The Power of Partner Marketing in the Financial Industry with Nicky Senyard of Fintel Connect

Our Guest: Nicky Senyard, the CEO and Founder of Fintel Connect

With a career spanning two decades in the affiliate marketing space, Nicky Senyard, the CEO and Founder of Fintel Connect, has established herself as a respected influencer and leader. Nicky’s journey in the world of marketing began in PR and marketing, where she honed her skills and developed a deep understanding of the industry’s dynamics. Her passion for marketing innovation led her to become an entrepreneur, and she achieved remarkable success by building and exiting her first SaaS marketing technology company in 2016.

As the visionary behind Fintel Connect, Nicky has set her sights on transforming the financial services industry. Her mission is clear: to create contribution and growth for Fintel Connect’s clients and partners. Under her guidance, Fintel Connect has risen to prominence as the preeminent affiliate network dedicated to serving the financial services sector.

Nicky’s commitment to innovation is exemplified by her dedication to a multi-channel marketing approach, encompassing the full spectrum of digital marketing strategies. In particular, she has a keen interest in harnessing the power of social media and influencer marketing to drive results for her clients.

Episode Transcript

Nicky Senyard: I see Fintel playing a very specific role because they’re such cool products with really targeted audiences. Fintel are created, in my opinion, because they solve a specific problem. Banks are generalists. Fintel are specialists.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Welcome to PayPod, the Payments Industry podcast. Each week, we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Hello, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh. And today on the show, we’re going to be talking a lot about a word that is used often on this show. Nearly every episode, I would guess. But we’re going to look at it in a little bit of a new light. And that word is partnerships. Companies partnering to build out tech stack solve problems for each other. That’s typically where we go with this term on this show. But today we’re using the lens of marketing to talk about partnerships and how they can be leveraged to grow your customer base and bring the products you offer to more and more people. Joining me to discuss this in more from the world of how to market Fintel Solutions is Nicky Senyard, founder and CEO of Fintel Connect, the leading partner marketing solution for the financial industry. Nicky, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Nicky Senyard: It’s exciting to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. I’d love to start with just a brief bit of background on you, yourself, and your career. What originally attracted you to the world of marketing and what about this world of marketing keeps you wanting to work in it and build more companies in this space?

Nicky Senyard: My background is actually in land-based marketing. I was a PR consultant, so I was a PR strategist and consultant and I actually ran a PR company of about 15 to 20 people, a CEO before I was 30.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Wow.

Nicky Senyard: And so I was very much into the idea of leveraging other people’s audience to be able to generate brand awareness and also engagement and acquisition through journalists, because journalists are a third party, have a third party megaphone into at the time it was print publications. And I have always been fascinated with the referral-based endorsement, attitude, and attitude or basically progress that you get from moving someone from a engage with a brand to an advocate. And I saw that that’s where journalists were. They reported news and they were an access to an audience. After doing that, probably for the length of time that I did, it gets a bit boring writing press releases, got to tell you. So I started and this was like in the late 90s where I think Google started in 97. So the Internet is just starting to get out there. And then I found this little niche in the digital marketing world called affiliate programs. And I found it quite fascinating because I didn’t like digital, I didn’t like advertising because I felt like it was a spray and pray that it was a lot of money that could be wasted on like eyeballs or getting in front of people that don’t necessarily I’m not I’m brand marketing wasn’t where I was attracted. It was like where the rubber hits the road, which was like in that acquisition marketing area. And I felt affiliate programs, which is a partner marketing channel that we were talking about before, is was an ideal channel for me to move my marketing focus into a digital realm because it was really about results and tracking results and only paying for what you get. So that’s how I started it and I built the first piece of technology to do this partner marketing or affiliate program marketing. In the early 2000 and I, in my career in PR, I’d focused on professional services marketing. So I’m a specialist. I like specializing different areas. And so I found a niche that we specialized in, cut our teeth, worked it out, worked out how to be an entrepreneur, worked out how to be a CEO, worked out all of those sorts of things, and exited that business in 2016 and then apparently wasn’t done.

Jacob Hollabaugh: And yeah, I was going to say, is that where then Fintel Connect comes in?

Nicky Senyard: Yep. And then Fintel Connect comes into it. And we found another niche that we thought that we could expand upon. So hence that’s the backstory.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah. And what was it about the Fintel world, the financial world at large, that attracted you to want to bring these types of solutions to this niche? Was there something you saw missing? Was it maybe missing in total or something you saw you could do differently or better? What attracted you to this being the new niche? To jump in.

