What Successful Fintech Founders Wish They Knew About Strategy Earlier

5 Strategies to boost sales, futureproof your tech stack and more.

The fintech industry has changed how we handle money, invest, and transact. Steering this step change are successful leaders who have made the right strategic decisions, guiding their firms through a competitive and fast-changing landscape. Here’s 5 things they wish they had known earlier: 

1 - Understand the business context of a fintech solution for better sales outcomes. 

Alone, technology is a tool, but when used in context, it becomes a solution. Fintech companies that sell to banks often focus on selling the technical capabilities to the teams responsible for their procurement. They may emphasize the functional capabilities of the technology but are still limited in their ability to express its contextual impact on business operations. Empowering sales teams to understand the roles, business areas, and needs of the end customers impacted by the technology enables them to articulate the value of the technology to a wider breadth of decision-makers along the buying process. It also creates a valuable feedback loop, where insights from conversations with business users can be incorporated into future product developments and even which customers to serve. This leads to better sales outcomes and better product understanding for the Fintech firm. 

2 - Make regulatory and compliance awareness crucial from the start. 

Financial services is a highly regulated environment that is impacted by constant change. This severely affects the ability of fintech firms to develop or enhance new products, especially in emerging fields like Web3 or Generative AI, where regulation is still evolving. By nature, fintech companies move quickly, often developing prototypes and products before engaging with risk and compliance teams for guidance or review. This leads to a retrospective alignment of solutions with current compliance and regulatory guidelines, often duplicating workstreams and forcing redevelopments that could have been avoided. Making regulatory and compliance awareness crucial from the start helps streamline product development. It avoids costly changes or fines that can be incurred from releasing a non-compliant product or enhancement.

3 - Make better decisions with scenario planning. 

No fintech business operates in a vacuum. Most are subject to micro and macro trends or events that affect business operations and end customers ( i.e., the ability to remain profitable). Developing the capability amongst leadership to work through different possible scenarios enables better decision-making over the medium to short term. It limits the seductive bias leadership may have to make commitments that see immediate results in the short term but hold adverse consequences effects later on. A positive by-product of including scenario planning in strategic decision-making is encouraging a flexible organizational culture that is more resilient to the environment within which it operates.  

4 - Creating a flexible technology stack. 

Many firms fail to create flexible technology stacks because of the higher upfront costs of ensuring flexibility, concerns around security, or accumulated technical debt. However, the outcome is valuable:  Fintech companies with this characteristic can quickly respond to market changes, easily adopt new technological advances, and have a much faster development time. While this can seem daunting, a parallel focus on the technology stack can be strategically beneficial and avoid costly workarounds or missed opportunities. Developing a flexible technology stack includes using modular components, focusing on interoperability, and adopting a microservices architecture.

5 -  Unlock the benefits of building strategic partners.

Strategic partnerships can have numerous benefits for Fintech firms. These include access to new markets, the ability to provide customers with enhanced product offerings, and accelerated speed to market. It could also collaborate with telecoms providers to provide financial services products to their extensive customer bases. However, strategic partnerships are often overlooked as competitive advantages and, therefore, not proactively included in the strategic planning process - this creates a great edge for the Fintech companies who systematically plan their partnerships. 

Whether it's understanding the business context, prioritizing compliance, or building flexible tech stacks, these strategies are crucial for futureproofing fintech ventures. By adopting these insights, fintech leaders can create more resilient, innovative, and competitive organizations poised for long-term success.