Fintech has never lacked confidence in its own story. In its earliest phase, that story was built around disruption. A new generation of financial brands willing to do what traditional institutions could not or would not. That narrative helped define the sector. However, as fintech has matured, that story has also had to evolve.
Nowadays, customers, investors and regulators are more discerning and less willing to back ambition without evidence. The result is a more complicated communications environment. Fintech still needs strong storytelling, but the type of story that people want to hear has changed in significant ways. So, how can the industry respond?
To test whether fintech’s story is keeping pace with the reality of what the sector is building, we convened a senior roundtable from the Started Advisory Board, bringing together perspectives from across media, strategy and industry leadership, which included:
- David Savage: Group Tech Evangelist at Harvey Nash & host of the ‘Tech Talks’ podcast
- Jas Shah: Fintech Strategist & Creator of Fintech: Under the Hood
- Raf De Kimpe: CEO at FinTech Belgium
Their discussion was moderated by Ryan Woods, Head of Content at the Started Advisory Board.
Do you think fintech has developed a storytelling problem? Has the narrative around products, services or technologies, in some cases, started to outpace people’s understanding of how they actually work?
David Savage: “I think fintech does have a broader communication problem. A lot of the conversation happens inside an already engaged room. People are speaking to others who already know the context, already know the language, and already understand the industry. Talking is easy in that kind of environment.
What often gets lost is the broader audience that would benefit from understanding what is actually being said and discussed. So yes, I do think there is often a gap between the conversation happening inside fintech and what is being clearly communicated beyond it.”
Jas Shah: “Yes, but I think it is often less a deliberate storytelling issue and more a capacity issue inside fintech companies.
The people best placed to explain what a product is, what it does and why it matters are usually the people building it. But they are also the busiest people in the organisation. Product managers, product directors, CTOs and CPOs do not necessarily have the time to sit down with marketing or PR and shape the external narrative properly.
What happens instead is that the product gets built, engineering and design move on, and then the external explanation becomes a separate exercise at the end. That is where the disconnect comes from.”
Raf De Kimpe: “I think the narrative has changed a lot over time. In the beginning, fintech storytelling was all about disruption. It was about saying: we are challengers, we are different, we are here to replace the banks.
That has changed. Now it is much more about collaboration, partnerships and solving real problems. In that sense, the storytelling has become more mature. It has become less about being different for the sake of being different, and more about what actual problem a product or service solves.”
Strong positioning is clearly an asset, until it is not. At what point does it stop helping and start becoming a credibility risk with customers, regulators or investors?
Jas Shah: “For me, it starts as soon as you lose authenticity. You can make mistakes as a company and still retain trust, but only if your communication has been consistent and credible enough that people believe you are fundamentally genuine.
As soon as that authenticity drops away, you start to have a problem. Transparency matters too, especially with regulators. You cannot always be fully transparent with customers in every situation, but with regulators you do need that level of openness.”
Raf De Kimpe: “Within the industry especially, people are very quick to spot hot air. If a company is using all the right buzzwords and has a polished narrative, but there is no operational substance underneath it, people can see straight through it.
A real use case says much more than polished language ever will. And you have to back it up with numbers. The era of saying, in ten years we will be the next Tesla, is much less persuasive now than simply showing that you are already in the market, already selling and already generating revenue.”
David Savage: “The credibility risk also increases because the wider environment rewards the more attention-grabbing version of a story over the more nuanced one.
A lot of the platforms people now communicate through are built to reward speed, controversy and simplification.
That creates pressure to lean into sensational framing. But that kind of communication rarely builds understanding. More often, it strips out nuance.”
One of the things coming through here is that fintech’s communication challenge may begin inside the organisation itself. Why does the sector so often struggle to explain itself clearly, even when the product itself may be genuinely useful or valuable?
Jas Shah: “One reason is that the people with the deepest understanding are often not the people being asked to speak externally. CEOs have an important role, obviously, but as companies scale they are often focused on leadership, fundraising, hiring and broader strategy. They are not always the people who have the most detailed understanding of how a specific product line works day to day.
That is why I think fintech companies need to bring more internal voices into external communication. Speak to the CTO. Speak to the CPO. Speak to the product director responsible for a specific area. Those are often the most credible and specific voices in the organisation.”
