Inside the Growth Story of Reaching Profitability as a Fintech (and the Marketing Strategy Behind it) | Gregory Aubert & Edvin Pauza, Yapily

Yapily is a FinTech company that's seen some strong growth in the past few years. In 2024, their live annual recurring revenue increased by 51%, and in Q1 of this year they were profitable and every month since then, they've also just signed a huge enterprise customer, Google. In this podcast I was able to get under the hood of what enabled this growth since 2021. What the team has learned along the way and the role of marketing in enabling that growth.

If you don't know what Yapily does, they are an open banking infrastructure platform that connects their customers to thousands of banks across Europe, allowing them to access financial data and initiate. Payments To date, they've raised $69.4 million in funding and employ over 200 people worldwide. And in this episode, I get to deep dive with two people from their marketing team, Gregory Aubert, their head of marketing, and Edvin Pauza.

Demand generation leader at Yapily Full disclosure, yap is also a client of ours and we've been working together for the past year and a half on their content and it's an absolute pleasure working with the team. So yeah, I'm really excited to go even deeper. In this episode. Specifically, we talk about Yap Lee's marketing journey to date, why they're data-driven and how this impacts their marketing.

How do they get Google ads to work so well for them? Why consistency across channels is what works really well and their future marketing plans. Enjoy this episode. I'm really excited to have both of you here, Greg and Edvin, thanks so much for jumping.

I'm gonna start with, getting straight to it. So, Yapily recently published their financial results of 2024, and they're really positive. So congratulations, and I know it was a really big year for you. So I'm excited to get into it and I know 2025 is a very big year.

But yeah I'd love to get into the marketing behind that. Compare 2024 to 2021. What's changed? I know a lot has.

what do you think was the role of marketing to get Yapily 2021 to YAP. 2024 and 2025. thank you. Thank you for the congratulations.

Yeah, indeed. It's it's been an amazing year as you said. I mean, profitable in 2025. We just signed Google.

So both are like massive milestone for us. I think in terms of marketing you know, I've only been IPD for two years, so I think Edvin will be able to show you more insight for back in the days and so on. But I think for me like one of the observation is like, kind of moving away from kind of growth and all cost, like, not focusing on leads leads, leads, we need to generate leads, but more about how can we. Build like a sustainable but also scalable kind of marketing growth kind of engine.

As a business we are very. Performance led, data driven. And I was like, to be fair when I joined, yeah, very impressed by the quality of the data. But that means that we can be very return on investment focused.

So, we really consider every activity that we do, it's a campaign or even, onboarding a new agency or a new supplier. What's gonna be potentially the return on investment. That we do. So that's one thing.

I think the other thing is and that's as a team we are a fairly lean team. Our marketing team is not very big. So that kind of like push us to be super efficient in everything we do. And I think that's probably the key, right?

by doing that means that the focus as marketer is really about. Straight to the point, like what's the pipeline? What are the opportunity and the deals that we can generate as a marketing team. So it's that very focused mentality on like, marketing is not like, I said, when you say sometimes the painting and drawing department, but like, it's a revenue driver for the business.

think one of the thing that I've observed here, and like, maybe it sounds a bit cliche, but you know, a lot of time you always talk about friction between sense and marketing. And I think one thing that we. At least what I've seen since Sam John we do very well is alignment with the sales team. So, SBR team under the marketing team, we work very closely with the sales team.

I think even more than that, like we build all kind of commercial strategy together. So like, the marketing and sales strategy is actually like one strategy that we build together. Obviously, we then go into more of the specific. But I think that has been essential.

So it's like that, collaboration element moment with the sales team. So we act as a kind of one, almost kind of one revenue engine for the business. Yeah, and I think I agree with you. I think when we first started talking like about a year and a half ago, I was also very impressed with the really comprehensive spreadsheets and lots of numbers in there, which I love because it just, it really helps understand external people also understand a lot better what's working and what isn't.