Nicky Senyard: A bit Of a combination of both. So the company that we built and sold was in the regulated online gambling space. When I started in 2000, it was the Wild West. And you look at the cool amount that the industry has been able to swift and change. Now with the legalized and the states and sports betting and all the rest of it being able to go online. What I did was I developed another company at the same time I was developing the big company because there was a whole lot of uncertainty in place and that company was something called Share Results. And we started working with Tangerine and Scotia, who are really big enterprise banks in Canada and 2011, 2012. So I’ve actually been around in the. In this Fintel finance industry for like over ten years. But it wasn’t the focus. It was a little sister to a very, very big brother with the other one. So when I sold, the other company, took a little bit of time off and decided to finish share results into Fintel Connect. And the reason that I was able to do it is I don’t think I would have been able to I don’t think Fintel Connect would have been able to have the same success ten years ago. And so this goes back to your question, why now? What did you see all the rest of it? What has happened over the last ten years in the digital finance world is we’ve evolved Neobanks pushed the envelope. It’s not let traditional banks hold all the power anymore or hold all the customers. And then we get from the neobanks you get the digital account opening platforms or the loan origination systems, and then you get technology like the iPhone and the Google Plex and everything else that happens with that within the appetite of what we’re now prepared to do as consumers on the device that we hold or on the screen that we’re on. So I think there was a combination of just not one thing, probably half a dozen things that opened the door for me to see now is it probably we were early and I’m saying we felt the struggle of the earliness. And but I think that what will happen is we were at the right time before the wave. And I’m seeing that the wave is getting a little bit of momentum. I don’t think we’re at the crest of it, but I think we’re getting a little bit more momentum because of the appetite of consumers. And I think that’s really where it’s gone. So I think this is why this business can have its legs and deep roots now because of a whole lot of combinations. Financial affiliate programs have been around for more than ten years and the big players are doing it. And the big players are with the big players. But what we’re really noticing is that as a specialist in the area, we’re not creating the cog, but we’re applying the cog in a slightly different way.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve got a couple of things I want to follow up on with that. But before I get to those, can we just get a quick little overview of what all Fintel Connect does and or offers and the types of companies and people you work with? Before I dive into some of the follow-ups on a lot of the fascinating things you just said there.

Nicky Senyard: Fintel Connect at its heart is an affiliate technology platform and what that means for everybody out there who may or may not know what affiliate programs are in general terms or in financial terms. It’s a piece of technology that sits between a product like a credit card or a loan or a mortgage or a savings account. And it sits between that and what we call third-party traffic drivers. So those third-party sites could be a media site like Forbes, it could be a website that has a niche audience like Millennial Money, or it could be a TikTok or influencer that’s just grabbing an audience and starting to work it. So we break out our publisher group into three tiers the Nerdwallet’s of the world, the credit karma’s of the world. This millennial money that like how to invest, how to save, and then like the tiktokers. And what those third parties do is they take a link technically from our site and put it on there behind the content on their site. And when somebody reads it and clicks on it and goes through to the brand’s credit card product and signs up, that third-party site gets paid a compensation for that successful event or registration. So we’re basically a third-party marketing technology that sits between these two groups to allow them to scale. So that means that you don’t have to do technical integrations. We take care of the legal, we take care of the payments, we take care of the tracking, we take care of all of those things. So that’s what we do. And then we found other things beside that we can help people with.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Is it at all other fintech companies being affiliates for other fintech companies as well? Is that another category?

Nicky Senyard: Yeah, basically, yes. It becomes incredibly intricate in terms of the product and a third-party site could be a Fintel third-party site, could be a publisher, a third-party site, could be an influencer, third-party site, could be a bank. I take third party as very generic as opposed to specific Anybody that’s got an audience that they want to monetize, that’s the best way of describing it.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Absolutely. And I appreciate you defining it all, too, because I was going to ask for I love I’m a sucker for getting very clear definitions with everyone we talk about, even if I’m confident I and the whole audience knows like I want to make sure we’re your version of it is the same as ours. So thank you for laying that out and to get to one of the things. You had said a few minutes ago about where we were at in like an adoption curve or the financial industry understanding these things. I definitely am thinking through this of it. Within the digital age, one of the most common topics we talk about on this show is almost every guest we have is some type of as a service business. And we often talk about the proliferation of as a service versus the consolidation and if that will ever come about. But with there being so many more Fintel out there, doing so many more niche things, there’s so many more opportunities than to partner or refer or say, I do this for you and you trust me and like me and you need that done. I know someone who does that. I work with them this other way and to be able to build these. So you’d already said earlier, answer the first part of this that we are it is growing. The opportunity is growing. Where do you think we’re at in the kind of adoption curve or set a slightly different way, I guess reaching full market size of what the partner or affiliate marketing space could become in the financial world?

