Malisha Patel, Consultant in our Financial Services practice, sits down with Payal Raina to discuss her extensive career in B2B marketing, focusing in on her recent initiative to launch a dedicated community for marketers in this sector.

Where did the idea of the FintechB2Bmarketing community come from?

Last year in Covid-19 pandemic, which altered the business environment, marketing took centre stage as the public face of an enterprise, for better or for worse. There was much uncertainty about the future which will more likely influenced consumer behaviour for years to come and redefine marketing for the current and future generations.

Marketers were put under the pressure to respond, pivot, and re-imagine a new way of doing things as part of the job description. Yet, no one gave us tools to help navigate the everyday challenges.

We were just expected as marketers to be swift, pragmatic, and committed to adapting our strategy. That’s when the FinTech B2B Marketing community was born in October 2020.

There are number of generic B2B marketing. Communities, FinTech and Financial Services communities operate in siloes. Given the fast-paced nature of the FinTech market landscape and secondly, working in a regulated environment added a huge level of complexity to a marketer’s role when trying to sell financial and tech products – which is very different from a traditional B2B marketing role.

For a FinTech marketer it takes a huge amount of time, effort, and dependencies on external agencies to gather the right tools, insights, and inspiration to develop the right strategy fit for marketing purposes. To solve those challenges and bridge the knowledge gap, Payal is a pioneer in founding the very first B2B FinTech Marketing community which is built for and by FinTech marketers.

What is the aim of the community and who can join?

This peer-to-peer community worked with one sole mission of bringing financial services and tech marketers together across the globe together to help simplify the complexity of FinTech. In less than 5 months since the launched the community, it has grown rapidly with 600+ strong supporters, across 5 continents in UK/Europe, North America, APAC, Africa and Middle East. Have firmly established themselves as the only leading global network that offers a forum to share insights and best practices, to train, learn, and develop marketing careers through the mentoring program in the niche sector that is FinTech.

The following are just some examples of roles of our members

• B2b marketers and corporate brands working in the financial services and FinTech space
• Sales, Product, CX, HR, compliance (or any functional area!) for a FinTech Solution provider
• Agency, consultants and vendors
• Students, research, academic institutions
• anyone interested in working in FinTech!

What future opportunities do you think marketing and communications will create over the next year (Particularly in the FS/Fintech/Tech space)?

Continuing a pattern from the previous year, 2021 firstly we will see increasing digital marketing acceleration. This year B2B marketers would need to adopt a truly digital first and digital-centric philosophy and embed it in their marketing strategy. Secondly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Powered Marketing – When it comes to marketing, few organisations are actually using AI for marketing and sales.; less that one in five. AI can make marketers become more efficient and smarter at scale by offering better insights, faster analysis and by streamlining routine tasks, including AI generated content, predictive analysis, lead scoring and automating repetitive tasks.

What hot topics are the Fintech Marketing Community talking about at the moment and why?

Tailored insights sit at the core of our community offerings. Most of the times, marketers are ignored in the Financial Services and FinTech space as most of the topics and themes are geared towards ops, technology, product which are quite technical and complex. With our community we aim to simplify the below topics so marketers can implement these insights in their marketing strategy and planning.

In addition we have been looking at some of these specific areas more recently:

• Account Based Marketing
• Entrepreneurial marketing for start-ups and small businesses
• ESG, Regulatory/RegTech
• MarTech

How can someone join?

It is very simple! You can sign up as a member via our website https://www.fintechb2bmarketing.com/.

You will receive regular emails and comms about our upcoming events, latest news and relevant insights. I have a lot of exciting things planned for the community over the course of this year and look forward to announcing more about this soon.

 

tml Partners is an international executive marketing recruitment firm specialising in board level appointments across marketing, business development and corporate communications. Malisha Patel is currently partnering with high-growth clients in financial services, namely in fintech and payments, to support the best in class development of in-house marketing, product and digital teams.