I'm sure Edvin has a more concrete example that, because he's been here for quite a while now, We're doing differently as well, but. I was actually gonna say just before I go to Edvin, like what's interesting though is that you are very performance driven, but you do appear in a lot of like your PR is very strong still, like very, there's a lot of brand awareness for Yapily as well. I mean, I feel like most people in the FinTech industry do know Yap. And if you look up any list topic, open banking providers, whatever, yap is always on that list.

So that's something I wanna talk about as well later how you've done that balance. But yeah. Edvin, I'd love to hear your perspective. You've been there for over four years now, right?

So. How have you seen the marketing team transition Since 2021, I think what we know the best and what we learned is learn myself and gain much deeper understanding, is our ideal customer profile of who are we actually going after. 'cause if you do reach out to them and get through to them, our message will resonate with them. And, in 2021 it was a lot more vague and generic, let's reach out to every payments company across Europe, but how many companies are there in total being specific and develop that stronger grasp of key markets, helping us to target and be effective.

But really what I think it also comes down to is. We improved and standardized our internal process. So, it might be great. Okay, let's reach out to every, let's just say payments company across Europe, even if you have a list.

'cause it's not that difficult to get a list of every FinTech company. Across Europe, across the globe. But how do you reach in an efficient, quick manner? And look at the ROI it, required internal processes, ensuring everyone understands what they're doing, and, establishing those processes and training or staff from sales development, senior sales across commercial.

We had to customize our CRM using Salesforce and, and through trial and error and there are many things we implemented and maybe six months down the line I'll speak with our Salesforce admin and he's getting frustrated 'cause he is now has to remove it and change it. But there was constant trial and error. So that it does not introduce friction of how our sales development and our senior sales work, and to make that as efficient as possible. So we once get the target, we tee it up and we go directly to them and get that quick ROI, and I think this, this has been.

it's that internal process integration, trialing what works, what doesn't and nailing it. And now we have in our go to market strategy, we can do that efficiently. Yeah, so getting really good at Salesforce. And how do you under understanding the ICP better, how do you think that's improved the marketing?

Like how do you think that's translated into better marketing? from our message to who we choose to target, how we do the outreach, and how well it resonates. Maybe back then, we might have to target 250 prospects let's say from 50, 60 companies. and and now we might actually have to select a list of 20 companies.

40, 50, 60 Prospect has become a lot more efficient in that process. So our kind of ROI what, what resonates with the wider market? 'cause we know. What works and what has become a lot more efficient.

And since then, 21 'cause key staff have stayed with the company. We learned that we have that knowledge knowhow and it was not lost, Along the way. Yeah. No.

Amazing. And so Apart from, understanding your ICPA lot better. I mean, I think it, it sounds like also iterating and testing, as you said, that was a big part of it. Do you feel that often at other companies, maybe people aren't willing to like, test and experiment so much?

Like, why do you think often that doesn't work out so well for certain companies? Like what you think is necessary to really understand, basically your SP better? I think staff have to be comfortable at failing. And the senior leadership have to provide room and provide space to fail and not to feel bad about failing.

Failure is, should be seen as good 'cause you're trying right? But you just fail a little things and your leadership is telling you off and, and you don't have. Their trust. You're afraid to test, but it's constant trial and error that you eventually succeed.

And then once you succeed, it's something you can kind of optimize what works and leave out what doesn't. And just me being for four and a half years, it allowed us to constantly do the trial and error from messaging, from channels, from paid advertising to organic, to different markets, different personas testing. And we are still continuously learning Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Are there any experiments that didn't work out, maybe or failures that you can share? Anything that you're like, oh man, this just did not work at all. So there have been many experiments that do not work out too many to list individually.

And I was kind of thinking that, I think the main theme that comes out is not following through to the end and given up to you early. Often everybody comes out with great, fantastic ideas, as they say. In the startup industry ideas are kind of cheap. People get excited, 5, 4, 8 people get together and everybody gets really excited.

And then, Friday, Monday comes and then different priorities come up and they just give up easily. So a key learning is kind of, and a key account. So if you know your ICP, and those big accounts, you never give up. 'cause one campaign fails, one message doesn't resonate.