Nicky Senyard: I think we’re just dip our toe in the water. Wow. And I think the reason that I can say we just tipped our toe in the water is because there’s a whole lot of brands that still haven’t embraced it. So we need to talk about why now and why the opportunity, a lot of it’s got to do with appetite, risk, and also leverageable technology on behalf of the financial institution or the Fintel. So what I mean by that is that you’ve got to have the appetite to want to grow online, which a lot of now banks, credit unions, and Fintel are doing. But you also have to have the sort of ability to see what that risk is going to be like for your brand. But more so you need to have the tech stack to be able to do digital acquisition. What traditionally has happened is credit unions and banks, not so much fintechs, but credit unions and banks have been hamstrung or held hostage by the core providers because the core providers haven’t quite been there yet. So hence the up creation or the blossoming of the digital account opening or the loan origination systems.

Nicky Senyard: And that’s what’s allowed these banks to actually get online and start to be able to do this stuff, which then gives the fintechs a bit of a run for their money because the fintechs have actually been the ones that have come into this space. But I see fintechs playing a very specific role because they’re such cool niche products with really targeted audiences. Fintel are created in my opinion, because they solve a specific problem. Banks are generalists, fintechs are specialists. So that’s the way that I see the distinction. And the reason I say toe in the water is because now as the audience being the consumers, being the business owners or the family households, or the independent people, everybody’s now having wanting the convenience of being able to do things online. So what you’ve got is this conversion point between appetite of people or businesses or whatever else, and the appetite and the ability of technology to meet it and the appetite of the financial institutions. So we’ve got that’s why I’m saying it’s just a toe in the water. I’m sorry. That was a very long description, but I hope that made it clear.

Jacob Hollabaugh: No, it absolutely did. And it also sounds like a wonderful place to be for a company like yourself to have like you said, it might have been a little bit of a struggle being a little ahead of the wave even. But if you can get through that struggle, it’s a wonderful place to be at the forefront of that when it’s just a toe dipped in the water and we’re yet to jump all the way in. Who does make up your like your network that you have with your platform, your affiliate, and influencer network? Who makes that up right now? And how do you go about finding those people or organizations or anyone from any of the buckets you listed? How do you go about finding those folks and getting them involved in your network?

Nicky Senyard: We put two buckets with feeling we’re a marketplace business, not unlike an Uber or skip the dishes or whatever else. We’re a marketplace business. We need the products or whoever needs the drivers, we need the product, and then we need the traffic, which is the consumers picking up the drivers. So we’ve got two buckets to fill on the product side, we’ve got a range, we’ve got enterprise banks in the US and Canada. We’ve got them targeting consumers, we’ve got them targeting small business on one side, and then on the other side, we’ve got a range. We’ve got about three and a half, 4,000 independent sites that just talk about finance. So what our network of third-party sites are very specific and we’re the ones curating that list that we’re the ones that are actually finding people, inviting them into the program, presenting our customer’s products to them to be able to create the list. There’s some that you would never know of unless you follow TikTok and you’re following for investment advice or how to. Play the markets or whatever else, or you’ve got the really big guys like the Nerdwallet’s or the Forbes, the Business Insider, the Gobankingrates. So we work with all of them. So there’s a lot to list. And as a company, we’ve got probably about 100 clients. So that’s a nice way to, to start to get into.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, good balance. What makes on the third-party side, what makes for a great partner or a great influencer or just a great third party? What are you looking for possibly when you’re trying to add to that bucket and what makes for a really good partner when I’m the company on the other side wanting to connect with those people?

