by turning to, and mastering traditional marketing methods like brand building, creating holistic media plans, and communicating like humans. In a category obsessed with innovation, trust will be the most underpriced asset, and there’s no growth hack for that.

In our next and last installment of the Underpriced series, we’ll cover retail/commercial banks.

We’d love to help

Manifest thrives in the complexity and haziness of things like how tech companies can build brand trust and human connection.

Reach out to hear about our approach to brand strategy in the financial services space. hello@manifest.com.

Explore the series

Underpriced: The unexploited marketing opportunity in finance

Part 1

Finance built empires without marketing. The next chapter won't be that generous

Part 2

The next generation of wealth has never heard of you. Time to introduce yourself.

Part 3

10,000 fintechs. One underpriced asset: trust.

Part 4

Banks don't have a relevance problem. They have a relationship problem.

READY TO GET TO THE POINT?

CHICAGO, IL

NEW YORK, NY

WASHINGTON, DC

PHOENIX, AZ

SAINT JOSEPH, MI