You don't give up on a large company, right? There's only so few of these Decacorns enterprises. You say, oh, I reached out to five people in a corporation of 10,000. It doesn't work.

So if one message or one campaign did not work, it was just a touch point. Then we are gonna re try out with our ICP again to till it works so that we get through to the right person. And I think just, we have yet made failed many times. But one thing that we have not given up is the accounts.

'cause we know our ICP, the company is right, but the message might not be, or the individual at the company not, not right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And in terms of like, are there any specific campaigns or specific efforts that you have seen maybe made like a strong impact over the past few years? Like anything specific or maybe a pr, like a specific press release announcement that made a difference. yeah, it's an interesting question. I think first, what I've made a massive difference, I think the last two years.

I think it's more about the consistency across all the Chanel that we've made and trying to achieve for instance, like, Adrian is doing an amazing job with everything. Paid search. We've got a very, robust engine on that perspective. We started to work with you guys from an SEO perspective where, we had, like a lot of gap, which now is kind of turning into kind of, Chat GPT optimization and so on.

And I think the fact that we've got that kind of consistent approach across multi-channel. And then on the top of that, We are scaled up. We don't have like huge marketing budget, right? So we can't really afford kind of brand campaigns.

So, so literally all brand campaign is those kind of enhancement and so on. And if you put that over the top, on the top of this, then that means we've got like a very, kind of refine engine. And we are seeing it a lot, even more and more recently where, we can see a deal that we closed, like, started from an impression on clicking on one of our ads on LinkedIn and then kind of. Came back to a website, then came back again on search, clicked on an ad, converted, or did a research on chat.

GPT then got captured by a Google Ads. So I think it's the fact that we've been very consistent across all channel and we not like, put all the eggs into one. Like let's say, oh, we just gonna do PR or we just gonna do paid search has really helped us to build a very kind of sustainable kind of inbound channel. So I think it's not about like, just like one magical marketing campaign.

I think it's a consistency that actually compound or results. And I think, yeah, as I said, like, we see that more and more. In terms of attribution and where all kind of deals close come from and it's very multitouch. That's really interesting.

Yeah, because I was gonna ask, as I mentioned earlier, like you in terms of. You're maybe more performance driven and all that and have a lean marketing team and budget, but you still, Yapily seems to be everywhere. Whenever open banking is mentioned in the uk, Yapily always turns up. How do you think that happened?

Is that just from being kind of early to the market or that consistency, what do think contributed to that? there's a few thing. I think like a few years ago, I think we used to spend a lot of money into pr that time I think it really helped to build a brand. Then also, from open banking perspective, like, we've been.

In open banking, since the start, right? So we are one of the first company. So there is that that consistency. I think we have also like a very clear positioning in the space.

Like, at the end of the day there's not that many players, like, we position ourself as, infrastructure first platform. we are like, the backbone of it and basically other business build open banking application on the top of us, right? So, so I think we have a very clear positioning that kind of set us apart a little bit as well. Yeah.

And I think what's interesting is this has also translated into in terms of the work that we're doing, what we're seeing in LLMs, you have, yap has really good visibility in LLMs and we're publishing an article on this, so it's public knowledge, but, you have good visibility and we think this is partially due to that. Basically that you're the strong PR that you did a few years ago. Because basically as I said, like on every top X list that's written by someone else for the uk Yeah, please always mention.

And I think that's benefited in UMS as well. So it's quite an interesting, like later impact of doing something many years ago, attribution and hard to measure, but it's an interesting connection It's, again, it's consistency. A lot of those leases as well they can be based on, your revenue and so on and, and how you grow. And we've been growing stead, like, like doing environment for the last few years.

So, as open making, grow as an industry as well, like, we naturally grow and so on. So, Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

I wanna talk about paid ads as well, because in my experience when we start working with FinTech companies, I always find it's hard to get it to work, basically. It's tough because FinTech financial services is an expensive industry. CPCs are high. It's like multi-month sales cycle.

So attribution is difficult. And when we started working with the app athlete, like your paid ads was really like advanced. And Edvin you've written a LinkedIn post that said that your responsibilities were once described as running a world class performance marketing program. So I wanna ask you like,, what would you say is key to running.

