What’s an underrated growth channel in fintech?

Social media. Obviously.

Word of mouth and client referrals. A viral campaign is thrilling, but in B2B fintech, trust travels faster and your clients are your biggest promoters.

Doing the things that don’t scale. AI is there to automate the boring stuff so you can go and do what you otherwise wouldn’t have time for, and I’d far rather see a company commission a mural or put together a bespoke gift for a customer than optimise its LinkedIn ads. Once the boring but important work is automated, the companies that stand out will be the ones doing things that are clearly human - and authentic.

Refer a friend. Don’t underestimate the power of your existing loyal base. That and owned channels - people forget they exist.

Product-led referrals. People trust recommendations from people they already send money to more than they trust ads.

Organic social. Yes of course paid social has a place too, but building a community and taking an active role is so important. Not just to celebrate our people but to build genuine connections within fintech.

Organic 100%. Most brands try it for two months and don’t get results so assume it doesn’t work and it frustrates me so much. The issue is finding someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

Good old human contact. People need real interactions to build emotional connection and trust. And that doesn’t just happen at events - there are far more innovative ways to bring the human touch into how we engage.

Direct mail. Most fintech marketers write it off as expensive or outdated, but per-mailer costs are far more negotiable than people assume. Negotiate with your vendors and your campaign CPA looks very different. The bigger missed opportunity though isn’t acquisition, it’s pipeline. A well-timed mailer between signup and first transaction with clear next steps, a strong incentive, a real CTA, can re-engage people who’ve gone quiet in a way no push notification or email can ever again. Everyone’s fighting for inbox space in 2026. The good marketers will own the mailbox instead. But let’s keep that between us.

I’m a huge advocate for building your own personal brand. So, slightly annoying answer perhaps, but your own LinkedIn. If you’re not showing up where your audience already is, someone else in your space probably is, and they’re taking the opportunities that could be yours.

I think newsletters are an amazing way of building your first 1000 True Fans, as Kevin Kelly would put it. No matter how obscure your niche, you can develop the tone, content, and insights your audience is looking for.

PR and content - most brands underinvest until paid channels plateau. Resilience takes time to build.

YouTube. It can bridge driving brand and acquisition objectives if used intelligently as a content hub. You don’t have to always drive people to your website but can meet your audience where they are.

Since I work in content… I will say Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) content distributed via SEO and LLMs. When people think of SEO they still think of targeting high level terms that are often too competitive, like “money transfer app”. The real goldmine is very BOFU queries that few people search but are so high intent that the conversion rate is massive. I’m still astounded at how few people do this in content, especially in B2B. With LLMs, it’s the same story: targeting the BOFU prompts with content is where you’ll see the biggest impact. Everyone seems to be focused on Reddit when this is what we’ve seen have the most impact.

Underrated is a tricky one. It doesn’t feel like there is a hidden gem nobody knows about or isn’t using. The oldies are the goodies, but maybe YouTube - especially with growing LLM influence.

Employees as ambassadors. I’m seeing a rising trend in tech companies paying their staff to post on LinkedIn and build their profile. Shows how much we value the human story even in B2B. Viva la influencer!

PFM [Personal Financial Management] I think... particularly as the Agentic solutions can do this with ease but in a completely unregulated environment.

It probably varies by business, depending on its audience. But what’s definitely underrated, and not just in fintech, is staying close to the customer which is the best way to stay grounded as marketers. Running interviews, reading reviews, and shadowing sales and support calls are the best ways to stay focused on our most important stakeholders.

Referral schemes are still incredibly powerful, people will happily recommend you if you’ve nailed the product. We’ve also seen great results from TikTok recently; the scale you can reach is wild.

Embedded partnerships and micro-events. Partnerships amplify reach while small, value-driven meet-ups build trust - especially as AI changes how people consume content.

I’d be surprised if anyone reading this hadn’t already rated all the growth channels (or read them here before). Instead, the key for me is time. When you feel under pressure to try every growth channel you can, as fast as you can, you miss out on giving that channel any true chance of success. Taking the time to put the frameworks in place, do the research, build out the hypothesis, find the brand fit, and then learn from it will lead to more success in the long-run, even when it feels like you’re moving too slow.

Email and push notifications.

LinkedIn. Do something original and tangible and it works very well. Never say you’re “delighted” or “humbled”.

Anything community-centered for long-term growth. Organic social, events, newsletters. It’ll take seconds for a new player to enter the market and steal your “customers” if you fail to invest in making them fall in love with your brand.

I would have to split between B2B and B2C. For B2B, brand is still massively underrated - but maybe not for long. In B2C, I think community is still the most underrated. Monzo wrote the playbook though - people should just follow it.

I think in fintech it’s less about finding underrated channels, it’s more about storytelling and brand-led content across channels. That’s what I want to see more of. Actual personality, real stories, not just dry product features.

Experiential. But thoughtful, creative, differentiated activations. As tech / AI makes it easier to produce (usually crappy) digital content / experiences, quality analog experiences will become so much more valuable and effective.

