You’ve just closed a round, the press release has been through three rounds of edits and it goes out on the wire at 7am. By lunchtime it’s been picked up by two aggregator sites and none of the journalists you wanted to reach have mentioned it.
PR for fintech can feel like something that needs a big agency retainer and a contact book you don’t have yet. A lot of fintechs are in the same position, especially in the early years when most of the budget is going into product and sales. Good coverage mostly comes down to having something worth saying and saying it to the right person at the right time and you can do most of that yourself.
Here’s how to get your fintech covered without a big budget.
Why PR for fintech is harder than it looks
Fintech journalists get hundreds of pitches a week and a lot of them are funding announcements and product launches that look very similar. Your news matters a great deal to you, but on its own it rarely gives a journalist a story.
Compliance adds another layer. Anything you say publicly about your product, performance or customers needs signing off, which slows you down when news moves fast. And because fintech touches people’s money, journalists are more sceptical of claims that can’t be backed up.
Start with something worth covering
The fastest route to coverage is a story a journalist can’t get anywhere else and for a lot of fintechs that’s data. If your platform processes payments, loans, transactions or applications, you’re sitting on information about how people and businesses behave with money. Anonymised, approved and turned into a short report or a handful of findings, it gives journalists a reason to write about you that has nothing to do with your product.
Other angles that tend to work:
- A clear opinion on a regulatory change, published on the day it’s announced
- Commentary on a trend your customers are living through
- A survey of your customers or market, with a sample big enough to be credible
- A customer story with real numbers, approved by the customer
Funding and product news still have a place. Tie a raise to what it says about your market and it becomes far more interesting to a journalist. If you’re turning platform data into a report, our whitepapers and ebooks service can help you shape it.
Build your own press list
A press list of 20 to 30 journalists is enough to start with and you can build it yourself. Pick people who already write about your corner of fintech, whether that’s payments, lending, wealth, regtech or embedded finance. Read what they’ve written in the last few months, note what they care about and follow them on LinkedIn and X.
Trade titles often matter more than national press for B2B fintech, because they’re what your buyers read. Industry newsletters and podcasts count too and they’re usually more open to new voices.
Pitch like you’ve read their work
A good pitch is short, specific and sent to one person. It explains the story in a sentence, says why it matters to that journalist’s readers and offers something concrete, such as data, a spokesperson or an exclusive. Personalise the first line so it’s clear you know what they cover.
Timing matters too. Pitch data stories a week or two ahead, offer comment on breaking news within hours and avoid sending anything late on a Friday. If you don’t hear back, one polite follow up after a few days is plenty.
Become the expert journalists call
Reactive PR costs very little and builds up over time. When a big story breaks in your area, such as a rate decision, a new piece of regulation or a high profile outage, journalists need informed comment quickly. If you can send two or three sharp sentences from your founder or a subject expert within an hour or two, you’ll start getting quoted.
Services that match journalists with expert sources, such as ResponseSource and Qwoted, are worth setting up for this. So is agreeing a fast sign off process with compliance before the news breaks, so comment doesn’t sit in an inbox all afternoon.
Use your own channels to back it up
Coverage goes further when you put it to work. Share it on LinkedIn from your founder’s profile as well as the company page, add it to your website and sales materials and send it to prospects who’d find it useful. A trade article that your sales team sends to the right person can do more work than it ever did on the publisher’s site.
Thought leadership on your own channels supports PR too. Journalists check LinkedIn and company blogs before they quote someone and a steady record of useful, opinionated content makes your spokespeople easier to trust. PR works best as one part of a wider plan, which we cover in our fintech marketing guide. Our content writing service is built to keep that record going.
When it’s worth hiring a fintech PR agency
A specialist fintech PR agency makes sense once you have regular news to share and want to reach national press quickly. When you’re choosing one, ask which fintech journalists they’ve worked with recently, what coverage they’ve secured for companies at your stage and how they handle compliance sign off. Until then, the approach above will get you a long way on your own.
Ready to give journalists something worth writing about?
Fintech Content writes the data reports, thought leadership and bylined articles that give fintech PR something to work with, all by writers who know the space. If you want your expertise to show up where your buyers are reading, we’d love to help.