Like a world class performance marketing program in FinTech. so it was kind of, I was tasked with that. I did not come up with a world class performance marketing program. So I think it really, world class depends how you define it.

For me, I have spent probably last few years, sometimes I just think about like, what did I truly mean? Like it could be seen as almost, arrogant, especially if I would call it myself. But for me it's about, building from zero, setting up right. Processes, systems and ad structure to drive measurable impact.

Or focus is UK European markets. So some say it's regional, it's not world class global. But we also work at global companies entering especially or kind of market payments are international by nature. So we have to think beyond borders of global companies that would want to work with us with what we offer.

And it's also about creating demand, not just capturing it, understanding how our audience thinks, searches real performance is not just about clicks or impressions. It's actual revenue. Because you mentioned, performance marketing. So it's actual revenue and money in a bank.

Being really brutally honest with yourself and holding yourself accountable, always challenging yourself with deeper KPI, so it's so easy to say. Okay. I generated a hundred thousand impressions and a thousand clicks or so. That would be a 1% clickthrough rate, but probably wouldn't be world class.

How many leads stand into meetings? So, just not clicks, but Okay. Say leads, well, I bought you so many leads, but it would. Commercial team would say, okay, but we didn't have meetings.

None of them just booked. It could be bots, right? But then it say, okay, you generated meetings. But you could say, well, these meetings were not good quality, so how many of them had real prospects that he can sell to companies that have money?

Just yesterday during meeting I end up challenging one of the sdr r saying, do they actually have money? Why did we put 'em as a, as an SQL, but we can't afford this. How can we sell to them? And how many opportunities are most importantly, deals?

One, because, the company has raised the money from investors and we decide to deploy that on. One of the channels performance marketing. If we spend that money on a channel, we want to bring show return on investment. 'cause otherwise, you know what's just the goodwill and brand marketing will not keep the lights on.

Some previous marketing managers that I work would use. You need to keep the lights on in a building to keep going. So it's about measuring, I think, to be, well, class performance marketing is holding yourself accountable, being brutally honest with yourself and to what am I doing in this company? Is it.

Does it bring in positive ROI and looking at as well, commercial team impact is marketing, keeping, the sales development, the senior sales, busy with quality opportunities. what's my role is to support 'em and to provide with opportunities and I think. world-class marketing is not about awards, it's about efficiency and outcomes. And I have seen, before the 2022, then money was not an object.

Especially in kind of FinTech space, okay? Growing free XA company. But if your resources, if your investors gave you huge amounts of money, so you spend 20 x resources, but you grew by three x. Now by outsider you could say you're doing fantastic 'cause you grew a company by 300%.

But what if you've spent millions on it? But, and I think it's about true marketers, good quality work, class marketeers are the ones that grow. The company, but with fewer resources. So the growth might not be as phenomenal.

You won't be as everywhere, but if you manage to do the tiny resources, you're doing fantastic job. 'cause if somebody just kind of chucks money at the wall and it grows and it's like, oh look, we're doing phenomenal. There's a huge loss, right? So Yap is a profit making company as of this year.

So I think it's ultimately about achieving greater growth multiples when resources available, and that's what performance marketing becomes world class. I think it does have to be that kind of angle that you're dealing globally with global companies and being able to attract them. But assuming that ROI and being ability to set up from ground zero, fully implementing. And it's not just one channel, it's how it feeds a wider team.

That's how we define it. yeah, it's about being resourceful. Ultimately it's about knowing what you're, understanding what you've been given, and knowing how to use, what you have. Would you add anything to that, Greg?

yeah, is spot on. I mean, I have to say like what is put together in the last four years? Super impressive on how efficient it is and how it's performing. We had month where like, oh, we are not sure it's performing that well and being persistent and optimizing it.

it's still like one of the key channel, like we constantly see deal coming through and they're not necessarily small, right? Some of them. Very meaningful as well. So the return on investment in pay, that is very good.

I think for like, on your, one of your points around why sometimes does it fail? Like from my own experience, a lot of time in FinTech, people use it as as a way to fix pipeline. Like, we don't have any pipeline. What can we do?