Customer education. If you help someone truly understand the problem, they’ll trust you to solve it.

Any product feature that makes people collaborate: investing together, splitting bills, joint accounts, family expense management, company expense management. Massively underrated growth lever.

Brand.

SEO and AI optimisation through data storytelling. Everyone chases the same keywords. Few build data-driven stories that earn backlinks.

Thought leadership with a real and differentiated point of view. Too many treat it as content marketing, but when done right, it builds trust and moves deals forward.

Word of mouth and WhatsApp.

Partner co-marketing. Your ecosystem is your distribution channel. Joint press releases, thought leadership webinars, and remixing content for longtail campaigns unlock audiences you’d never reach alone. It works exceptionally well.

PR. Especially as we enter an AI era where SEO is being replaced by ‘GEO’.

Influencers. There’s still a significant education component to finance, especially when going mass market. Influencers are a great way to propagate a deeper understanding of your product and features through voices that resonate with your target audience.

Offline referral marketing in rural and semi-urban areas - especially for commercial banks in Nigeria. The focus is often towards digital channels in major urban centres, leaving out huge untapped markets driven by trust and word-of-mouth from the immediate friends and families within their spheres of influence.

TV.

Radio/audio. Especially if it’s integrated with TV/AV with the right distinctive audio assets (voiceover, music track, jingle, end line).

Not sure there are many underrated things in fintech marketing - there are many overrated though... ;-) But sometimes it can be interesting and impactful to leverage channels that have fallen out of fashion such as direct mail and PR, to avoid the noise and cut through.

Merchandising cross-collaboration. Joining forces with physical goods companies on limited edition drops creates engaging surprise and delight campaigns, and cross-pollinates audiences.

Partnerships. Find partners who share your values and ethos, and grow together.

Customer advocacy. Fans who love you complain less, buy more, and recruit others for free. If customers don’t love you, you’ll struggle.

Customer testimonials. They are the ones using your product and know what makes it so great (and where you can improve too). Including them at the heart of what you do is key for growth - whether that be for press activity, featuring them in your ATL, or for getting feedback to improve the product experience.

Brand (which may seem counterintuitive) but if we acknowledge the 95:5 Rule which posits that only 5% of a given segment is currently in market for one’s product or service, then brand should be used to prime the other 95%.

LinkedIn. Specifically activating employees. It’s almost impossible to grow a brand page on LinkedIn without them.

Podcasts. From every angle: creating one, sponsoring one, and appearing on one.

Talking to your customers regularly, understanding how they use your product day-to-day and how they describe it to friends can give you some gems. Also, the product itself. If people genuinely want to talk about it, you’re laughing.

Optimising your product end-to-end for growth opportunities.

Talking to those on the frontline, be it customers or relationship managers – they have helped sharpen our plans and messaging countless times and it’s all too easy in tech to forget about the human at the end of it.

Customer support. Nothing grows retention like solving problems before they tweet.

LinkedIn organic - founders and teams as your loudest brand voices.

Coming from an organic social background there’s only one answer here for me. Organic social is undoubtedly the biggest lever that brands can pull to drive efficiency through the funnel, and it’ll stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Organic social. I think people are quick to jump to paid but we’ve found great success in creating content based on our customers’ struggles and goals.

Exclusivity.

Brand partnerships - when done right - can give you huge visibility and unlock new audiences at scale. The key is finding partners that align with your mission and values.

B2B2C. There are so many interesting fintechs that want to test new product lines, can move quickly, and come with distribution..

Lifecycle comms and customer experience. I live by the rule that you should never pour water into a leaking bucket when increasing ad spend. Strong retention is crucial for scaling effectively.

The product itself. Obsessing over writing, design, and how it works is a growth channel, I think. Make something truly great / novel / delightful so customers talk about it with people they care about.

We’re constantly betting on smaller, quality, community channels. Essentially the anti-Tube campaign: go small, go niche, and go direct (vs big and mainstream).

Referral. Easy to talk about but very hard to get right. If your product is truly good then people will talk about it. So figure out how to incentivise that.

In a category where trust is key, word of mouth is gold dust. All you need is a brilliant proposition built on insight, delivered consistently.

Do NOT underestimate the power of good old linear radio. Traditional radio tends to over-deliver, and is perfect for cheap brand repetition. As part of our overall mix it drives down the CPA on conversion channels.

Word of mouth. It drives trust-based, organic user acquisition, often with higher conversion and retention than paid channels. Satisfied users sharing their experiences will almost certainly lead to exponential growth. At OakNorth, still almost 80% of our new business comes from unpaid referrals through word of mouth.

Organic social! It’s often overlooked because of the problem with attribution, but if you believe - as I do - that brand building is the key to long-term growth, there are few better channels to use.

We are betting hard on direct mail this year.

I think it’s adequately rated but you can’t really build a fintech business without embracing comparison sites. It’s a vital part of almost every user journey in financial services. Invest in it properly.