Marketing a Fintech Brand: How To Find the Right Words for a New Category
When an innovative technology arrives, a quiet race begins underneath it: the race to name the category it creates. In software, the company that successfully defines a new market eventually captures roughly 76% of its value, according to the foundational category-design book Play Bigger. Whoever owns the words, owns the market.
That race is now on across fintech. New companies are issuing dollar-backed digital tokens, holding crypto assets under federal bank charters, automating back-office payment workflows, and giving businesses new ways to hold and move money. None of it had a name five years ago. And in finance, naming is not a writer's problem… it's a regulatory, trust, and customer-acquisition problem all at once.
Customers are wary of anything that doesn't yet have a familiar name: a 2024 academic analysis of more than 56,000 reviews of digital banks found that even users who liked the product worried about the absence of a recognizable institution to fall back on. The words a company chooses are what stand in for that missing familiarity, which means choosing them carelessly carries a real cost.
The Synapse collapse of 2024 made this issue concrete. When the banking-as-a-service middleman went bankrupt, up to $96 million of customer money was left in dispute, even though the underlying partner banks were solvent. Many affected customers believed they had been depositing into FDIC-insured bank accounts, because that's how the consumer-facing fintechs sitting on top of Synapse had described the experience. The language had implied a guarantee the legal structure didn't deliver.
Synapse is the cautionary case. The more interesting story is what comes next. The founders building new financial products have learned from failures like Synapse, and they're selling something more complicated than a product. They're selling the very vocabulary their customers will eventually use to describe what they do… building a brand and inventing a category at the same time, in an industry where the words available to them are either taken, regulated, or already carrying baggage.
The financial services market is being rewritten
Mordor Intelligence and Bain estimate that "embedded finance," the broad category for the financial services that get built into non-financial software, will expand by somewhere between $150 billion and $700 billion between 2025 and 2030. Galileo forecasts that B2B embedded finance flows alone will roughly quadruple in the same window, from about $4 trillion to nearly $16 trillion. Fireblocks estimates that tokenized money, funds, and bonds on public blockchains will reach $5 trillion by the end of the decade.
Why the standard software playbook breaks for fintech
The standard category-creation playbook was written for software. Play Bigger would tell a founder: name the problem, design the category, crown yourself the example. That formula works cleanly when you're inventing "CRM" or "marketing automation." It breaks in financial services for three specific reasons:
- The obvious words are owned. "Bank," "deposit," "checking account," "money market fund" are regulatory designations. A non-bank fintech that calls itself a "bank" can be enjoined by regulators; one that lets a customer believe its accounts are FDIC-insured can be sued. Mercury, the business banking platform that supports 1 in 3 U.S. startups, includes a careful disclaimer in the footer of every page: "Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC." In this category, the compliance review is also a copy review.
- Trust is asymmetric, and gets harder the more novel your product is. Novelty cuts both ways: it earns attention, but it also raises the bar for proof. Customers are being asked to put real money into something that doesn't have a familiar name yet, and the absence of a familiar name is exactly what triggers their caution.
- Every analogy you might reach for brings baggage. "Neobank" was the great category-creation success of the 2010s, the word that helped a generation of consumer-facing fintechs explain themselves. By 2024, Britannica was defining neobanks largely by what they are not ("not true banks"), and Wikipedia's entry was noting that, in Sweden, police had begun associating the term with a higher rate of criminal transactions. The category exists, but the connotations aren’t helpful to someone trying to ship a serious institutional product.
The takeaway for founders: yes, invent a phrase. But invent one that regulators will tolerate, customers will adopt, and journalists will not eventually turn into a slur. This is not an easy feat.
Name what your customer can do, not how it’s done
The cleanest examples of category creation in this market come from companies whose product, on first explanation, has no available word. The discipline is consistent: refuse the easily borrowed analogy, name the job to be done in plain English, and let the proof points carry the weight that the unfamiliar phrase cannot yet bear.
Modern Treasury is a B2B software company founded by alumni of Silicon Valley Bank that builds the back-end systems companies use to move money: the unglamorous workflows of initiating, approving, processing, and reconciling payments at scale. The company manufactured a phrase for it: "payment operations."