What's the quick answer to that? Or let's just spend more money into ads. And as an issue, you probably start to spend too much too quickly. You don't give yourself the time.

And I think Adrian mentioned it like he started that program four years ago. So, Imagine the level of optimization that has gone through this. I think it's about, you need to have the time and focusing on the quality. And I think, I don't know if I can remember if you mentioned it and so on, but I think like, we fully integrated or with Salesforce.

To optimize your ads and so on. And that's, some of the stuff like that are super essential and help you to, performing. But it does take times you need to be patient. Yeah.

And if another FinTech is listening to this and they're trying to figure out paid ads. 'cause as I said earlier, like I feel like it's tough in FinTech it and it sounds like it takes maybe years to really get it to, to work well. What do you think maybe other FinTech companies are not doing right or what do they need to be doing to really make the most of paid ads? Or it could be what they shouldn't be doing.

you don't need to start running paid advertising. If you don't have product market fit 'cause so many early startups have kind of targets to hit, but if they, there is no product market fit and they. Check everything, trying to hit those targets. But you've really like going back to the start of this conversation when we start discussing the ICP and the pain points, the use cases, like really defining and that's when you can start scaling.

'cause otherwise, you need to start experimenting. But I think paid advertising as to, come in when you, we hit that, what works with pain point use case and start scaling. if they're not focused on their core markets, ICPs and it's not established, it becomes. Too broad un unfocused targeting and then they, end up blaming the markets.

Here we end up blaming the paybacks. But it comes down to, you know, sometimes a company is struggling, sometimes a product is not working. Sometimes, the product was designed with like a theory, but actually if you look at the kind of statistics once a paid ads running, it just doesn't resonate with your audience. 'cause maybe our audience.

Or the product service as creative is not, it looks amazing on, on, theory, but is there a demand for it? So I, I think, yeah it has to be grounded in data ICP and lack of internal understanding of pressure from leadership kind of forces as kind of grasping onto anything that's out there. Yes. So did you start doing paid ads at yap?

Like 2022? You didn't do it right when Yapily started as that also what you did at Yap, 2021. I started the early ads, and it was pretty much a blank slate of setting everything up. Somebody there, there was some in initial tests, but then they, I think that's where they got me and start setting up, from, actually I really enjoy setting up first, Google tag manager of a first account connecting to Google Analytics.

It's actually, it's. It's a kind of a plain sailing, but once it comes down to, you set up and you start going and receiving early results, that's when you kind of start understanding what is working and what is not working. and 'cause we measure all the way to the end, we can even find out later on in the stages, which industries work well. Maybe it comes down once a lead MQL, once it becomes an opportunity, which is all fine, maybe.

Down, later down the funnel. There are differences in terms of ICP and what doesn't. Yeah. And what year would you say Peans really started to work well?

Was it like, 'cause I imagine as you say, like maybe the first year you're still figuring it out. At what point do you think it really took off? think from a get go there was an impact. So, was made.

'cause I mean, it's easy to make an impact and you start from ground zero, right? Then proving positive ROI, it's again, going back to Yapily, the product. The solution. Open banking, there is a demand.

So, we are winning the deals that opportunities that they're creating. We are winning deals and money was in a bank, so I was able to measure that and, and the leadership were trusting performance marketing. It was proving the ROI. So sometimes it comes down not to like the marketing, but it comes down to the actual product and the technology, the company behind it.

I could have been running exactly the same, program performance ads. But if a different product, different ROI you could be winning. But if the deals are smaller, you suddenly it's too expensive. And especially if you have higher total contract value, you might only win fewer, but the fewer that you win really make up for the spend that you put in for the last six months.

And I think. Because it's also B two, B2B three Bs, I think make a big difference. And if you're selling like smaller deals, it might not prove the ROI but it is yeah. I think this is why some, something that annoys me a little bit in content marketing is a lot of advice out there for SaaS companies where you kind of.