Raf De Kimpe: “Yes, and companies also make the mistake of making the story too much about themselves or too much about the technology. A technical founder may understandably want to explain the innovation in detail, but the client does not necessarily need every internal mechanism explained. What they need is relevance. What does this solve for me? Why should I care? What is the real-world value here?”
David Savage: “There is a wider issue too, which is that people in fintech often end up speaking to their peers. That makes it easy to drift into insider language, shorthand and assumptions about what people already know.
The problem is that those assumptions do not hold outside that room. If the goal is to build broader understanding, then the industry needs to get better at speaking beyond itself.”
If the problem is not storytelling itself, but storytelling becoming detached from reality, what does more credible communication look like in practice?
Raf De Kimpe: “For me, it starts with audience awareness. That is the single biggest thing. I see this all the time around events. People will pitch the same way regardless of whether they are speaking to founders, investors, students or end users, and that is where things go wrong.
The message has to fit the audience. If you are pitching to investors, they do not need a customer-facing product pitch. They need to understand the business, the plans, the budget, the runway. If you are speaking to end users, then yes, the product value needs to be clear. The biggest communication mistake I see is not adapting the story to the audience in front of you.”
Jas Shah: “I would add that more credible storytelling means getting closer to the people doing the work. There is real value in bringing more technically credible voices into public-facing content. We talk a lot about the fintech side of fintech, but we do not spend enough time talking about the tech with the people actually building it.
There is a lot of value in hearing from a CTO about how infrastructure gets built, how AI is actually being used, or what the operational trade-offs really are. That creates a more grounded kind of storytelling.”
David Savage: “The most credible stories also tend to come from people who are genuinely trying to solve a problem they have experienced themselves.
That is where you often get the strongest combination of passion, credibility and authenticity. When someone is building around a problem they know intimately, they usually communicate in a way that feels more grounded and more convincing.”
How much of this sits with fintech companies themselves, and how much of it is being shaped by a wider media and market environment that rewards the bolder story more than the clearest one?
David Savage: “Yes, I think it often does. A lot of today’s media environment is structured around clickbait logic. If you ask how to grow an audience, the advice is often to say something sensational, provocative or controversial. That naturally pushes people towards content that is quicker to consume and more dramatic in tone.
The problem is that it often strips out nuance. It encourages people to talk in simplistic, exaggerated ways because those are the formats most easily picked up by algorithms.”
Jas Shah: “That has definitely been my experience too. The reason my newsletter is called Fintech Under the Hood is because I am not trying to make huge sweeping claims just because they are more clickable.
What I try to do is explain where I think the industry is heading, but also the steps in between. How do we actually get from where we are now to that future state? What has to happen operationally, strategically and structurally?
The challenge is that the content that gets the most attention is often the content someone can consume in 20 or 30 seconds. If readers keep rewarding that, naturally more people will create more of it.”
Raf De Kimpe: “There is definitely more scepticism now towards very polished narratives that do not feel rooted in something real. And when that polished language is combined with new hype cycles, especially around AI, that scepticism increases further. If everything is AI-generated, AI-written and AI-branded, people start to wonder what is actually real.”
If a company wants to know whether its message is actually landing in a clear and credible way, how should it test that?
Raf De Kimpe: “It sounds obvious, but explain it to someone outside the industry. Try it on your parents, your grandparents, your friends, or better still, someone who resembles your target audience. If they are willing to make the effort to understand you and still do not get it, then your message probably is not clear enough.
That does not mean every message has to work for every audience. But it should be understandable to someone close to the audience you actually want to reach.”
David Savage: “Fintech often underestimates how much insider language it uses. Pressure-testing against a broader audience is a useful way of exposing that.”
Jas Shah: “And clarity is not the same as oversimplification. You can still explain something properly without making it vague or superficial. The important thing is to make it legible to the audience you are trying to reach.”
Looking ahead, if there is one thing fintech should get better at when it comes to storytelling, what would it be?
David Savage: “Speak beyond the room you are already in. If the industry wants broader understanding, it needs to get better at communicating beyond its own echo chamber.”
Jas Shah: “Bring more authentic, operational voices into the conversation. Not everything should come from the CEO. The people closest to the work often explain it best.”
Raf De Kimpe: “Adapt to the audience. That is the single most important thing. If you do not know who you are speaking to, or you do not adjust the message accordingly, the story will not land.”
Image provided by Started PR