In a 2022 podcast with Andreessen Horowitz, co-founder Dimitri Dadiomov was candid about the strategy: "When we thought about marketing, what we thought about more than anything is, like, we're trying to create a category of payment operations… One of the side effects of category creation is that in the beginning, you're the only one in it."
Modern Treasury defined the term itself, on its own website, in a piece called A Beginner's Guide to Payment Operations. They illustrated it with a 1951 photograph of accountants at H.J. Heinz. The implicit message: this problem has always existed inside large companies, and finally there is software for it. The category might be new, but the job is familiar.
The lesson generalizes. The brands that have done this best lead with what the customer is trying to accomplish (move money, store cash, reduce risk, automate a workflow), not with the mechanism that does the accomplishing.
How fintech companies communicate trust
If software companies can sell category and product simultaneously, fintech companies have to sell category, product, and trust.
The mechanism most have converged on is what could be called selective credibility-borrowing: a small set of named institutions, regulators, and proof-of-scale numbers that triangulate confidence without overloading the page. The brands that lean only on celebrity advisors read as thin. The ones that lean only on regulators read as stiff. The ones that combine all read as solid.
Anchorage Digital
Anchorage Digital is a digital-asset platform that serves institutional investors who want to hold cryptocurrencies but cannot, for legal or fiduciary reasons, store them on a consumer exchange. In January 2021, Anchorage's bank subsidiary became the first crypto-native institution in the United States to receive a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the same federal regulator that supervises JPMorgan and Citibank. That single fact has become the load-bearing element of the entire brand.
The Anchorage homepage leads with "the only federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S." Every product announcement reinforces the phrase: "the first federally chartered bank to enable Solana liquid staking", "the first qualified custodian to offer institutional-grade custody" for one new token after another. The brand is making credibility itself the category. It concedes nothing to the broader industry's reputation problem and instead positions Anchorage as a category of one.
Bridge
Bridge is a stablecoin infrastructure company that Stripe acquired in 2024 for $1.1 billion. Bridge received its own conditional OCC trust bank charter approval in February 2026, and the language the company chose for the announcement is instructive.
Bridge's product, in plain English, helps companies issue and move dollar-backed digital tokens. But the press release describes the product as helping enterprises "build with digital dollars inside a clear federal framework." The phrase is doing two jobs at once: digital dollars re-frames a crypto product as a familiar fiat one, and clear federal framework signals that this is a regulated, government-sanctioned activity rather than a Wild West one.
The audience here is not the crypto-native trader; it's the enterprise CFO who has, until now, kept stablecoins at arm's length precisely because the vocabulary felt unregulated and unfamiliar. Digital dollars and clear federal framework are language of reassurance — and they let the name of the product (a stablecoin) recede behind the name of the job (dollar settlement, inside the rules).
Bridge's product head, Mai Leduc, has summarized the underlying thesis even more directly: "Nobody needs to know they are using a stablecoin." For an infrastructure brand whose proposition depends on enterprise adoption, invisibility is the trust strategy.
The same pattern of distributed credibility shows up across the digital-asset infrastructure stack. Securitize cites BlackRock as a transfer-agent client, anchored by a single number — the more than $2 billion in assets that BlackRock's tokenized fund (BUIDL) has accumulated since launch. Fireblocks cites BNY Mellon, ABN Amro, and ANZ. Ondo Finance cites Coinbase, Anchorage, and Fireblocks. Regulator, named institutional customer, named partner, plus a single arresting number — proof distributed across categories rather than concentrated in one.
How fintech firms can evolve a brand as they scale
If category creation is hard, recategorization is harder. Three of the best-known business-banking-adjacent fintechs — Mercury, Brex, and Ramp — have spent the last several years living that lesson out loud. The pattern across all three: invent a category narrow enough to dominate, then evolve the language carefully as you scale. Hold the noun steady and let everything else grow. Change the noun, and you're starting over.
Mercury
Mercury launched in 2017 as "the bank for startups," a clean repackaging of CEO Immad Akhund's own founder pain. By 2025, after crossing 200,000 customers and roughly $650M in annualized revenue, Akhund was describing Mercury as "the financial operating system," a deliberate widening of the brand to make room for invoicing, bill pay, spend management, and eventually lending.
The category had to grow with the company, but the underlying noun — Mercury as the financial home base for a business — never moved.
