Fintech has lived through a range of iterations: finding its genesis in consumer-focused solutions, and diversifying over time—in the face of market pressures—to also address B2B and corporate needs. An even newer wave of fintech solves explicitly for subsectors, verticals, and roles, finding stickiness in niche industries and corner offices.

The Chief Marketing Officer is among that latter target demographic. Through CMOs, fintechs have found a savvy and enthusiastic user base prone to evangelize the products it loves. With their unique pain points addressed by innovative fintechs, CMOs have been especially prone to seek out, adopt, and indirectly market the following products:

Prepaid cards

Though at this point a fairly established product, prepaid cards—both physical and virtual—have been a boon to marketing teams and CMOs. Distributed marketing workforces can use prepaid cards for a range of key tasks, including to: distribute and analyze ad spend; purchase relevant physical and digital assets for marketing purposes; and travel to relevant industry and sales venues.

Crucially, prepaid cards offer a centralized way for CMOs to control spend, and determine whether their strategies actually work. The most successful prepaid-card solutions offer centralized and intuitive analytics features, which let CMOs understand year-over-year trends, and respond to market realities and shifts in real time.

Revenue analysis and projection

CMOs don’t work in a silo, and are accountable to other executives as well as shareholders to ensure that funds allocated to marketing budgets are successful and effectively used. As a result, successful and holistically oriented CMOs tend to work in conjunction with CROs and CFOs to determine optimal strategies and practices.

A relatively clear metric with which these internal stakeholders can measure their success is revenue. Fintech analytics platforms that offer macroeconomic insights as well as sector- and strategy-specific data are especially useful, letting leaders understand which strategies have provided the greatest return on investment, and improve, pivot, or discontinue those that are underperforming.

BNPL

Though it may not seem like a product falling under a CMO’s direct purview, buy now, pay later (BNPL) solutions have—at least in waves—been a growth opportunity for CMOs.

By lowering the barrier to access capital for consumers, BNPL has enabled consumer-focused CMOs to expand their target audiences and deploy a wider range of channels to grow brand awareness and improve conversion.