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Marketing Briefing

By Tearsheet Editors -- June 21, 2019

Welcome to the Marketing Briefing, Tearsheet's newsletter to keep you up to date on brands, user acquisition, and all things marketing.

What do you do when you're marketing in to a 'sea of sameness'?

So much of consumer-facing fintech has begun bleed into one another. It doesn't matter where firms started but as they mature, they layer in new products and services in order to get a higher share of wallet. The result is lots of companies and products that look, sound, and smell the same.

Take high yield deposits. Banks, robo-advisers and payment firms are all after stickier, cheaper capital so they're all offering high yield deposit accounts.

It's hard to compete solely on the rate, so marketers at Personal Capital felt it needed to cut through this 'sea of sameness' to get the end customer to pay attention. You can do this by innovating on the product or by innovating through messaging . Personal Capital tried to do both. Here's how.

(If you're an Outlier member, you can also access some data we put together on what consumers think about high yield savings accounts)

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Top stories

1. KeyBank recently bought upstart student lender Laurel Road. Goldman has Marcus. JPMorgan Chase (used to) have Finn. Now Key plans to keep the Laurel Road brand and use it as a proving ground for new products. And as much as Laurel will cross-sell Key's products, Key is looking to learn from the fintech firm's special sauce.

2. Community banks and credit unions are facing competition from nationals and regionals as well as from the challenger banks. But their branch networks and physical presence in communities can be a strategic advantage.

Tearsheet spoke with Finastra’s Steve Hoke on making community banks more competitive -- it's not just about technology.

3. Some challenger banks want to become the largest banks on the planet. Literally, they're aiming for billions of clients. Others, especially in the US, have a different strategy. Instead of going broad and cross-border, they've taken a marketing approach to go deeper locally and service particular niches.

There's a new class of digital bank that wants to go big by going hyper local (Members only)

4. Steering the marketing and strategy for one of the largest brands in financial technology is no small feat. It's even more complicated when your products and tech power a big part of the financial services industry. Ellyn Raftery, chief marketing and strategy officer for FIS, has spent a big part of her career running professional services marketing. She talks to Tearsheet about the special attention and skillsets financial services marketing requires.

We also talk about her vision for a 50 year old brand and what attributes and messaging she uses. Lastly, FIS has been doing a lot of work around UI/UX, and in our discussion of that, we tackle the evolution of financial services marketing as a whole. Read more.

5. We delivered a eulogy for JPM Chase's Finn, which was abruptly shut down. Hopes were high for the digital brand which struggled to find its place among other digital brands. Should incumbent banks create new upstart brands? Or, should they capitalize on their own brands and market their size and experience to new customers?

Read/Listen in on Tearsheet's post-mortem on Finn.

What we're reading about marketing

This branchless bank quadrupled its customer base to 4 million in a single year (CNBC)

Retail banks ignore social media/customer experience data at their peril (Fintech Futures)

Poor digital sales begin with weak content on banking websites (The Financial Brand)

Goldman Sachs offers incentives to keep Marcus clients away from court (American Banker)

The top 7 metrics every fintech company should monitor (Yahoo Finance)

Creating a fintech product -- from vision to marketing (Insurance Thought Leadership)

Bankers: Is it worth buying checking accounts? (Jeff for Banks)

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