Hosted by Araminta Robertson, 'Market like a fintech' is the new podcast for fintech marketing professionals and enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry, and level up their marketing knowledge. Subscribe here to never miss an episode.
In this episode of “Market like a fintech”, Araminta is chatting with Marc Winitz, Chief Marketing Officer at Rapyd. Marc has experience as a senior marketing leader working with multi-million dollar budgets and a background in enterprise software, SaaS and systems integration markets.
Rapyd is a fintech as a service platform, which lets businesses collect and disburse money locally through preferred payment methods. Rapyd offers 900 alternative payment methods ranging from cash, e-wallets, local card networks and a lot more. They currently operate in over 100 countries, hit $100 million in revenue in 2020 and were valued at $2 billion earlier this year.
In the episode, Araminta and Marc chat about Marc's experience with SaaS and fintech companies, who Rapyd’s target market is and how Rapyd is building a developer community.
This episode is brought to you by VC Innovations.
VC Innovations is a full-stack marketing services agency dedicated to innovation industries with a special focus on Fintech. They work with businesses across 3 key areas of marketing infrastructure, demand generation campaigns and event properties including the must-attend Fintech Talents Festival. Check out www.vcinnovations.co.uk to find out more.
Podcast summary:
(When asked in what ways would he say that marketing a fintech company is different from marketing a SaaS company?) "So one of the principles I think of, the state of what current B2B marketing is, even if it's really SaaS heavy, still applies to the type of fintech that Rapyd is. We're doing large-scale global payments, infrastructure, and embedding fintech capabilities via things like APIs into business processes."
"I think the primary difference is just that when you are a marketer, and you're trying to get your product to be considered in a buying process, really, that audience really matters. And so the things that you do matter, in terms of who that audience is, how you talk to them, who you target, how you target them, etc."
[Whether you're a fintech or a pure SaaS company] "There's still basic things that you have to go back to, to have a baseline of success. And so those are things like understanding what is your ideal customer profile."
"Do you understand who the audience is you're talking to? Do you have the right set of targeting in place? Is the messaging aligned to the personas you're trying to target, in other words, the people that are involved in that buying process?"
"And so what Rapyd does is we essentially provide the full set of capabilities that businesses need to implement, to support any kind of business process where they can build any kind of fintech application. So, that's anything from the payment methods that are needed ... and then having all of the things that go aside with that, to be able to make that transaction occur."
"The other part of Rapyd is that we've essentially gone around the world, and aggregated together hundreds of local payment networks and we make that really easy button for payments."
"All of a sudden, you're seeing this digital acceleration of payments that's happening because of COVID ... And we're seeing lots of small-medium businesses that know that they need to get online to be successful, and Rapyd just happens to be a very unique company as a startup that can serve [those] markets."
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"Originally, Rapyd was meant to be a B2C wallet play ... We actually picked an initial market to launch which happened to be the UK, went through this process of figuring out how to integrate the local payment networks, there were licensing requirements, regulatory issues, tax issues, AML Compliance, all that just to turn on one country. And when we launched the company, and we started marketing, how could we get consumers to download this wallet where you could make these transactions where you can pay and be paid, however, you want to go locally?"
"We're serving a lot of different markets...and everybody has the same problem."
(When asked how Rapyd adapts its marketing mix to different segments) "So going back to just that concept of, who are our ideal customers, we look at various specific segments in the enterprise space."
"Marketplaces are a good example of who we would go after, e-commerce is a massive space for Rapyd, we do focus on the enterprise side there, but we're seeing more and more uptake on the small-medium business side..."
"We have to place our bets [on] where we think we can get the most traction. There's actually almost an unlimited number of places we can play. But we're trying to stay focused."
"The average small business owner, or SMB probably doesn't know anything about local payment methods ... What they may start to see is okay, you know, [thy've] been able to accept credit cards up to this point, but for whatever reason, the market [they're] trying to work in has other mechanisms that they currently don't support, and they probably realise that."
"There's only so much educating you can do because the world's a big place, and we serve so many markets."
(When asked how Rapyd stands out) "If you go back to Rapyd's origin story, the way that Rapyd started, [it's] really unusual ... We're very unique from how we came about as a start-up. So, in most start-ups, you'd find product-market fit based on the problem that you're trying to solve - usually in a geographic market, it's essentially almost how most startups start ... In Rapyd's case, it's literally a polar opposite to that - as we built Rapyd and then launched the company, we were essentially scaling the company globally, from its inception, which is highly unusual for a start-up."
"I think it's that global scale, and the ability to solve so many different kinds of use cases, and then obviously, having this huge diversity of payment methods that you can tap into, that really is kind of what separates Rapyd from everybody else."
"We saw the shift in the market, in terms of moving online, from a business perspective for the customers we were serving, especially the SMB market. So, really, one of the biggest things that's happened for us both as a company and for me as a head of marketing, is launching a service capability to appeal to small and medium businesses, which by its nature has to be digital anyways, regardless of COVID. So we really got into paid media in a significant way."
"One thing that hasn't changed with COVID is everybody still has a device in their hand, and they still read stuff. So, keeping your name out there really, really matters if you can do it in the right way ... [There's] no one thing and there's no one silver bullet, but it's truly a conglomeration of a lot of [ways to keep your name out there]."
"At the end of the day, developers actually are decision makers, much more than people think about, certainly in the payment space, and definitely in the small-medium business space."
"I would say developers are like anybody else in the sense that they're looking for good information. So, in our overall global marketing approach, we're trying to put out useful, important, tangible information. No matter who we're engaging with, it doesn't even matter if it's a developer or not."
"You can still think from a marketing perspective [when talking to developers], the marketing just needs to be useful and authentic for them to want to engage."
For more tips, listen to Marc's complete story below.
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