Nicky Senyard: I think where it is, what makes a good third-party site is somebody that’s in finance or has a financial bent. We deal with some big consumer like Forbes isn’t a financial site per se, but it touches on finance. I think where what we’re looking for is more audience to understand that they’re interested in consumer product and basically the trust that the brand has with their audience. So that means that just there’s an authentic connection because what we’re wanting to do is drive the value. We’re wanting to drive real customers to real products to solve real problems. So this is not a traffic-driving, vaporware-type relationship. This is where that publisher we want that publisher. We don’t care whether that publisher has 300 people or 3 million people. We just want that connection to be authentic and close, because what we’re doing is we’re playing off that publisher’s relationship with that audience to trust their recommendations to take a financial product. So it’s basically having a good relationship with the audience and having as much data. So we want to know unique visits, we want to know pickup rates, we want to know conversion rates, we want to know all of the good backup data stuff that allows us to then pitch those to our financial clients. And those financial clients have to approve all of these publishers. So this is not a willy-nilly come-in, grab what you want, put it up on your site, and see how it goes.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Here’s a link. Go promote it and see what happens. Yeah, it’s a little more.

Nicky Senyard: There’s so much regulation and so many safety nets around this sort of thing. I don’t think people understand how much legwork goes into the back of this. As I said, I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now for 20 years and I’ve never seen rigor like I have. So you don’t enter into affiliate marketing for financial services with a weak heart. You work, you’re very structured with it.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Well, that’s actually the next thing I wanted to talk about. So perfect segue. Thank you for that. To the world of Compliance, which does come up on all of the the shows that we do. But there’s a decent amount of rules and regulations around how a company in any industry can operate and how any company in any industry can market itself. You can’t just go out there completely and utterly lie or anything like that. There’s usually some penalties. But in the financial industry, as you were just referring to, I would suspect it’s about as regulated as it possibly gets and about as tricky and complex as it possibly gets around how all the operation can work, how messaging can work, how compliance in general works. And I was actually fascinated when you were given the kind of history of your career that the one place I could think of that’s probably just as difficult to work in is the gambling industry over the last couple decades. So you’re well suited, you’re used to the the cobweb, the complex mess. But if I correct? It sounds like that that it is as complex as it gets. And how in what ways if you could give an example or two of how marketing for the financial industry differs from different industries in regards of the compliance?

Nicky Senyard: Everything else, gambling is up there, but like everything else, the best way of actually looking at it is that we’re looking at a lot to do with content compliance. This is not brand compliance and this is not brand reputation management. This is actual content compliance. We’ve actually developed a machine learning tool to help us with this because I saw when we started this business that it was going to be something that would hold financial institutions back from taking advantage because of the risk. So we wanted to develop a tool that helped manage the risk through automation, which is what we’ve done. And we’ve got that product and it’s called Fintel check. And what this product does is that it looks at I break this content compliance area into two buckets again or two different channels. One is what I will call hard content compliance, which is disclaimers, disclosures, interest rates, making sure that information is factual and correct. And that is really important for regulators when there is a commercial relationship between the financial. Brand and product and these third parties. So when that relationship is commercialized, then it means that third party is then a reflection of the bank or the brand, or the fintech.

Nicky Senyard: So therefore needs to be regulated. They can be regulated with the content. So our tool actually finds those pieces of content on the sites that we know exist and actually gives a pass or fail to a disclaimer or an interest rate or something like that, which is really helps the compliance people in the fintech or the bank or the credit union know that something is out there evaluating this on a constant basis. The other thing that we need that content, that compliance people are concerned about is contextualization of misleading terms like free or guaranteed or all of those sorts of things which have to be always reviewed within context. So basically what our tool is on the sites that we know, it picks those up and then shows and gives that then to the compliance analyst the ability to evaluate whether that context is correct. So what we’re trying to do is understand that we don’t want to replace content compliance analysts, but we want to give them the tools to be able to find things a lot quicker within the realms of where they’ve got a commercial relationship so that they can solve a problem.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, love that. And definitely, that’s been another trend we don’t have to go down the road of, but it sounds like you’re leveraging AI already in a very good and appropriate way to bring a lot of value and always love convincing people that we’re not replacing people. We’re trying to make them better and faster. And that’s an incredible example of how the problem of checking all of these things is not doable by humans alone. And so you’ve created a wonderful solution to to merge those two together. The final thing I’d love to pivot to is more just general marketing trends For these last couple of questions I have for you, starting with what would you say are some of the key drivers that like a small or medium-sized business customer is looking for when being marketed to by a financial institution or when going to one of these sites? One of your third-party folks Is that SMB customer looking for what matters most to them right now when they’re trying to sift through these this plethora of new tools and technologies that are available to them.

