Robinhood published its first “Markets in Motion” report in Q2 2023, breaking down how its 23 million funded accounts were allocating across equities, options, and crypto during a period of rising interest rates. The data showed something no analyst report had captured: retail investors under 30 were increasing their allocation to dividend-paying stocks by 34% quarter over quarter while reducing crypto positions by 22%. That single data point was cited by CNBC, Bloomberg, and three Federal Reserve research notes within six weeks. Robinhood had spent two years rebuilding its reputation after the 2021 GameStop trading restrictions. The “Markets in Motion” report did more for that rebuild than any advertising campaign or executive apology tour. It established Robinhood as a company that possessed unique insight into retail investor behaviour, and that insight was the foundation on which the company rebuilt its authority in the market it had nearly lost.
Why Insights Build Authority More Effectively Than Claims
The fintech sector is saturated with companies claiming to be leaders, innovators, or experts in their categories. These claims are marketing language, and sophisticated audiences discount them accordingly. Insights, by contrast, are self-evidencing. They do not ask the reader to believe a claim about the company. They demonstrate the company’s understanding by providing the reader with something they did not know before.
The distinction between claims and insights maps directly to the difference between marketing and authority. Marketing says “we are the leading payments platform.” An insight says “our data shows that average transaction values for subscription-based businesses declined 12% in Q3 while one-time purchase values increased 8%, suggesting consumers are rationalising recurring costs while maintaining discretionary spending.” The first statement asks for trust. The second earns it.
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 82% of B2B companies use content marketing, yet only 29% rate their strategy as highly effective. The gap between participation and effectiveness corresponds almost exactly to the gap between companies publishing claims and companies publishing insights. The 29% who are effective are disproportionately companies whose content provides the audience with new understanding rather than recycled marketing messages.
The Types of Insights That Build Fintech Authority
Not all insights carry equal weight. Four types of insights consistently build authority for fintech companies, and each type serves a different audience and reinforces a different dimension of credibility.
The first type is behavioural insights derived from proprietary transaction or usage data. These are findings about how people or businesses actually behave with money, as opposed to how surveys say they behave. A payments company revealing that small businesses in the restaurant sector process 40% more card transactions on Tuesdays than on Mondays (contradicting the industry assumption that Fridays are peak) provides a behavioural insight that restaurant operators, food service distributors, and point-of-sale vendors can all use. The insight builds authority because it could only come from a company processing real transactions at scale.
The second type is structural insights about market dynamics. These are analyses that reveal how different parts of the financial system interact in ways that are not visible from any single vantage point. A banking-as-a-service company explaining how sponsor bank concentration risk affects the entire embedded finance ecosystem is providing a structural insight that regulators, investors, and fintech operators all find valuable. Structural insights build authority because they demonstrate systems-level thinking that goes beyond the company’s own product.
The third type is predictive insights about where a market is heading. These are forward-looking analyses grounded in current data that project specific outcomes. A lending platform predicting that default rates in the small business segment will increase by 200 basis points over the next four quarters, based on leading indicators visible in its own portfolio data, is providing a predictive insight that investors, competing lenders, and regulators will monitor. Predictive insights build authority when the predictions prove accurate, creating a reputation for foresight that is extremely valuable in financial services.
The fourth type is comparative insights that benchmark performance across segments. A payment processor comparing acceptance rates across twenty merchant categories, or a neobank comparing savings rates across demographic cohorts, provides comparative data that helps the audience understand where they stand relative to peers. Comparative insights are among the most widely shared and cited because every reader can extract personally relevant information from the comparison.
How to Extract Publishable Insights from Proprietary Data
Every fintech company sits on data that contains publishable insights. The challenge is not access to data but the analytical process of turning raw data into findings that are specific enough to be interesting, accurate enough to be credible, and generalisable enough to be useful to an audience beyond the company’s existing customers.
The extraction process follows four steps. The first step is identifying data sets that are unique to the company. What does the company see that no other entity can see? A payments company sees transaction patterns. A lending platform sees credit performance data. A compliance technology company sees suspicious activity report filing patterns. The uniqueness of the data determines the potential uniqueness of the insight.
The second step is looking for patterns that contradict conventional wisdom. The most shareable insights are those that surprise the audience. If the data confirms what everyone already believes, the finding is useful for reference but does not generate the attention that builds authority. If the data reveals that a widely held assumption is wrong, the finding becomes newsworthy. Robinhood’s discovery that young investors were moving into dividend stocks was newsworthy precisely because it contradicted the assumption that young retail investors were primarily speculative traders.
The third step is validating the finding against potential objections. Before publishing, the company should ask: is this finding an artefact of our specific customer base, or does it reflect a broader market pattern? A neobank serving primarily tech workers in San Francisco may observe spending patterns that are not representative of consumers nationally. The insight should either be presented with appropriate caveats about the sample or validated against external data sources. According to DemandSage’s 2025 content marketing data, 83% of marketers prioritise quality over quantity. In insight publishing, quality means analytical honesty about the limitations of the data.
The fourth step is framing the insight for the target audience. The same data point can be framed differently for investors (implications for sector valuations), operators (implications for product strategy), and regulators (implications for consumer protection). A fintech company that publishes the same insight with three different framings for three different audiences multiplies the authority-building effect of a single analytical investment.
The Authority Flywheel: How Insights Create More Insights
The most powerful aspect of insight-driven authority building is that it creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Published insights attract attention. Attention attracts data partnerships, research collaborations, and requests for commentary. These new inputs provide additional data and perspectives that feed the next round of insights. Over time, the company becomes an information hub in its sector, with data flowing in from multiple sources that strengthen the next publication.
Plaid illustrates this flywheel at scale. Plaid’s early reports on financial data connectivity attracted attention from fintech analysts and journalists. That attention led to requests for Plaid’s data in other contexts: academic research, regulatory analysis, and competitor benchmarking. Each new use of Plaid’s data reinforced the company’s position as the authoritative source on financial data connectivity. Today, it is nearly impossible to discuss the fintech data infrastructure market without referencing Plaid’s published research, because the flywheel has been spinning for years and the accumulated authority is too deep for any single new entrant to challenge.
For earlier-stage fintech companies, the flywheel starts smaller but operates on the same principles. A startup that publishes one high-quality insight per quarter will find that by the fourth publication, journalists are reaching out proactively for commentary, analysts are citing the previous publications, and the company’s search rankings for relevant terms are climbing. The authority compounds with each publication cycle.
The fintech companies that hold the strongest authority positions in any given market segment are invariably those that started publishing insights early and maintained the practice through periods when the returns were not yet visible. The insight that builds authority today was published six months ago. The authority that will matter in 2028 is being built by the insights published this quarter. Companies that understand this time lag and invest accordingly build positions of authority that shape their markets for years.
