Often, fintech companies spend millions to get noticed, but drawing in customers is a different challenge. The real test comes when people trust a company enough to let it manage their money.
Yewande “Wendy” Akomolafe-Kalu, Flutterwave’s Head of Marketing, sees trust as central to fintech marketing. With digital payments on the rise and more competition, she says companies need to do more than list features. They should show how their products fit into daily life and always keep their promises.
“Brands are competing on trust now, but brands have always competed on trust,” she said. “It is the basis of somebody choosing to try out your product, especially a money-based, finance-based product.”
When fintech products first began gaining traction, companies had to explain what they did before convincing people to use them. Customers needed to understand unfamiliar concepts and feel comfortable trusting technology they might never have encountered.
Wendy recalled that even features like near-field communication (NFC), which enables contactless communication between devices, required explanation. Marketing teams had to help people understand the technology and imagine how it could become part of their daily routines or businesses.
That challenge has not gone away; it has just changed. Customers now have plenty of fintech apps to choose from, and they are pickier than ever. They do not just want a list of features. They want to know: will this actually solve my problem? That is why marketing has to move from tech-talk to storytelling.
Instead of telling a small business owner, “our platform supports international transactions”, which means little to most people, show her what it looks like in real life: a fashion seller in Lagos receiving payment from a customer in London in seconds, without worrying about exchange rates, bank codes, or complicated steps.
The technology behind it matters, of course. But first, the customer just wants one answer: will this make my life easier?
Similar read: From Flutterwave to Terra, the foreign money backing Nigerian tech is diversifying
Wendy on why Flutterwave is holding on to its African identity
Building a global brand presents another challenge: how does a company like Flutterwave appeal to customers in different markets without losing what makes it distinctive? For Wendy, the answer is to remain clear about the brand’s identity while adapting its storytelling to local context.
“You have to stand for something as a brand. You need to know what your identity is and stick with it,” she said.
For Flutterwave, that means taking its African experience into international markets rather than appearing otherwise. At an international industry event in Las Vegas, for instance, the company should not adapt so completely to its surroundings that people forget its African roots.
Instead, it can show how its understanding of African markets helps it serve businesses and customers. The same principle applies when marketing in countries such as Uganda, the United States, or the United Kingdom. A brand can adjust its examples and messaging to local audiences without abandoning its underlying identity.
Wendy sees being African as an advantage, not a limitation. Companies should understand what their backgrounds and experience enable them to do differently, then communicate that value to the markets they want to reach.
Fintech marketing is also moving beyond traditional financial messaging into culture, entertainment and other parts of everyday life. She also explained that payments rarely happen in isolation. People buy concert tickets, pay for food at events, purchase merchandise from their favourite artists and send money to family while following major sporting competitions.
These moments give fintech brands opportunities to connect with audiences where transactions already happen.
She pointed to Flutterwave’s “Africa All the Way” campaign around football and the World Cup, which tapped into the excitement of the competition and African pride while connecting that cultural moment to the ability to send money home.
The point is not to attach a brand to every trending conversation. It is to find a genuine connection between the audience, the moment, and the service being offered. However, cultural relevance cannot compensate for a poor product. A memorable campaign may persuade someone to try a service, but a failed transaction or unreliable experience can quickly undermine that interest.
Flutterwave’s business and merchant stories, which feature businesses using its services, reflect this balance. They give merchants visibility while showing prospective customers how the platform works in real commercial settings.
“The storytelling helps people understand what it means in a real-life context,” Wendy said, adding that the product experience must support the story.
AI can make fintech marketing faster, but not better
As artificial intelligence changes how marketing teams create content and understand audiences, Wendy cautioned against treating it as a replacement for human creativity. AI can help teams work more efficiently, but marketing loses its effectiveness when it becomes generic or ignores the experiences of the people it is meant to reach.
“The ideation and the thinking and the context and the stories all come from human experience,” she said.
AI can help a marketing team work faster, draft ideas, design visuals, cut videos in minutes. But speed alone doesn’t sell.
What makes a story stick is real life. It’s knowing how it feels for a market trader when a payment fails at the worst moment, or how much it means for a small business owner to receive money from a customer abroad without stress. AI doesn’t understand that worry. People do.
That is Wendy’s point: let AI handle the heavy lifting, but let humans lead with ideas, context, and emotion. Otherwise, a campaign may look perfect and say nothing.
Looking ahead, she believes the real test for fintech marketing won’t be who shouts the loudest, but who follows through after getting attention.
Take Flutterwave. As it grows beyond payments into things like embedded banking, banking services built directly into other apps, open banking, letting customers securely connect their accounts across platforms, it has to explain all of that in plain, everyday language. The challenge is to talk about new technology without forgetting the original promise: making it easier for ordinary people and businesses to move and use money.
In the end, brands that last do three things: understand their customers, know what sets them apart, and deliver what they promise.
For fintechs, that means trust isn’t won with a clever campaign; it’s earned with every payment and every transaction. As Wendy says, great marketing may win attention, but only a reliable product earns loyalty.
Read also: Flutterwave’s GB Agboola is the only Nigerian on FinTech Magazine’s Top 100 leaders list
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