Key Takeaways
- Lead with outcomes, not features. Shift your B2B payments marketing strategy from product facts to CFO-level outcomes like growth, risk reduction, and P&L impact.
- Match the story to the buyer. Tailor marketing narratives to buyer segments and verticals for cards, embedded payments, and lending so prospects see their own challenges and wins.
- Make proof the hero. Highlight client success stories about solving critical problems like loan delinquency and costly manual workflows, to turn your bank or fintech solutions into business value that buyers need.
What’s one of the toughest problems in payments innovation? OK, aside from regulatory scrutiny. B2B payments marketing for banks and fintechs is the slippery slope. Despite doing all the hard product work, organizations often lose ground against competitors because their marketing sounds more like a feature grid than must-have business value.
For CMOs and VPs of marketing, that’s a real risk. You may be touting best-in-class payments and lending innovation, embedded solutions, or next-gen commercial card programs. But if your go-to-market strategy doesn’t speak to helping buyers better manage risk, costs and growth, your efforts may stall out.
This year, we helped our bank and fintech clients close that gap. Together, we shifted the conversation from “what it does” to “what it changes”, creating outcome-focused, segment-specific GTM content that built trust with buyers to drive sales.
Here are some snapshots of how that played out, and what it could mean for your own GTM strategies in the year ahead.
Commercial card marketing strategy: Winning the narrative back from fintechs
The bank’s commercial card program could beat fintechs. So why were competitors winning away business?
Our national bank client had a strong card and spend management offering for startups and venture-backed growth companies. But in the past, they marketed the product, not the value. So prospects viewed it as a commodity to compare, not a lever for growth.
Why this matters for B2B payments marketing
Selling rewards and card features doesn’t speak to the realities of fast-moving companies. When you sell them opportunities to better manage cash flow and burn rate, you earn a strategic role in their journey.
Leaning into our team’s past experience in leading marketing for early-stage startups, we created a segment-specific GTM playbook for commercial card marketing. It focused on how the card program supports runway and cost-efficient operations at different stages of growth, and for different verticals. And we echoed that value across new web pages, sales tools, email campaigns and thought leadership. We even integrated client testimonials as social proof.
Can your Relationship Managers tell a different story based on a prospect’s stage of growth or vertical?
The payoff? A 20% lift in traffic and clicks on new product pages. It gave Sales a stronger pipeline of qualified leads, and compelling, relevant stories to close deals and deepen treasury relationships.
Embedded payments marketing: Different buyers, different conversations
Embedded payments isn’t one product. It’s a broader set of payment capabilities with many different stakeholders, which means many different conversations.
A Top 5 bank made embedded payments a strategic priority. They had a roadmap, executive sponsors, and partnerships lined up. What they didn’t have was an embedded payments marketing strategy that matched the complexity of the buyers.
Why this matters for building engagement
Embedded payments intersects banking, software, and platform business models, so a one-size-fits-all story won’t work. You have to engage a diverse range of buyers (think fintech product managers, healthcare CFOs, and hospitality COOs), who each define value and risk differently.
Our bank client started moving deals once we helped them pivot marketing strategies with industry-specific, use case driven content. We tailored multi-channel engagement to make embedded payments concrete, doable, and necessary for each audience. For example, fintech platforms could learn about growing revenue with new SaaS models. Healthcare leaders could reduce costs and manual work with a compliance-ready payments infrastructure. And hospitality brands could deliver a loyalty-winning guest experience and simplify payments for franchisees.
Does your embedded payments story reflect the risks, rewards and use cases your buyers care about?
Once the embedded finance narratives spoke to the priorities and challenges of different stakeholders, doors opened and the pipeline heated up.
“One thing we see over and over again with banks and fintechs is this: the teams that win are those that sound like someone who has sat in the customer’s chair. Once you translate finance features into solving operational pain, the deal cycle changes. That’s where the real fun starts.“
— Steven Ramirez, CEO, Beyond the Arc
Fintech payments platform marketing: Turning delinquency pain into 50+ new clients
Lenders don’t buy modern payments. They buy getting paid on-time, every time.
Our fintech client has a powerful platform enabling faster payments with flexible options and seamless self-service. But hearing about the bells and whistles of ‘modernizing’ payments didn’t resonate with buyers. Lenders entrenched in legacy systems and processes thought that “good enough” seemed less risky than change.
How could the fintech increase sales momentum? It was crucial to create urgency with buyers by re-framing a modern solution into business-critical value.
Why this matters for fintech success
It’s the old adage, ‘features tell, benefits sell’. Focusing on helping lenders reduce delinquency, call volume, and exception costs was a game-changer.
To help drive our client’s new insights-driven marketing strategy, Beyond the Arc didn’t need weeks of ramp-up. We live in payments and B2B financial services every day, and could immediately start creating impact. Our thought leadership strategy and content (blogs, whitepapers, social) inspired urgency by connecting consumer pain points and changing payment behaviors to the declining profitability and competitive pressures facing many lenders.
For instance, we mapped how the lack of mobile-friendly options leads to more late payments, more costly calls to pay-by-phone, more exceptions and manual work for office staff. Then we added in a bright side, explaining how modern capabilities keep pace with changing consumer behaviors to drive better bottom-line outcomes.
With that story at the center, the fintech was speaking the language of lenders. And it worked.
How well does your marketing link user friction to P&L impacts that platform buyers worry about?
The company won a 20% lift in web traffic and 50+ new clients in a highly competitive market. New insights content did the heavy lifting early in the sales funnel, helping to recast their payments platform into a must-have driver of lending portfolio performance.
Commercial lending platform marketing: Proof beats product sheets
Even if your B2B marketing is aligned with buyer needs, there’s nothing like value you can prove.
A commercial lending platform provider came to us with amazing technology that checks all the boxes for configurability, automation, and integrations. But they knew Chief Lending Officers would not embrace innovation until they see proof of how their peers and competitors are getting ahead.
Why this matters for lending innovators
For loan origination, platform features don’t get budget approved. Lending teams need proven outcomes they can defend to their C-suite and board. So we went to where the credible stories live: our client’s customers.
Through interviews, we learned how banking lenders had struggled under legacy manual processes, and how the new automated workflows empowered their teams to close deals faster with significantly fewer errors and lower costs. Then we crafted testimonial case studies that showcased the wins for lenders and their borrowers.
How much of your marketing is real-world stories that build trust with buyers?
With customer success stories that demonstrate the business value, we helped our client frame the technology conversation around the ‘why to care’ that buyers look for, giving a powerful jumpstart to their sales cycle.
Payments marketing for banks and fintechs – 2026 is the time to rethink engagement
B2B financial services marketing leaders are feeling the squeeze. More competitors are snapping at your heels and B2B buyer expectations keep evolving. Budgets are getting tighter and there’s increasing pressure to “use AI” without introducing risk.
That’s where we come in.
An experienced, agile extension of your marketing team
For 20 years, we’ve been immersed in banking, payments, fintech and AI, backed by CX strategy and compliance know-how. Together, it helps banks and fintechs turn complex payments innovation into clear, outcome-focused GTM playbooks for B2B payments marketing that resonate with your buyers to close deals faster.
Let’s help you rethink B2B engagement and win more in 2026.
Image source: iStock