The, The sales cycles are a lot shorter. I mean, not always. Obviously there's enterprise SaaS, but it's often a lot faster. You pay just quickly and it's like a OV of, I mean, I don't know, 50 pounds a month or something.

And it's just those tactics and advice just does not apply to FinTech often. I mean, sometimes it does, but often it doesn't apply because we're talking about 50 KA hundred k. A million plus often value of customers and it's just a different ball game. And in that world, it's not number of leads.

It's a quality that matters so much. And this is why we're always like chasing our clients. Like we wanna see the sales force, we wanna see the spreadsheet because we wanna make sure there's actual deals coming in and that proper value. And it's the same, it applies The same applies in paid ads as well, I remember thinking about payments industries and I used to think it's so tough because if you do any kind of advertising, you can pay cost per click five, 10, whichever amount, but especially with kind of transactional if you work, dollars to euros, pounds to euros, the margin is so tiny.

I used to think how do they make a profit? But being at Yapily where we go to kind of. The B2B the payment service providers. It does make sense 'cause it's not kind of a, based on a single transaction, like in B2C and then it's okay.

I can't spend that time researching, targeting, think planning it out. 'cause the ROI is big enough. Yeah, exactly. Another thing I wanted just to ask about is also like understanding FinTech.

I know you're both quite deep in FinTech. I know Edvin, you're you've done a few posts about your thoughts on FinTech. I think you've also in invested in some fintechs. I dunno if that's correct.

But do you feel that it's necessary in FinTech marketing to be a bit of a, like FinTech nerd and to really. To also just to enjoy it, to like it, to wanna learn more about it and be a bit of a nerd about all these payment things and all of that. I mean, maybe I can start. Yeah, it's a good question.

I think it's not essential to come from FinTech to be successful in FinTech. I think we've got like many people in our team that used to work in different industry and they're doing very well. the reality is like, it's more about your personality, right? Like, you need to be curious.

I have a genuine interest in terms of what we do. And I think for me, like, so I've worked in FinTech and B2C and B2B, B2C is probably less important in a sense because. it's much more straight to the point. You're just sending the product.

So you might have to understand maybe the benefit of the product and so on. Whereas in B2B, you need to understand the ecosystem. like the reality is for us, like, YCP on many financial services business, right? you need to understand the ecosystem.

On the top of that, like as an open banking provider, we do payment and data. The payment ecosystem is super, super complex. I've been in the space for like almost 10, 10 years. I wouldn't be able to say I understand everything.

It's still very complex. But this is so important from a marketing perspective, right? Because if you think about. As I said, like OICP and then the persona within the ICP, like, they are experts into their domain with which are financial services could be payment as well.

So for us as marketer we need to understand the detail, we need to understand the trend and what's going on in industry. I can give you an example, like, if, let's say we want to do a campaign and targeting kind of lenders, right? we're gonna target product manager and so on. We can't just be like, use open banking for X, Y, Z reason, because it's gonna help you to get better view of your potential customer better, KYC and so on.

Like, we need to get a bit more deeper and really understand what's the benefit and the value almost from a technical perspective. But I think yes you're gonna have to naturally. You don't have to come from that. As long as you're curious and interested into it, that's fine.

But I think for me is, yeah, it's one of the key success and good marketing that we are doing is the expertise that translate from the content that you put together. Right? Yeah, you have to be like, just interested in it at least a bit of a nerd, of a, like, I like learning, and I think these people succeed in industries like FinTech, which are a little bit more complex and more technical and Yeah and I think you need to appreciate that, that it is complex. Like you're not gonna come in and after a month understand everything and like I know exactly how payment flows are working and so on.

It's gonna take time. Yeah, agree. Edvin, would you call yourself a FinTech nerd? gosh, Greg.

Yeah, Definitely. I think you previously mentioned and I probably made the post about investing in startups and fintechs. And that again came out of my curiosity to better understand, but also frustration when I was. Working partially as a freelancer and choosing which companies to work for and choosing the right ones, right?

'cause part of your success if work in a right company career can really take off and have massive success. So I thought I wanted to learn what. What makes a good company from bad and again, from my freelance days, I had bit of money that I invested through Cedars in EIS Enterprise Investment Scheme. Just that I learned about that and how to submit my taxes and claim from that.