Nicky Senyard: They’re looking for simplicity and function. I think that’s basically what it is. Small business, digital acquisition is really something that is relatively new in the space and I’m thrilled about it. So the way that I see it is a continuum from the center of the continuum. We’ve had consumer financial marketing ten years ingrained. Big enterprises do it, community banks, regional banks, fintechs, or the rest of it coming on board for it. But I think the next step out from that center of the circle is small business. And the reason that I think it’s interesting with small business now is because there’s products out there that allow banks to have dual sink ditches or the technology has created the advantage for the small business. I’m waiting for the third step to come in, which is commercial. So that I think is on the horizon. So it doesn’t add to your question, but I wanted to give you perspective in terms of the linear development of digital acquisition of financial customers into institutions. It’s how to it’s stepping out from the center. So small business customers, the thing that we see most readily is like a normal consumer or a household person.

Nicky Senyard: They want a product that suits their needs. That’s not too complicated and it’s convenient. And I think the thing is that as a small business owner myself, you don’t have time. So the thing the whole idea about going to a bank and having to do signatures for bank accounts and things like this just adds a layer of complexity that we don’t have to have anymore. So this is where digital banking comes in and also where digital adoption of whether it be a credit card or a business loan or all of those sorts of things are now available online, which is I’m very excited about because it’s bringing that it’s saying we’ve now solved the complexity problems of signatures, of due diligence of all of this sort of stuff, and we can do it online now in the same way that to get a credit card, whether people know it or not, you’ve gone through an adjudication process. It may be automated with a bank, but you’ve gone through it. So now what we’re doing is being able to see that and go that layer out and now and then hopefully we’ll see commercial within the next five years.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Love that. The final thing then I want to ask about is something you referenced earlier in everyone these days is referencing and that is the importance of data. Both collection, analysis, implementation data is just the name of the game. And with you coming from the marketing world and already having referenced it, I know this because marketers especially were as early as anyone on understanding data and where we have been heading for some time as far as it’s. Dominance and its importance. So I know the answer is going to be some version of it’s very important. I know that’s the blanket high level answer. It’s very important, but I still like to ask to get your own perspective or spin on how important is proper data gathering, how important is knowing what you should be gathering, and then the proper analysis implementation of that data. Any general thoughts beyond? It’s very important to go with.

Nicky Senyard: Okay, so I’m going to answer this question in a linear way. Okay? So I and I’m going to start from a customer value. So I think basically what happens is I see data in what we do as a continuum. So if we start with the end in mind, which is a highly valuable client for a financial institution or fintech, what has to happen is we need to backtrack and say how is their onboarding process. And then we need to backtrack and say where did they originate from? And then we backtrack again and say, where did that traffic come from and what was that messaging, and do is that audience? Is there more audience available? So in affiliate marketing, what we like to evaluate is not only volume of new customers, but we also like to evaluate value and quality of new customers. So I think when you’ve got the data, you’re able to actually discern which channel created the greatest volume of customers, but also which channel created the best quality of customer. And that data allows you to do more of where you get the best banks for your buck. And I think that’s what data does. I think data in and of itself is pretty boring. But what it does is if you can be purposeful on what and why you’re collecting it, then it also it gives you the power of choice. And I think that’s where it comes with data.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, love that. Fascinating stuff. Well, Nicky, this has been a real pleasure. For those listening who may want to follow you or learn more about Fintel Connect, keep up with everything you and the company have going on. Where would be the best place for them to go to do so?

Nicky Senyard: Absolutely. On LinkedIn, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Nicky Senyard. Or alternatively, we’ve got Fintel Connect on LinkedIn and of course our website. We are constantly publishing new blogs, new insights, new content because we really want to feel like we’re rising the tide of financial marketing literature and we want to be able to see that we can contribute.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yes. And I can say, as someone who read a decent amount of it in the last few days in preparation for this call, it’s good content. And those who have listened for a while know don’t don’t necessarily say that every single interview. So I mean it when I say it good content that’s going out. So we will link to the blog, the website, LinkedIn, everything all of that below in the show notes for anyone who wants to go follow those things. Nicky, thank you so much for your time and knowledge today. Have greatly enjoyed it and hope to speak again sometime soon.

Nicky Senyard: Thanks so much for having me.
Jacob Hollabaugh: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to soarpay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s soarpay.com/podcast.