How to Take Your Brand To Market. You Don’t.

There’s a perception, as with all hyper growth sectors, that fintech marketers are in a bitter race against their competitors to engage, convert and retain customers.

And it’s quite easy to fall into the trap of creating incremental gains on your competition, by pushing the boat out a little bit at a time with new marketing campaigns to take your brand to market.

And this is no more so true than with tired, old customer stories.

That’s because most marketing teams follow the same customer story playbook but the reality is the way we reach out and obtain customer stories is broken. We ask a customer for their story that includes how we delivered a great service - that’s all that’s needed, right? Wrong.

Sometimes it’s worth stepping back and applying some second order thinking, to question whether you’ve become too attached to a certain goal or process - i.e. to acquire testimonials - and whether you should rethink how you get your brand out into the market and more importantly why. 

Let’s go back to scratch and re-evaluate how we get customer stories, how do we get customers as excited as we are?

1??Step one, forget everything you know about customer stories. The old process makes customers groan: ask for story, receive story, amend story, sign off story, publish story (and that’s if the whole exercise doesn’t fizzle out!).

2??Step two, think about each part of the customer story process differently. If they are my customer, do I need to ask them for their story? Can I already deliver a fully formed story to begin conversations? If not, how do I make acquiring the additional information as convenient for the customer as possible? 

And lastly, how do I ensure that I am bringing value to the customer - how do I make them excited?

3??Step three, provide a real value exchange for your customer. Execute this step right and your customer will promote your customer story as much as you do.

How do we see it?

Here’s our rethink: As a payments platform, it’s our mission to help other businesses reach their true potential and give them the tools to build their innovative ideas. This makes the innovations built on top of our platform a fundamentally critical part of the Modulr brand, and we’re proud to support that.

So we reasoned a customer story should focus on just that: the customer. Sure, we mention they use Modulr but the real proof point is the success of what they’ve built on top of us. We call this ‘Powered by Modulr’. 

And here’s the value exchange: Powered by Modulr would not exist without our customers’ engagement. By making it a mutually attractive brand exercise we’ve given our customers that extra value that means we both take our brands to market.

We’ve been releasing a stream of new customer stories over the last few months (Unfortunately, I can't give away for full process behind how we engage!).

Here are three of my favourites.

Mode: How Mode is transforming the crypto market with fast, regulated access to bitcoin 

Mode is a digital banking platform that aims to combine the benefits of traditional, tokenised and cryptocurrency finance for its users. Powered by Modulr’s payment infrastructure, Mode hopes to become the first fully regulated digital-asset bank in the UK. 

Challenge 

Mode wanted to provide consumers with easy access to bitcoin through a simple, secure and regulated platform. But it was struggling to find a traditional bank that understood the crypto industry and could fulfil its infrastructure needs. 

Knowing that a reliable payments partner would be key to success, Mode turned to Modulr to help them build their solution. They were attracted to Modulr because of our technology, regulated status and existing partnerships with industry leading providers. 

Solution 

Supported by Modulr’s 24/7 payments infrastructure and access to all the relevant payment schemes, Mode is now able to offer its customers regulated accounts and instant payments.  

With the Mode app, users are provided with an individual account number and sort code. Funds can be transferred to their account in less than one second. The user is then ready to instantly buy and sell bitcoin. The entire process is designed to be as fast, intuitive and easy as possible.  

Result 

By working with Modulr to create a faster, easier and safer way for users to invest in bitcoin, Mode is now able to differentiate its proposition in the competitive crypto market. 

And supported by Modulr’s payment infrastructure, Mode has ambitious plans for future growth. Having solved the challenge of giving users easy access to bitcoin, it now has several other projects in the pipeline, including peer-to-peer payments and an e-commerce loyalty program. 

Learn more about how Mode is transforming the crypto market with seamless access to Bitcoin via regulated payments, powered by Modulr.

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Kashing: Pivoting Payment Solutions to Close a Gap in the Market

Kashing is a payment facilitator that serves SMEs in the UK tourism industry. It provides payment solutions for unattended point of sale devices – allowing merchants to transform anything, from pool tables to vending machines, to accept contactless payments.

Challenge 

One of the most significant issues the company faced was building brand loyalty with small merchants. In the crowded and competitive payment marketplace, independent retailers often pick payment providers based on price. 

Although Kashing already had their own payment settlement system up and running, the team was struggling to find a payment provider who could deliver Faster Payments in bulk. 

They needed an alternative payment provider which could help them process thousands of small payments every day with minimum fuss, zero downtime and maximum efficiency. 

Solution 

Modulr’s platform helped Kashing to pursue this gap in the competitive SME payments space, by giving them the ability to deliver Faster Payment in bulk. They can now process thousands of small payments every day with minimum fuss, zero downtime and maximum efficiency. 

Modulr is also helping Kashing to prevent fraud, as it lets them keep customers’ money in a safe, segregated account until it’s ready to settle. 

Result 

This has all helped Kashing to achieve impressive growth. In 2019, month-on-month, unattended Card Turnover grew 45% and the number of unattended transactions grew 38%. 

Before using Modulr, Kashing typically onboarded five devices a month. Now they onboard five to ten devices a week. And over February 2020, Kashing processed the same amount of payments as they did in 2019. 

With Modulr at its side, Kashing is helping SMEs across the UK to deliver a better digital payments experience to customers. Modulr is also building affordable currency exchange systems to help Kashing expand into the European market and scale even further. 

Check-out how Kashing uses our technology to leverage the instant economy and provide SMEs with fast, secure payments.

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Revolut: How Modulr’s payment infrastructure enabled Revolut to scale and take on established banks

In just over four years, challenger bank Revolut transformed from its origins as a travel and foreign exchange app to a popular financial brand that’s set to challenge traditional banks with a full current account service and expansive payment offering. 

Challenge

Revolut was founded with the vision to minimise FX fees for consumers and businesses. It soon added a payment card so that customers could pay in a foreign country at a rate mirroring spot exchange rates. This lead to a rapid acquisition of new customers.

But infrastructure is a major stumbling block for many FinTechs: it is difficult to replicate the back-end of established banks or directly link up with the wider payment systems. 

Revolut needed to overcome technical limitations to offer fully functioning current accounts and a seamless customer experience, while provisioning its banking services at scale and open new accounts as fast as customers were signing up. 

Solution

Revolut turned to Modulr’s API-driven payments solution to support its goals for rapid growth.

Modulr’s infrastructure enabled Revolut to rapidly process customer signups, activating new accounts in record time and at scale, with thousands of users signing up every day. 

Modulr also worked with Revolut to enable additional current account features, including the launch of direct debit. 

Customers can now use their Revolut account just like a traditional bank account, and set up direct debit payments for subscriptions like gym memberships. 

Result

Revolut’s transformation has shown that even if a startup doesn’t have access to traditional banking infrastructure, partnering with Modulr can bridge the gap. 

We provide the plumbing that allows fintech startups to build a full banking service from the ground up.

Check out how Revolut is encouraging restlessness among their customers.

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Key Takeaways

• Most marketers follow the same playbook
• It makes certain processes inefficient and unproductive, like customer stories
• You should apply second order thinking to the goals of customer stories (or any process for that matter) 
• Rethink how and why you need customer stories
• You should generate a greater value exchange to engage customers
• Practice executing a genuine series of customer stories

Check out how Modulr’s marketing team has pivoted its approach during the crisis.