That gave me an exposure eventually, I think now a hundred over 140. I mean, these are tiny sums, but that's the beauty of FinTech. It allows you to miss from 10 pounds into a FinTech, and then it gives you exposure to company reports and access to, c-suite of the companies that you invested. So that helped me to learn and see what kind of companies fail, what kind of companies succeed.

The only thing I learned is almost still to me seems like by chance, but I've been fascinated by finance and banking from a young age. My first work experience at age of 14 was a large northwest branch. But I didn't go straight into finance for many reasons. And actually marketing came naturally to me.

I was. Almost not. I did study marketing at uni, but I also studied other dual degree. And actually then I.

I. used to come back from summer holidays and wanted to make a bit of money or engage in some kind of venture. I was building my own websites. I was writing my own Google.

I just, yesterday I made LinkedIn post, it was in 2008 summer holiday. I posted my first Google AdSense advert, and that's when I used to get paid myself from other people clicking on the advert. So I don't think fin technology is crucial to succeed. Sometimes it actually can be an advantage.

Gives you a fresh perspective and clouded by industry assumptions. 'cause you can come like, you might actually have a really good strong back design or an approach. This industry, which financial services is a stuffy old fashioned industry. FinTech has a bit of a tech edge.

But if you come, like worked or. TikTok or somewhere and now you joined a FinTech company, you can market that FinTech completely different way than somebody who's been in financial services. And actually I was kind of part of that example 'cause I brought into this. Google search, paid search, different way of thinking.

And then I was initially sharing my findings on Slack where the senior leadership could see, they probably just opened their eyes to new, different knowledge of how people search for a company. But once foundations are built and running smoothly, the foundations that you discussed, setting everything up, that deep industry understanding it, really starts to matter. Especially, the pain points, use cases and the ecosystem. And if you want to go up the gear, so you might, start new, set everything up.

You don't need any knowledge. But once suddenly you will. That kind of, it'll saturate the space where you can kind of build upon. And that's when you want to go into higher gear.

Then suddenly you need to start thinking, okay, what's a use case? What's the pain point? What's the ICP? What use case pain point will resonate with these audience?

Now that starts to matter, once you need that extra boost. but hopefully, if you just join from. And like TikTok is pretty much a FinTech anyways. But if you joined from completely different industry and now you work in FinTech, by the time saturate it you should learn, you should have that knowledge within a year, two years.

And that's when you can put together the knowledge where you came with the new knowledge where you learn. it's your Nitro boost to, 10 x results even further. Okay. And I think being really in touch with experts on the team, like just interviewing you, you get so much knowledge just from interviewing people and this is why it's part of our process.

Like just constantly talking and speaking to the experts. You learn so much as well. And that's like a big part of it as well. Cool.

So I just wanna end on Yeah. Yapily in the next few years. You know, 21 to 2024, there was a big change. A big jump.

What is the focus for the next, I don't know, three, three or four years? how do you see maybe your marketing changing, but also, also for Yapily? Like, are you going global? what are the next kind of ideas?

It's a good question. So I think for us, the fact that we kind of have control over the future being profitable is ascension, right? So how do we build on that? How do we kind of continue to grow?

Like, we've, like you had a good growth trajectory that has been accelerated in 2025, and the challenge is how do you maintain that in 2026, right? I think given where we are, where like, capabilities and so on I think it's being even more focused. like Edvin talked a lot about ICP, but this is gonna be like, even more and more important for us, really being hyperfocused on those. How can we win more, understanding the pain points.

And so on. Like, I think as we said, like, we have a very strong kind of inbound engine, right? But like, now how do we supplement that? And the fact that we have that allow us to be even more focused.

So I think, in the next few months that's gonna be what we're gonna try to do. 'cause I think in a scale up, like, we kind of always want to be focused and I think we try to be focused throughout the year. But you know, there's always so many distraction priorities, shifts and you have project that you didn't plan that you need to do and take some priority, right? So I think for us it's kind of how can we kind of reduce the noise around the team and be hyper focus because, it's one thing to, to have amazing grow, but like it's even more challenging to maintain that, maintain that grow.

