In 2015, Transferwise (now Wise) placed a full-page advertisement in the Financial Times that consisted entirely of data: a table comparing the total cost of sending £1,000 to euros through six major UK banks, showing the exchange rate markup, the transfer fee, and the total cost side by side. The advertisement looked more like a research table than a marketing message. It contained no slogans, no brand imagery, and no calls to action beyond the company’s URL at the bottom. The Financial Times received more reader enquiries about that single advertisement than about any other advertisement that month. But the real impact was not the advertisement itself. It was the media coverage the advertisement generated. Journalists wrote articles about the fee comparison because the data was newsworthy on its own terms. The advertisement became content. The content became media coverage. And the media coverage built Wise’s brand in ways that the advertisement alone could not, because the journalists’ decision to cover the story carried an implicit editorial endorsement that no paid placement can provide.
How Media Presence Differs from Media Coverage
Media coverage is a single event: a journalist writes about a company. Media presence is a sustained condition: the company is consistently referenced, quoted, and cited across the publications that its audience reads. The distinction matters because single instances of coverage produce temporary visibility, while sustained presence produces cumulative brand strength.
A fintech company that appears in one Financial Times article receives a spike in website traffic that decays within a week. A fintech company that appears in the Financial Times monthly, whether through feature articles, executive commentary, data citations, or analyst references, occupies a permanent position in the reader’s mental model of the fintech sector. The monthly reader encounters the company’s name repeatedly, in different contexts, through different editorial lenses. Each encounter reinforces the association between the company and its area of expertise.
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.
The Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B research found that 81% of B2B marketers cite brand awareness as content marketing’s primary benefit. Media presence converts that awareness into something stronger: brand familiarity, which is the condition where the audience not only recognises the brand but has a detailed, multi-dimensional understanding of what the brand represents. Familiarity is a more durable form of awareness because it is built on repeated, varied encounters rather than a single impression.
The Five Components of Fintech Media Presence
Sustained media presence in fintech is built from five components, each contributing a different dimension of brand strength.
The first component is feature coverage: in-depth articles that examine the company’s strategy, products, or market position. Feature coverage provides the most detailed brand exposure and is the most difficult to achieve, because it requires the company to have a story compelling enough to justify a journalist investing significant time. Feature coverage typically occurs around major company milestones: fundraising rounds, product launches, market entry announcements, and leadership changes. The brand-strengthening effect of features is highest when the coverage includes analysis of the company’s strategic approach rather than just reporting on the milestone itself.
The second component is expert commentary: the company’s executives quoted as expert sources in stories about industry developments. Expert commentary builds brand strength through association with industry expertise. When a fintech CEO is quoted alongside the heads of major banks in an article about payment infrastructure, the implicit positioning is equality. The audience associates the company with the calibre of institutions it appears alongside. Expert commentary is built through relationships with journalists, which require consistent engagement over months and years.
The third component is data citation: the company’s published research or proprietary data referenced in media reporting. Data citations build brand strength by positioning the company as an authoritative source of information. When a journalist writes “according to data from [Company],” the company’s authority is reinforced with every reader who encounters the reference. Data citation requires the company to publish original data that journalists find useful, which loops back to the importance of proprietary research programmes.
The fourth component is contributed analysis: byline articles and opinion pieces published under company executives’ names. According to DemandSage’s 2025 content marketing data, 83% of marketers prioritise content quality over quantity. Contributed analysis is the purest expression of quality-over-quantity in media presence, because each piece carries the executive’s personal reputation and must meet the publication’s editorial standards. Contributed analysis builds the personal brand of the executive and, through that, the brand of the company.
The fifth component is industry report inclusion: the company referenced in analyst reports, market maps, and industry overviews. This type of media presence is often passive (the company does not control when analysts include it in reports) but is influenced by the other four components. A company with strong feature coverage, expert commentary, data citations, and contributed analysis is more likely to be included in industry reports because analysts use the same media sources that other audiences do.
How Media Presence Strengthens Specific Brand Dimensions
Different components of media presence strengthen different dimensions of the fintech brand. Understanding these connections allows companies to target their media efforts strategically.
Feature coverage strengthens brand story. It gives the audience a narrative about the company: where it came from, what problem it is solving, and where it is heading. Strong brand stories are memorable and shareable, which is why feature coverage has the highest secondary sharing rate of any media component.
Expert commentary strengthens brand authority. It positions the company’s leaders as credible voices on industry issues, which transfers to the company a reputation for expertise that extends beyond its product capabilities. Authority is particularly valuable in fintech because it addresses the trust deficit that all fintech companies face: when a respected journalist chooses to quote a fintech CEO as an expert, the journalist is implicitly vouching for the CEO’s credibility.
Data citation strengthens brand reliability. When journalists cite a company’s data, they are treating the company as a trustworthy source of factual information. This trust extends to the company’s products: if its data is reliable, its products are likely reliable too. The logic is not always conscious, but it operates at the level of audience perception and affects purchasing decisions.
Contributed analysis strengthens brand depth. It demonstrates that the company’s expertise extends beyond its product and into the broader challenges facing the industry. Brand depth is what separates a company perceived as a vendor (useful but interchangeable) from a company perceived as a partner (valuable and difficult to replace).
Industry report inclusion strengthens brand legitimacy. Inclusion in analyst reports and market maps validates the company’s position as a recognised market participant. For fintech startups competing against established financial institutions, this legitimacy signal can be the difference between being considered for an enterprise deal and being excluded from the evaluation.
Building Media Presence Systematically
Media presence cannot be achieved through sporadic outreach or reactive PR. It requires a systematic approach that generates multiple media touchpoints per month across different components.
The operational model for systematic media presence includes three workstreams running in parallel. The first workstream is proactive pitching: identifying story angles based on company milestones, market developments, and editorial calendars, and pitching them to relevant journalists on a weekly basis. The second workstream is reactive commentary: monitoring industry news and offering expert commentary to journalists covering relevant developments within hours of the news breaking. The third workstream is content placement: developing contributed articles and placing them with target publications on a monthly cadence.
The three workstreams together produce a steady flow of media touchpoints: one to two feature pitches per month, three to five reactive commentary offers per week, and one to two contributed articles per month. Not all pitches result in coverage, and not all commentary offers are accepted. But the volume ensures that the company maintains a consistent presence across multiple media channels simultaneously.
The CMI data showing that 46% of companies expect to increase content budgets reflects growing recognition that content drives media presence, which drives brand strength, which drives business results. The fintech companies that invest in systematic media presence are building brands that strengthen with each month of sustained effort. Wise’s data-driven Financial Times advertisement in 2015 was not a one-time tactic. It was the beginning of a media presence strategy that, over the following decade, built one of the most trusted brands in international finance. The strategy worked not because any single element was brilliant, but because the elements combined and compounded over years into a brand that the market could not ignore.
