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Financial-technology companies are changing the face of finance. Over the past ten years, what started mostly as disruption in the payments space has expanded to every corner of finance. Even areas once assumed to be safe are seeing new entrants and competitive threats. Wealth and asset management, wholesale banking, capital markets, regulation and risk (“regtech”), and trade finance are just the most recent areas to see innovation driven by small technology-first players.

Whether fintechs ultimately win or lose significant market share may be beside the point; they are redefining customer expectations and continue to create new business models. As fintechs are frequently building their entire technology stacks from the ground up, they are highlighting incumbent financial institutions’ weaknesses not only in digital user experiences but also in operational efficiency. Whether a new digital brokerage wins or loses may not matter when customer expectations around brokerage fees change. A retail foreign-exchange fintech having 5 or 50 percent of the market may matter less than retail FX margins disappearing for everyone. Whether the next crops of “neobanks” disrupt retail banking may be less important than their highlighting for users and customers the possibilities of a modern, digital-first experience.

f your downside potential from disruptive threats. Incumbents can choose to invest in companies they partner with or to focus on areas they know well or interesting adjacencies. We frequently advise clients to find ways of keeping corporate venture-capital groups slightly at arm’s length to attract skilled managers, and we recently have seen increased interest in investing in established outside managers who focus on financial technology. Transform yourself to be more like a fintech. Digital transformation is a difficult but necessary process for most incumbent financial institutions. Redesigning core infrastructure to be more modular and dynamic, driving a new agile operating model, and upgrading technology and workforce skills are all necessary to compete with outside threats, fintech and otherwise. Build your own (internal) fintech. The road for transformations is normally measured in years, but the competitive threat from fintechs is today. Increasingly, we are seeing financial institutions try to beat fintechs at their own game or self-disrupt areas of their business before others can. The key to success in new digital business building is to combine the agility, speed, and talent of a start-up with the “unfair advantage” of an incumbent by leveraging existing assets (e.g. customers, distribution, or infrastructure). Serve the fintechs. A few financial institutions can find their competitive advantage in creating scaled, efficient technology and operations to enable others to embed financial services in their customer experiences. This “banking as a service” business model depends on finding a profitable path to white labeling but draws on the inspiration of large tech platforms. Enabling the customer experiences of others has quickly moved beyond just enabling fintechs to also working with big technology companies, retailers, telecommunications companies, and beyond. Ignore fintechs. Although ignoring the competition is rarely the right choice, some businesses are built on moats—frequently regulatory—that are difficult to disrupt or they play within narrow markets. Companies should prioritize where they need to focus and in doing so know when they need to pay attention and when they need to avoid the distraction of disrupters.

PROMOTE Find the most effective channel for your niche In consideration of some financial constraints, fintech companies must distribute their content in the channel where they’ll reach their target audience – and this may not necessarily be the most popular channel. For example, Facebook may have 2.3 billion active users but most of your customers might be a certain type of professional who mostly hang out on LinkedIn, then that may be the best channel for you. Some fintech companies find traction in Reddit, while others are big on Telegram. Find an online space where most of your customers go to seek solutions and tailor your content to reach them.

A study shows that 80% of decision makers prefer to gather information about a company via articles than make their purchase decisions based on advertisement and marketing materials. It’s clear. The most effective marketing strategy used by fintech companies is content marketing. By allocating significant efforts in creating, publishing and distributing digital content tailored to a specific market or audience, customers, as well as bottom line, are served well.

Most fintech companies get the biggest bunch of their sales from the internet. This is because the first thing people do when they need to find out more information about a finance product or service is to search for solution providers online. For this reason, every fintech company needs to have a robust online presence. When buyers start researching, their first aim is to gather information. They don’t necessarily focus on your marketing materials because there are lots of adverts on the internet, which aren’t always reliable