Brex
Brex tells the opposite story. The company's 2018 launch, as a corporate card with no personal guarantee designed for venture-backed startups, was one of the cleanest category wins in fintech history, hitting $100 million in annualized revenue inside 18 months.
But the very specificity that made the early brand work became a ceiling. In 2022, Brex abruptly closed thousands of small-business accounts to refocus on a higher-end "spend platform" — a move so jarring that fintech analysts began referring to it as "Brex's Brexit," an unflattering label of the worst possible kind, applied to the brand by outsiders rather than chosen by it.
The company spent the next four years methodically replacing "the corporate card for startups" with "the AI-powered spend platform for modern companies." In January 2026, Capital One announced a $5.15 billion acquisition. The original brand had effectively been retired.
Ramp
Ramp, founded in 2019, exploited Brex's repositioning gap with surgical precision. Where Brex had once owned "card for startups," Ramp staked out finance automation: a single-line promise to replace four legacy tools (Amex, Expensify, Bill.com, Concur) with one platform.
By 2025, Ramp had reached roughly $1 billion in annualized revenue at a $22.5 billion valuation. The current homepage tagline is the disarmingly plain Spending, simplified. It is, deliberately, anti-jargon — a luxury available only once you are the category leader and can afford to stop selling the category itself.
Finding language for an “invisible” service
The hardest marketing problem in this space is being indispensable while remaining invisible. Two brands offer the cleanest study in opposite approaches.
Stripe
Stripe spent its first decade as the developer-first payments API behind a generation of internet businesses — invisible to consumers, indispensable to the companies they were using.
As the company has grown into one of the largest private fintechs in the world, the language has evolved with it. Stripe now positions itself as "financial infrastructure for the internet," language that is intentionally closer to a utility than a startup.
That tonal restraint is itself the positioning: not a payments company anymore, but the substrate other companies build on. For an infrastructure player at Stripe's scale, the brand had to grow up.
Bridge
Bridge, again, takes the opposite extreme: invisibility as anti-strategy. As one recent profile put it, the brand's vision is for stablecoins to "disappear into the background of commerce." That's what infrastructure-grade marketing actually looks like in 2026 — a bet that the category will mature precisely to the extent that the brand stops needing to explain itself.
A fintech branding playbook
Across these brands, certain patterns are consistent enough to qualify as a working playbook for any founder or marketer building at the intersection of brand and category:
- Describe the customer benefit first; the mechanism can support. "Spending, simplified" can be supported by "AI-driven multi-entity ERP integration." Customers care about what gets solved; the underlying technology is supporting evidence.
- Borrow credibility, but distribute the proof. Pair a regulator with a named institutional customer with a named partner, plus a single arresting number — the way Securitize names BlackRock alongside the $2 billion that BlackRock's tokenized fund (BUIDL) has accumulated since launch, or the way TreasurySpring pairs its named issuers with cumulative flows it has handled to date. Lean only on one of those, and the brand reads as thin or stiff.
- Coin a phrase, but compound familiar words. "Payment operations," "developer infrastructure bank," "federally chartered crypto bank," "financial infrastructure for the internet" — all work because they recombine words the reader already knows. Forced neologisms ("neobank") accumulate baggage faster than equity.
- Refuse the "we're not a bank, we're a ___" trap. Distancing yourself from the incumbent is not the same as describing what you are. The strongest brands either become the incumbent (Mercury applying for a national bank charter, Column being a chartered bank from day one) or invent an entirely new species of one (Anchorage).
The bigger picture for financial services brands
These new brands are revealing the surface of a structural shift in financial services. The corporate treasurers and CFOs that fintech companies are courting in 2026 have lived through SVB and Synapse. They've become more API-literate, more comfortable with AI-driven workflows, and less patient with marketing that doesn't survive a compliance review. Every fintech brand is doing simultaneous category education and trust manufacture, in a space where words are regulated and analogies are dangerous.
The financial brands that have answered that constraint best haven't done it by getting louder. They've done it by being more direct: naming the customer's job and pain points in plain English, and letting the proof points (a regulator, a named partner, a real number) do the heavy work that, in less regulated industries, a tagline alone might bear.
The hard marketing and branding work is making sure that, by the time competitors arrive, the category is already yours… exactly the one your customer would have asked for if they'd had the words.