The panel on a recent episode of the Fintech Insider podcast made a point that should land for anyone running a financial services firm right now: the product-as-growth era is over[1]. The firms that grew fastest in the early fintech wave, Monzo and Wise being the obvious examples, did so because their product experience was genuinely different. Now those products have been copied, iterated on, and commoditised. The next competition is not about features. It is about brand, trust, and whether your firm is the one a buyer thinks of first.

That is a significant shift for advice and wealth businesses, where the assumption has long been that the quality of advice speaks for itself. It often does not, at least not until someone is already sitting in front of you.

Why “product-led growth” has run out of road

The early fintech playbook was straightforward: build a better product, acquire customers cheaply through word of mouth, and let the UX do the marketing. That worked when the product was genuinely new. It works less well when every platform offers broadly the same features and the same promise of being frictionless, best-in-class, and end-to-end.

Nicole Herringer, VP of Brand and Comms at Infuse, described this convergence as a “sea of sameness”[1]. Canva, she noted, democratised design to the point where everyone’s brand now looks like everyone else’s. The tools that were supposed to help firms stand out have produced an industry of near-identical visual identities and near-identical messaging.

For financial advice and wealth management firms, this problem is not hypothetical. A firm’s website, its LinkedIn presence, and its client-facing materials are often the first thing a prospective client sees. If they read like every other firm in the sector, using the same phrases about holistic planning and long-term relationships, there is no reason to remember them.

“Remarkable marketing means two things: it means ‘great,’ and it means something people will ‘remark’ on.” Lucy Heavens, paraphrasing Seth Godin[1]

The word soup problem

Lucy Heavens, CMO at Vixio, flagged what she called “word soup” as one of the most damaging patterns in fintech marketing[1]. The same applies directly to financial services. Take any page from a mid-sized IFA or wealth manager’s website and count the words that could appear on any competitor’s site without changing a sentence.

“Frictionless.” “Best-in-class.” “End-to-end.” “Comprehensive.” “Holistic.”

These words carry no information. They signal nothing about the actual value a firm provides, the kinds of clients it serves well, or the specific problems it knows how to solve. And because they are so common, they do not help a reader decide anything.

The fix is simpler than most firms assume: describe what you actually do, plainly, for the specific type of person you do it for. “We help family business owners prepare for a sale or succession” is more useful to the right person than “comprehensive wealth planning for high-net-worth individuals.”

The B2B buying committee is more complicated than it was

For firms operating in the B2B space, whether that is a wealth platform selling to advice businesses or a technology vendor selling to compliance teams, the podcast raised a structural point worth absorbing. The B2B purchase decision now involves a “whole village”: IT, compliance, legal, and senior executives who each need different things from the same conversation[1].

The data is pointed. According to figures cited by Lucy Heavens, 57% of B2B buyers expect a return on investment within the first three months of purchase, and 11% want it immediately[1]. That is a very short window in which to demonstrate value, which means the commercial case needs to be documented and specific before the sale closes, not assembled after.

For anyone selling services to financial advice firms, this has practical consequences:

First, map every stakeholder’s concern. The MD of a 30-adviser firm cares about revenue and client outcomes. Their compliance officer cares about whether the tool creates a regulatory liability. Their IT lead cares about integration with existing systems. The same case study will not serve all three. Each needs messaging that starts with their specific concern.

Second, build the ROI case into the sales process. If buyers expect to demonstrate return within 90 days, the conversation about what success looks like has to happen before onboarding. That means being honest about what takes time to show results and what does not.

Third, do not treat compliance as the last hurdle. Tom Davies, founder of Brandingo and former VP of Marketing at Yonder and Monzo, made the point directly: regulated firms often fail by treating legal and compliance as a final tick-box sign-off on creative work[1]. Bringing compliance into the creative or commercial process early means the work is bolder and safer at the same time, because the constraints are known from the start.

What AI does and does not do for marketing

The podcast’s take on AI in marketing is worth taking seriously, because it cuts against the prevailing enthusiasm. Tom Davies argued that while AI is genuinely useful for process work, documentation, briefing, and first drafts, AI-generated creative currently lacks the distinctiveness needed to build long-term brand equity[1].

That observation sits alongside what is happening more broadly in the channel mix. AI referral traffic is growing fast, with some data suggesting triple-digit year-on-year increases in AI-referred visits[2]. The practice of ensuring a brand is correctly represented in AI-generated answers, variously called AEO or GEO (AI Experience Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation), is becoming a real consideration for firms that rely on search-based discovery[3].

But the Fintech Insider panel’s point holds: being findable through AI search is a distribution problem, not a brand problem. You still need something worth finding. A firm whose positioning is indistinguishable from its competitors will not benefit from AI-driven traffic in any lasting way, because there is nothing in the content for an AI assistant to anchor a distinctive description to.

The practical implication: use AI to produce faster drafts, cleaner documentation, and more structured briefing material. Do not use it to generate the creative thinking that makes a firm memorable. That still requires human judgement, iteration, and the willingness to produce a bad first idea on the way to a good one.

The data trap

One of the more quietly useful points from the podcast concerned what might be called the Year-in-Review trap. Spotify Wrapped and Monzo’s Year-in-Review both generated enormous engagement by turning personal data into shareable, identity-relevant content. The temptation for any firm with data is to replicate that format.

The panel’s warning is worth quoting directly: just because you have the data does not mean you should publish it[1]. Unless the output adds genuine utility to the person receiving it, or is specific enough to trigger a real conversation, it becomes noise. And producing something noisily is often worse than producing nothing, because it uses resources that could go toward something better.

For advice and wealth businesses, this applies to any planned client communication that is driven by what is easy to generate rather than what the client actually finds useful. Annual review summaries, portfolio updates, and market commentary all carry the same risk. The question is not “can we produce this?” but “does this give the reader something they will actually use or remember?”

What this means for your firm

The shift the Fintech Insider panel described, from product differentiation to brand and trust, is not a fintech-specific problem. It is a financial services problem, and it is already here.

A few places to start:

Read your own marketing copy as a stranger would. Could it belong to any firm in your sector without changing a word? If yes, it is not doing the job.

Involve compliance in creative work early. Not as a checkpoint, but as a collaborator. The constraints are almost always workable if they are known from the start.

Be specific about who you help and what changes for them. “We help retired business owners make sense of their first year without a salary” is more useful and more credible than “comprehensive financial planning for life’s transitions.”

Treat your first idea as the starting point, not the answer. Tom Davies’ Substack is called Marketing is Hard for a reason[1]. The distinctive work takes iteration. Most firms stop too early.

If your firm is working through how to position itself more clearly, or how to build marketing that earns trust in a regulated environment, a discovery call with Cordrey Consulting is a good place to start.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute regulated financial advice or a compliance opinion. Consult a qualified compliance professional for advice specific to your firm.

Sources

[1] Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS, ‘1075. Insights: What are the new rules of fintech marketing?’, 25 June 2026. [Primary source for all direct quotes and attributed claims from Nicole Herringer, Lucy Heavens, and Tom Davies.]

[2] Adobe Digital Insights (2026), ‘AI traffic converts 42% better: 2026 channel strategy’, Digital Applied. Available at: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-traffic-converts-42-percent-better-2026-channel-strategy

[3] Digital Applied (2026), ‘AI traffic converts 42% better: 2026 channel strategy’. Available at: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-traffic-converts-42-percent-better-2026-channel-strategy