In 2022, Klarna cut its workforce by 10% and saw its valuation drop from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion. Most companies in that position go quiet, reduce marketing spend, and wait for conditions to improve. Klarna did the opposite. It increased its publishing output, releasing detailed analyses of the buy-now-pay-later market, consumer spending patterns across its merchant network, and regulatory compliance frameworks for BNPL products. By the time Klarna filed for its US IPO in late 2024, it had rebuilt its valuation to $14.6 billion, and a significant portion of the market’s renewed confidence traced directly to the company’s sustained thought leadership during its most difficult period. Klarna’s board understood something that many fintech companies learn too late: thought leadership is not a marketing expense that gets cut during downturns. It is an investment that pays the highest returns precisely when competitors are cutting theirs.
The Investment Case for Thought Leadership
Fintech companies invest in thought leadership for the same reason they invest in product development: it creates durable competitive advantages. But where product advantages can be copied (features, pricing, user interfaces), thought leadership advantages compound in ways that resist replication. A company that has spent three years publishing substantive market analysis has built an audience, a media reputation, and a search presence that a competitor cannot duplicate by simply deciding to start publishing.
The Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B research found that 46% of B2B companies expect to increase their content marketing budgets, while only 29% rate their current strategy as highly effective. The gap between spending growth and effectiveness reveals a market where most companies are investing in content but few are investing in thought leadership specifically. The distinction matters. Content marketing fills a publishing calendar. Thought leadership changes how the market thinks about a problem.
The Boston Consulting Group projects fintech revenues will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, with embedded finance and digital lending accounting for the largest share of projected growth.
According to CB Insights’ 2024 fintech report, global fintech funding declined 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, pushing the sector toward consolidation and a sharper focus on profitability over growth at all costs.
For fintech companies, thought leadership investments fall into three categories: original research programs, executive publishing platforms, and industry analysis capabilities. Each category serves a different business function, and the most effective thought leadership programs combine all three.
Original Research as a Competitive Asset
Fintech companies sit on data that no other entity can access. A payments processor sees transaction patterns across thousands of merchants. A neobank observes saving and spending behaviour across millions of consumer accounts. A lending platform has underwriting data that reveals credit risk dynamics invisible to traditional credit bureaus. This data, when analysed and published, becomes thought leadership that no competitor can replicate because no competitor has the same data.
The investment required to turn proprietary data into published research is substantial but quantifiable. A quarterly research report typically requires 40 to 80 hours of analyst time, 10 to 20 hours of editorial and design work, and executive review. The total cost ranges from $15,000 to $40,000 per report, depending on complexity and whether the work is done in-house or through external partners.
The return on that investment operates across multiple channels simultaneously. The research generates media coverage, which builds brand awareness. It provides sales teams with conversation starters for enterprise prospects. It attracts inbound partnership enquiries from companies that want access to the data. And it establishes the publishing company as the authoritative source on its market segment, which means that journalists, analysts, and regulators begin citing the company as a default reference.
Plaid, Stripe, and Square have all built proprietary research programs that function as competitive moats. Plaid’s annual fintech reports are cited in regulatory filings, academic papers, and competitor presentations. That citation network creates a compounding advantage: each new citation increases the visibility of the research, which attracts more citations, which further reinforces Plaid’s position as the authoritative source. A competitor launching a similar research program today would need years to build equivalent citation authority.
Executive Publishing and Personal Brand Investment
The second category of thought leadership investment centres on executive publishing. This involves fintech executives writing or contributing to articles, opinion pieces, and analyses published under their own names. The investment creates value at both the company level and the individual level.
At the company level, executive publishing puts a human face on the brand. Fintech companies are complex, often abstract businesses. A payments infrastructure company can be difficult for prospects and partners to evaluate at a distance. When the company’s CEO publishes a detailed analysis of where payment infrastructure is heading over the next five years, the abstract company becomes associated with a specific person, a specific viewpoint, and a specific quality of thinking.
At the individual level, executive publishing builds personal reputations that have tangible business value. When a fintech CEO is recognised as an expert voice in the industry, that recognition facilitates fundraising, partnership negotiations, media relationships, and regulatory engagement. The CEO’s personal credibility becomes a company asset, and the thought leadership investment that created it has an ROI that extends far beyond content marketing metrics.
The operational challenge is that most fintech executives are not writers. The solution, used by most companies with effective executive publishing programs, is a ghostwriting or co-writing arrangement where a subject-matter editor works with the executive to extract insights and produce publication-ready analysis. This typically costs $3,000 to $8,000 per article and produces two to four pieces per month. For a fintech company whose CEO’s published expertise generates even one enterprise deal per quarter, the investment pays for itself many times over.
Industry Analysis and Market Intelligence
The third category of thought leadership investment is ongoing industry analysis: regular publication of commentary on market developments, regulatory changes, competitive dynamics, and technology trends. This is the highest-volume thought leadership activity and the one most often confused with standard content marketing.
The difference is specificity. Standard content marketing on a topic like embedded finance might produce an article titled “What Is Embedded Finance and Why Does It Matter?” Thought leadership on the same topic would produce an article titled “How Embedded Finance Revenue Models Differ Across Banking-as-a-Service Providers: A Comparison of Unit, Treasury Prime, and Synapse Fee Structures.” The first article fills a content calendar. The second article gives the reader information they cannot easily find elsewhere.
According to DemandSage’s 2025 content marketing data, 83% of marketers now prioritise quality over quantity in their content programs. For fintech companies, quality means specificity. An analysis that names specific companies, cites specific numbers, and draws specific conclusions builds more thought leadership capital than ten generic overviews of the same topic.
The investment in industry analysis typically involves hiring or contracting analysts who combine financial services expertise with writing ability. A dedicated fintech analyst producing two to three substantive articles per week costs $80,000 to $150,000 annually in salary and overhead. That analyst’s output, if it consistently meets the specificity standard, generates media pickup, inbound leads, and industry recognition that would cost far more to achieve through paid channels.
Why Thought Leadership Investment Increases During Downturns
The Klarna example at the top of this article illustrates a counter-intuitive but well-documented pattern: the fintech companies that increase thought leadership investment during market downturns emerge from those downturns with stronger competitive positions than companies that cut.
The mechanism is simple. During downturns, most companies reduce marketing spending. The companies still publishing substantive analysis face less competition for attention. Journalists who previously had twenty pitches per week now have five, and they are more receptive to quality content. Industry conferences have fewer speakers, which means the speakers who do participate command larger audiences. The thought leadership market, like any market, operates on supply and demand. When supply contracts, the value of each remaining contribution increases.
The historical evidence is clear across multiple fintech market cycles. Companies that maintained or increased publishing during the 2022-2023 fintech correction, including Stripe, Plaid, and Mercury, emerged with stronger brand positions than companies that went quiet. The investment was not comfortable. Boards questioned marketing spend during periods of revenue pressure. But the companies that maintained the investment captured share of voice that took competitors years to recover once the market stabilised.
For fintech executives evaluating their thought leadership budgets, the question is not whether the investment produces returns. The evidence on that question is settled. The question is whether the company can afford the competitive cost of not investing while competitors continue to build their positions as the industry’s authoritative voices.