Uh, there. Yeah. Get 'em. Used to very strong growth, but then it's you have Yeah.

Yeah. You have to another story. Exactly. Yeah.

Amazing. Would you add anything, Edvin? Well, we're focusing personally a lot on scaling efficiently, and, pretty much con the whole podcast without saying the word ai, know, you, I just ruined it. you know, Seeing how we can use these AI agents, let's call 'em agents, these robots, you know, instead of having to, you know, it's easier to build out processes and automating the manual work.

To be done by an AI agent rather than hi hiring, a hundred employees creating a hundred AI agents. And also wanted to mention that and marketing that creates intellectual property that adds value to the company. And we have worked at a creative design agency and that would help to visualize better what. Yapily open banking infrastructure platform is, that is unique to Yapily only and not just a bunch of stock images.

cause in FinTech and open banking space, these, some of these companies are like cookie cutters, stock images and apart from a funny name, there's little difference. 'cause the connections are very similar. But really creating unique IP visualization, the brand that will really help to push these deals over line In competition to other companies out there. So, watch the Space.

There will be as soon as a update on a art that's unique to Yapily, basically, that will help people to visualize and understand just by looking, because it's open banking. What does open banking infrastructure platform? tough to kind of, to say and understand, but if you can visualize that easily. I think that will be really built on Yap Lee's intellectual property and uniqueness of the brand.

That will really help us to kind of, as we scale, help us the brand to stand out. yeah. No, I love that. I think that makes sense.

Just to add on that, I think Edvin, you mentioned AI and this true, we haven't mentioned it throughout the podcast. I think and it's also a lot of work that we do with your, I mean, I think it's one of the key thing is how we gonna adapt on, like basically what's the bio journey and how AI as a play with this and the different touch points we kind of feel like that we. People are gonna do more and more research without looking at your website, right? So your website is gonna, at least for us, website, that's where people.

Like, fill in a form and contact us form and book a meeting. That's the ultimate goal. You like a lot of, more and more people are gonna come to the website and they always, I mean, it's always the case, but like, they're always gonna have made the decision, but it's always almost gonna be a conversion point and that's it. Right?

So I think kind of really understand that kind of shift of behavior and whether people are gonna get the information and make the decision. I think we are gonna have to adapt quite a lot And I mean we just got relaunching new website, which is great, but I think we're gonna have to optimize a lot of it to really maximize performance around. That think gonna be super interesting because I mean, if you look at, GBT is trying to be more an operating system than anything else now.

So how are we gonna definitely. That's a big question. No, it's a really interesting topic. It could be in a whole other episode.

people are predicting, maybe websites just no longer exist really, and through an LLMI think it'll be quite a few years before that happens. But it does, as a marketer, it, you start to ask interesting questions where maybe we only ever market to an LLM. And we'll never be able to reach the end customer. 'cause like it's the first time where when you create an article, you know the reader is gonna read what you produced.

Exactly the same thing. But with an LLM, you don't know how the end customer is gonna read that. So it's like for the first time as a marketer, you're actually marketing to the LLM in a way. And it's kind of this weird situation where you don't know how the end reader's gonna interpret or how the LL m's gonna interpret your content.

So I think there is a world where marketers. Maybe half of your work is influencing an LLM and half of it is influencing the customer. And that's just a very interesting concept to me. I don't know what, how it's gonna look like but definitely one, one be interesting.

But yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really fantastic to deep dive into yeah, please.

Marketing. Congratulations again on the incredible growth and on your world class performance marketing program, and I think it's helpful. To other fintechs, to see a little bit like what is possible and especially, and paid ads that often it takes time and you have to just optimize a lot. But yeah, so thanks so much for coming on.

It's been fantastic. Thank you for having us. Thank you. I.

Thank you for listening. You can find show notes and information about guests at fintechmarketinghub. com forward slash podcast. And finally, huge thanks to Orama.

tv for producing this podcast. We look forward to having you on our next episode.