Last week I attended the Fintech Marketing Conference in London for the first time. So much good content across all sessions I attended and one thread running through all of it: the biggest barriers to growth in fintech are rarely technical. They are strategic, cultural, and deeply human.
Here is what I took away.
Growth is a leadership challenge, not a marketing problem – The opening session set the tone for everything that followed. Sustainable revenue growth, the panel argued, is not a marketing problem, a technology problem, or a sales problem. It is a leadership challenge.
The organisations struggling to grow are almost always the ones where business strategy, brand strategy, and technology are pulling in different directions. Marketing teams are asked to drive growth without a clear direction, compelling positioning, or the data to make good decisions. The result is activity without momentum.
The fix is not more tools or more budget. It is alignment around the customer, and around a single shared definition of what growth actually means.
In regulated industries like fintech and financial services, brand awareness without credibility does not convert. Noise without proof points erodes confidence. Growth, when it is real and sustainable, is a byproduct of clarity, consistency, and trust built over time.
And the biggest blocker? Decision-making paralysis. Waiting for certainty that never comes. The alternative make decisions with pace, aim to be right 51% of the time, test and adapt, is harder than it sounds but far more effective than standing still.
Scale comes from strong foundations, not more tools – this was a masterclass in the unsexy but essential truth that most go-to-market challenges in regulated industries stem from weak foundations, not missing technology. The session opened with a simple but damaging observation: even the best GTM tools fail when they are built on unreliable data. In fintech, this is a solvable problem. Regulation creates access to rich public datasets, FCA registries, Companies House APIs, global regulatory directories that most teams are simply not using as the foundation they should be.
The warning on AI was blunt and worth repeating: AI is a force multiplier, but it multiplies what already exists. Fragmented data becomes faster fragmentation. Poor ICP definition becomes widespread confusion. Fix the engine before you add fuel.
The practical advice: audit your data, analyse the leads already in your pipeline, understand why deals stall, and compress the sales cycle before chasing more demand. Strong growth engines are built by aligning people, data, incentives, and decisions around how buyers actually buy.
Marketing, capital, and the fundraising journey – This session reframed something that too many founders get wrong: marketing to investors and marketing to customers are not two separate activities. They are the same story, told consistently. The panel traced the evolution of marketing across the fundraising journey from pre-seed to Series B. At pre-seed, it is about credibility securing a first real customer, demonstrating a clearly articulated problem, sharing progress transparently with a small trusted network. The founder brand matters more than the company brand at this stage. Investors back conviction, clarity, and teams they trust to execute.
By seed stage, the focus shifts to traction, trust, and momentum. Consistent LinkedIn presence, thoughtful content aimed at a defined ICP, and offline engagement in the ecosystem. Momentum itself becomes a growth signal.
By Series A, numbers dominate but brand does not disappear, it changes role. Marketing must balance demand generation with long-term brand building, and visibility at scale becomes critical in regulated markets. The strongest takeaway: the best position a founder can be in is not needing to raise. Capital efficiency, paired with clear market pull, shifts the balance of power in fundraising discussions entirely.
Market entry: listen before you launch – the panellists tackled one of the hardest challenges in fintech: how to enter a crowded, regulated market without getting lost in the noise. The answer, the panel argued, is not a louder launch. It is a clearer one.
Successful market entry does not begin with technology or features. It begins with deep customer insight real conversations, not market reports. Validation is not about pitching early ideas; it is about listening, understanding objections and frustrations, and allowing those insights to shape the product and proposition.
The session used the example of ultra-high-net-worth individuals customers who are highly valued by private banks for investment management but poorly served in transaction banking due to compliance complexity and legacy infrastructure. The gap was not found in a research report. It emerged from repeated conversations with people experiencing the friction firsthand.
On performance marketing: it has a role, but timing matters. It works best when the ICP is well defined, messaging has been validated, unit economics are understood, and trust has already been established. Brand clarity and customer validation deliver greater long-term leverage in complex regulated markets especially early on.
Six months before launch, do not focus on how loudly you will enter the market. Focus on how clearly you understand your customer and how honestly you tell that story.
Building the Next Generation of Fintech Talent – Perhaps the most forward-looking session of the day, this one zoomed out from growth tactics to ask a more fundamental question: who is going to build the fintech of the future?
The answer requires a collective effort from universities, industry, and technology leaders and it requires treating youth engagement as a long-term investment rather than a short-term initiative.
The panel was clear that technical skills alone are not enough. As automation accelerates, human skills become the differentiator. Communication, curiosity, confidence, networking, self-belief these are the skills that separate good technologists from great ones. Teaching employability means showing students how to engage, not just telling them to network more. On AI, the consensus was reassuring rather than alarming. AI does not replace talent it amplifies it. Young people are uniquely positioned to benefit because they have time to learn, high risk tolerance, and natural curiosity. Those who embrace AI tools early can create opportunities for themselves and act as reverse mentors to more senior colleagues. The real risk lies not in AI adoption but in AI avoidance.
From visibility to revenue: what it really takes to win deals – Building a great product is no longer the hard part. With AI accelerating development and cloud-native infrastructure lowering barriers to entry, technology alone is no longer a differentiator. What separates winners from the rest is how effectively they generate demand, build trust, navigate complex buyers, and turn pilots into long-term revenue.
Lead generation has fundamentally changed. Buyers are no longer discovering fintechs through cold outreach. They arrive warm, having reviewed multiple content assets and consulted AI tools before engaging any vendor. Visibility in large language models is becoming as important as search or social. Sales teams are no longer creating demand — they are responding to it.
Selling into banks is not selling. It is sense-making. Banks do not buy solutions. They buy risk reduction, board-level comfort, and the ability to say yes safely. Founders’ job is not to push solutions but to help the organisation understand and agree on the problem.
On pilots, the most commonly misused tool in fintech. Most failed pilots fail for organisational reasons, not product reasons. A pilot signed by the wrong stakeholder will die in procurement. A pilot given away for free erodes perceived value. A good pilot is strategically chosen, time-bound, costed, and explicitly designed to lead to scale.
Aligning the CMO and CRO: turning activity into revenue – the most persistent and most expensive misalignment in fintech marketing: the gap between the CMO and the CRO.
The root cause is structural. Marketing teams are incentivised on volume metrics MQLs, engagement, share of voice. Revenue teams are rewarded for short-term outcomes — pipeline, closed deals, quarterly targets. Until teams share risk, accountability, and time horizons, dashboards alone will not fix the problem.
The harder issue is trust. Trust breaks down when leads are passed over with limited context, when campaigns optimise for activity rather than outcomes, and when sales teams disengage from nurturing opportunities. Customers feel this too from their perspective, the organisation is one entity, not separate functions.
The shift that made the biggest difference for several organisations: reframing success around lead disqualification rather than lead volume. When nearly half of MQLs are quickly disqualified by SDRs, it is a signal of upstream misalignment, not sales failure. Reducing disqualified leads became a strategic objective forcing marketing to sharpen qualification, targeting, and messaging. The closing message was simple: CMO-CRO alignment is not about reporting lines. It is about shared outcomes. The organisations that win in 2026 will be the ones that stop arguing about attribution and start co-owning growth.
The Thread That Connected Everything
One consistent message. In fintech, the organisations that grow are not the ones with the most technology, the biggest budgets, or the loudest launches. They are the ones with the clearest story, the most trusted voice, and the most disciplined focus on what actually matters.
Growth follows clarity. Revenue follows trust.
If you were at the event and want to continue any of these conversations, or if you’re navigating any of these challenges and want to compare notes, reach out. These are exactly the conversations worth having.