Twenty years into building The Fletcher Group around fintech and payments, I’ve worked with countless companies that have genuinely impressive technology but struggle to talk about it. There is no shortage of smart people at these companies. But the expertise required to build sophisticated payments infrastructure is fundamentally different from the expertise required to explain why it matters to buyers, press, and partners.
In fintech and payments especially, the most important companies often do their best work invisibly. Transaction processing, fraud decisioning, identity verification, money movement—these are the capabilities that make digital commerce possible, and end users almost never think about them. That invisibility is by design. But when it comes to market positioning, it creates a real problem. If your most differentiated work happens behind the scenes, you need a communications partner who already understands that world well enough to bring it to the surface.
That’s where deep category expertise changes what’s possible.
For technical brands, the communications challenge is finding the right level of explanation. Oversimplify and you sound like everyone else, another company promising to “streamline payments” or “enable seamless transactions.” Go too deep and you’ve written a product brief instead of a narrative. The story that moves buyers sits somewhere in the middle: clear enough to land without context, specific enough to feel credible, and sharp enough to create real separation in a crowded market.
A communications partner who specializes in your category already knows what the market understands and where the gaps are. They know which terms need a sentence of context and which ones you can lead with. They know what journalists covering payments are actually trying to explain to their readers.
This is especially important as the category keeps evolving. Payments have changed dramatically in the past decade. Embedded finance means that the buyer isn’t always a bank or a merchant anymore. It could be a software company that wants to offer financial products to its own customers. The fraud and identity space has its own language and its own buyer, one that responds to trust narratives very differently than infrastructure buyers do. Issuer processing, acquiring, cross-border payments, digital wallets, real-time rails—each segment has a distinct competitive landscape, a distinct regulatory reality, and buyers who care about different things. A generalist PR agency working in this space is effectively learning on the job, one client at a time.
Growth also tends to create new messaging complexity for the companies themselves. A company might launch with a clear, singular product story and then move into adjacent segments, expand internationally, or shift from a B2B2C model to a direct enterprise sale. Each of those moves requires a communications strategy that can hold the original credibility and connect it to where the company is going. That’s very hard to do well without category depth.
Our work with Blackhawk Network is a good example of what this looks like in practice. When we started working together, Blackhawk’s story was largely about physical gift card distribution through retail locations. As digital commerce grew and Blackhawk’s gifting platform expanded to cover digital delivery, incentives and reward solutions delivered by businesses, the story had to evolve without losing the core of what made the company credible. That kind of evolution requires a partner who understands the company’s market position well enough to carry the narrative thread forward, not just reacting to each new product launch. A generalist agency would have been learning about the industry at the same time they were trying to shape how the company was perceived in it.
That’s the advantage of staying deep in a specialized category over a long period of time. Good storytelling never goes out of style, but the stories themselves have to keep up with where the market is going. An expert partner doesn’t have to rebuild their understanding every time the client’s story shifts. The foundation is already there.
Is your company solving a complex problem in the shadows? Reach out today to discuss how we can make your value easier to see.
