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As I joined the world of fintech marketing, it was tempting to say that the domain could take inspiration from entertainment or consumer brands, classically seen as innovators. The reality, of course, is the polar opposite. Fintech in India is at the global forefront of innovation, and marketing has more than kept pace. As markets, customers, and the products themselves go through a disruptive transformation, I found five significant trends that are helping drive marketing practice.
Key Trends
Email Endures
Despite the deep density of numerous digital marketing channels, email marketing continues to remain remarkably effective. And make no mistake, this endurance isn't merely about tradition – it's about evolution. Today, fintech marketers have transformed email from a simple tool into a sophisticated platform for delivering personalised financial insights, security updates, and product recommendations.
What makes email particularly valuable in fintech is its ability to maintain a communication thread with the customer while delivering personalised content. How is this happening? By leveraging automation based on transaction data and user behaviour, companies are able to create highly relevant and engaging communications at scale. From portfolio performance updates to spending insights to cross-selling/upselling, email serves as a crucial touch point in the customer relationship.
Beyond Lead Generation
BFSI in general has dominated digital leadgen for almost a decade, driving some of the highest keyword costs in our consoles. Early fintech marketing often focused on aggressive customer acquisition through heavy spending on paid channels. However, market maturity and increasing customer acquisition costs have driven a pivot in strategy. Over the past few years, there has been a shift from pure lead generation to comprehensive brand building.
Trust is very vital for financial products and services, especially when features can be quickly replicated. Today's successful fintech brands invest heavily in customer education, transparency initiatives, and community building. Companies are simultaneously demonstrating expertise while keeping an eye on driving salience and building brand attributes that connect at an emotional level.
User experience as ma arketing
Perhaps the most significant evolution in fintech marketing is the recognition that user experience itself serves as a powerful marketing tool. A product’s digital presence, interface and user experience have become critical differentiators in a crowded market. Fintech brands have gone beyond the hygiene of clean, intuitive interfaces that simplify complex financial transactions, into a world that integrates nudges, emotion triggers and aesthetics, to not only retain customers but turn them into brand advocates. And as important, this trend is re-vitalising B2B platforms as well, as they go beyond the dry and bare interfaces of the past to create more engaging user journeys that can be useful leverage even for large institutional applications.
This approach uses classic integrated marketing communication principles folded into the UI/UX design, to inject brand-building and differentiation directly into the user experience. The best fintech products now market themselves not only through their ability to solve user problems, but do that elegantly, aesthetically, cueing deeper meaning.
Frictionless Onboarding
The pandemic accelerated the trend toward virtual-first customer onboarding. Modern fintechs have doubled down on that, creating ways to minimise the speed-breakers to get a customer quickly to access the real functionality. Onboarding often combines eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) processes, video verification, and biometric authentication, as well as a myriad of signals from public data, user behaviour buckets and predictive learning, to create seamless paths to customer integration.
Progressive onboarding has become standard practice because it allows users to begin experiencing value quickly while gradually completing full verification processes. This approach significantly improves conversion rates while maintaining regulatory compliance, a crucial balance in financial services.
Evolution of social
Social media's role in fintech marketing has evolved far beyond traditional promotional content. Each platform now serves a distinct purpose in the marketing ecosystem, Youtube for financial education, LinkedIn for thought leadership and B2B engagement, and Instagram for lifestyle integration of financial products.
Influencer collaboration tends to be lower than other domains, primarily because of regulatory needs, but the practice has also matured, moving beyond paid promotions to meaningful partnerships that go beyond the typical financial educators.
Not all roses: Contemporary challenges
Despite all the changes, the practice faces significant challenges. The rise in customer scams and phishing attempts has made trust-building more crucial yet more difficult than ever, as scammers get smarter in utilising AI tools and social engineering. Fintech companies must constantly innovate in security measures while educating users about safe financial practices, a delicate balance between accessibility and security.
Community building, while valuable, remains challenging in the highly regulated financial sector. Companies have to work harder than in other domains, to maintain engagement while navigating compliance requirements and content moderation needs. Success requires smarter, more human strategies and robust governance frameworks.
Perhaps the most significant shift has been in lead generation approaches. The era of extravagant customer acquisition spending has given way to a focus on profitability and sustainable growth. Companies are now prioritising customer lifetime value over bulk user acquisition, leading to more ROI-focused marketing strategies.
Looking forward
The future of fintech marketing lies in finding the right balance between automation and personalisation, innovation and security, growth and profitability. Successful companies will be those that can leverage emerging technologies like Gen AI and Machine Learning, to create personalized experiences that maintain the human touch to underline trust.
Successful fintech brands, both B2B and B2C, adapt their marketing approaches to build sustainable, profitable relationships while maintaining the innovative spirit that has defined the fintech sector.
The evolution in fintech marketing reflects a broader vitality of the industry – one that recognises the world-changing importance of the domain for consumers and businesses.
This article is penned by Saurabh Kanwar, Chief Brand & Marketing Officer, Veefin Group
Disclaimer: The article features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of the publication.