How to reach senior fintech buyers without relying on paid ads

Why ads struggle with senior fintech buyers

Ads can make people recognise your name. They rarely make a bank's buying committee trust you, and trust is what a fintech sale to a licensed institution runs on. A few things stack up against paid reach:

• The committee is large, and much of it is hidden. Six to ten people typically need to agree. Edelman and LinkedIn's 2025 research on these "hidden buyers" found that 71% say they have little or no interaction with sales teams, yet 95% say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach.
• Senior people do read, just not ads. In the 2024 edition of the same research, 54% of C-suite executives said they spend an hour or more a week reading or viewing thought leadership, and 9 in 10 decision-makers said they're more receptive to outreach from organisations that consistently publish it.
• In person still wins. A face-to-face request was 34 times more likely to get a yes than the same request by email in research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritise human interaction over AI.
• In the Nordics, introductions matter more than reach. Bank buyers in the region rarely take cold meetings. The sentence we hear most from fintechs entering the market is that you need warm introductions.

Ads still have a job: keeping your name familiar between the moments that matter. They just shouldn't be the plan for reaching the people who sign.

Six channels that work instead

1. Give a stage

The strongest invitation there is: a speaking slot, a panel seat, a newsletter or podcast feature, a discussion-lead role at a roundtable. Senior people are rarely asked what they think in public, and most of them would like to be. In our experience, someone who has been offered a stage takes the next meeting.

The sequence matters. Give the stage. Talk about their topic and their goals, not your service. Bridge later, once there's a relationship. Discover what they need. Propose only when there's something worth proposing. Skip the bridge, and a speaker slot can turn into free work with no conversation at the end of it.

2. Borrow trust from partners

Find the companies that already sell to your buyers without competing with you, and co-host something with them: a breakfast, a dinner, a build day. Their name on the invitation does what your ad can't. When Cardboard, a Norwegian company, wanted to meet Stockholm finance leaders, the breakfast was co-led by Gilion's CFO and Fairlo's Head of Finance: 18 approved registrations, 15 checked in. How to build a partner-led go-to-market.

3. Go where they already are, with a role

Your buyers' own events, their offices, the conferences they already attend. Visit a target company's event and say hello; it's how some of our best conversations started. At conferences, a ticket alone buys you a crowd. A role buys you attention: speak, moderate, bring a delegation, or host a dinner beside the show. Two hours around a table beats twenty minutes at a booth.

4. Publish what they want to read, and use it as outreach

A newsletter or a LinkedIn series about your market, not your product, earns attention you'd otherwise have to buy. Then make it work as outreach: feature companies from your target list, and message each one the day the piece goes live. Our newsletter, Stockholm Growth & Fintech, had 1,215 subscribers on 22 October 2026, including 193 people at 53 banks. Several companies have found us through it.

5. Book meetings before the conference, not at it

The best conference meetings are booked weeks before anyone travels. Email the companies you want to meet three times: about three weeks out, ten days out and two days out, each time with a specific day and time. By the time you arrive, they know your name.

6. Build with technical buyers instead of pitching them

CTOs and engineers are often the hardest part of the committee to reach, and the most responsive to a worthy challenge. A builder night or a build day on real APIs gives them a reason to come and gives you product feedback you can't buy. At the Embedded Finance Build Day, 44 builders in 15 teams spent a day on two partners' banking APIs, and seven teams independently chose the same fraud problem.

Messages you can adapt

Short, specific, and about them. Replace the brackets, and only name an event once you've actually secured the stage.

What it costs instead

"Without ads" doesn't mean without budget. It means the budget goes into time, rooms and people rather than media. One data point from our own work:

Fifteen target accounts, including SEB Embedded, Fortnox, Klarna and Insurely, engaged with the event without registering. We count those as reach, not leads. Full counts, and the estimates we keep separate, are in our track record.

A weekly rhythm that keeps it running

These channels work when they're habits, not campaigns. A rhythm that has worked for us:

• Mornings write, afternoons talk. Features, invitations and proposals before lunch; calls after.
• One target-company event or office visit a week, picked from your account list.
• A fixed number of personal invitations every week: speaker invites, feature messages, room invitations.
• A cap on conference work, about three hours a week, so travel doesn't swallow selling time.
• Every call ends with the next meeting booked. No proposal goes out without a review call in the calendar.

How to know it's working

Not by impressions. Track, every week:

1. Invitations sent and accepted
2. Meetings held with people at your named accounts
3. Target accounts with two or more people engaged
4. Meetings booked within 30 days of each room or feature
5. Proposals sent with a review call booked

If those numbers rise, pipeline follows. If they don't, more reach won't fix it.

Questions people ask

Sources

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