| Winning trust is key for financial technology startups, although how you do that will depend on the company, said panelists at a FinTech MeetUp hosted by Eastern Bank last night.
“The primary driver of choice in the B2C market in financial services – and often the only driver of choice – is trust. Do I trust your brand and your company enough to give you my money?” said Rio Slaven, the head of marketing for Tradier, a cloud-based financial services brokerage.
Boston’s FinTech community has been meeting like this on a monthly basis for some time now, but Tuesday night’s MeetUp was the first one hosted by Eastern Bank. The bank invited more than 100 financial technology professionals, there to mingle and listen to a panel discussion about B2C marketing, into the lobby of its Franklin Street headquarters, fittingly adjacent to its tech incubator Eastern Labs.
“People don’t run around looking for new banks all the time. … What people are really doing is looking for new tools and new ways to solve problems in their financial life,” said John Magee, currently chief data scientist at Eastern Labs.
Magee was speaking not about his work at Eastern Labs, but of his experience working as the head of analytics at PerkStreet Financial. The now-defunct PerkStreet Financial offered an online-only checking account and rewards for debit card purchases. After it closed its (figurative) doors in 2013, its CEO Dan O’Malley and other PerkStreet veterans were recruited to head up Eastern Bank’s new tech incubator.
Magee said of marketing PerkStreet that, “We had to tap into that process of people looking for tools and looking for advice and then had to present our product as a way to solve problems.”
He talked about the sponsorship deal that PerkStreet picked up with radio host and financial author Dave Ramsey, who focuses largely on encouraging his listener base to get out of debt and avoid credit cards.
“He has a very passionate user base and decided to endorse our product. It really helped him integrate with his message,” Magee said. “We did a ton of sponsorship work with him and worked to extend that message through other venues.”
But one size does not fit all. Tuesday night’s meetup brought together a wide breadth of Fintech professionals, and the panelists themselves hailed from a wide range of Fintech companies.
“For us, the notion of customer is different, I think, because we’re not actually selling a product. We’re trying to get people to invest their time and energy and smarts into something,” said Dan Dunn, a vice president of product and community at Quantopian, a crowd-sourced hedge fund that entices engineers with a slice of the pie for writing the best algorithms.
“We actually don’t spend any money on advertising. We haven’t yet. I’m sure we will someday, but we haven’t done that yet,” Dunn said. Instead, Quantopian has relied on press, SEO, in-person connections, social media and word of mouth, he said.
Meanwhile, Slaven argued that a startup would be wise to engage the help of a public relations firm almost immediately.
“I don’t know if people actually realize how much work it is to build relationships with reporters, the right reporters, understand how to pitch them, what they like to write about, what might be interesting, following up getting the press release written in a way that’s going to get picked up,” she said. “You really need somebody that’s an expert and whether it’s somebody in-house or you hire a small, scrappy team.”
