Marketing in fintech has never been louder. Or harder.

As attention spans shorten and product categories explode, fintech CMOs are shifting from growth-at-all-costs to traction-with-trust. In a dynamic session at Money20/20 Europe, leaders from Checkout.com, Amazon Pay, and Flutterwave offered a rare front-line view of what actually works in 2025 and what’s finally being left behind.

Moderated by Kathryn Frankson, VP of Marketing at Money20/20, the panel didn’t trade in playbooks or platitudes. Instead, it offered grounded lessons on audience trust, human storytelling, and the hard decisions behind meaningful metrics.

Rory O’Neill, CMO of Checkout.com, opened the session with a warning: traction doesn’t mean trust and without trust, fintech growth is fragile.

For a digital payments company like Checkout.com, trust isn’t abstract. It’s the foundation of every transaction. O’Neill noted how younger audiences, particularly Gen Z, interact with financial systems in radically different ways. They’re embedded in gig and creator economies, often earning outside traditional employment, and disproportionately exposed to fraud.

Rather than assuming confidence, marketers need to earn it and localize how trust is built.

Across geographies, Checkout.com adapts its brand work to reflect cultural differences in how users engage with digital commerce. The job of marketing isn’t just to convert; it’s to secure confidence in an ecosystem still evolving.

If trust is the end goal, storytelling is the mechanism especially in categories where products can feel distant, technical, or invisible.

Yewande Akomolafe-Kalu, AVP of Brand and Storytelling at Flutterwave, emphasized this with clarity. For many fintechs, payments are positioned as cold, transactional features. Flutterwave flipped that approach. They grounded their brand in the stories behind the transactions, people paying bride prices, sending money to family members abroad, or covering emergency hospital bills.

Each campaign centers a human moment that makes the product matter.

This isn’t anecdotal marketing. Flutterwave’s entire homepage and content ecosystem are built around these narratives, not product specs. Akomolafe-Kalu argued that even complex B2B or remittance products need emotional weight because behind every transaction is a decision, a goal, a risk, or a relationship.

For Soha Hohnecker, CMO at Amazon Pay, the challenge wasn’t storytelling, it was measurement at scale.

She acknowledged the classic marketing meme: “Everything the light touches is yours to fix.” At an organization the size of Amazon, deciding where to focus is less about ignoring metrics and more about knowing which ones tell the right story.

While volume metrics like active users, merchant retention, and payment volume remain crucial, Hohnecker argued that even so-called “vanity” metrics can be valuable if interpreted in context.

Her approach: zoom in to understand channel impact, but zoom out to evaluate how metrics interconnect. What may seem like a surface-level KPI (e.g., click-through rate) could indicate a deeper friction in product onboarding or trust conversion.

Across the panel, three themes emerged for marketers trying to build genuine traction:

At a time when AI-generated content and product saturation are rising, the CMO’s job is no longer just to drive acquisition. It’s to filter signal from noise and build meaning at scale.

Whether through Checkout.com’s localization of trust, Flutterwave’s community-driven storytelling, or Amazon Pay’s discipline in metric interpretation, the message was clear:

Great marketing doesn’t just get attention. It earns belief.

Not affiliated with Money20/20

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