The best fintech campaigns turned an abstract financial product into something concrete: a film, a referral loop, a data-led media pitch or a real customer story. Airwallex reported $900 million in annualized revenue and 13,000 new customers in Q2 2025 after its "Future of Finance" films. The 22 cases below cover marketing and PR, including what the Visa and Plaid collapse and Robinhood's GameStop halt teach about trust.
Last updated: October 28, 2026
Which fintech campaigns are on this list?
This list covers 22 campaigns from consumer and B2B fintech companies, selected for verifiable results reported by named sources between 2019 and 2026. Cases 1 to 18 are marketing campaigns. Cases 19 to 22 are PR and public-market cases that show how fintech brands earn legitimacy through earned media, listings and regulatory moments. Each entry gives what happened, the reported numbers and why the approach worked.
What are the 18 best fintech marketing campaigns?
1. Airwallex "Future of Finance" (2025)
Airwallex, working with creative agency Special and Accenture Song, released six high-production films showing wrecking balls and bulldozers demolishing symbols of legacy banking: paper stacks, filing cabinets, analog clocks, according to Ballistic Media's case study. Andrew Balint, VP of Marketing APAC at Airwallex, told FF News the campaign coincided with $900 million in annualized revenue, $200 billion in transaction volume and more than 13,000 new customers in Q2 2025 alone.
Why it works: Destroying literal, physical symbols of old banking gave an abstract positioning claim (legacy finance is obsolete) a visual the audience could feel in seconds, without reading a single feature list.
2. Revolut "Money Possibilities" (late 2024)
Revolut returned to brand marketing with a global campaign built with agency Anomaly London, using abstract visuals like stretched wool to represent financial flexibility, running across TV, out-of-home and social in more than 20 countries for eight weeks, according to Ballistic Media. Anomaly London CEO Camilla Harrisson told Mobile Marketing Magazine the campaign aimed to make money "feel different."
Why it works: Moving from combative "Your Way In" messaging to an abstract, aspirational tone let Revolut reposition from a challenger bank to a lifestyle platform without directly attacking competitors again.
3. Revolut referral program (ongoing since launch)
Revolut grew from zero to 1 million users and anchored a growth trajectory to 45 million global customers by 2024 largely through a referral loop, without a traditional above-the-line marketing budget in its early years, according to Brighter Click's case study collection.
Why it works: A referral loop turns every existing customer into an acquisition channel, so growth compounds without a proportional increase in paid media spend.
4. WePay "UnfreezeYourMoney" campaign
WePay's B2B fintech campaign holds the highest publicly documented conversion metrics of any campaign in the category, reporting 3x conversions, 300 percent traffic growth and 225 percent sign-up growth, according to Brighter Click.
Why it works: Naming the exact pain point in the campaign title (frozen money, a merchant's literal worst fear) meant the target audience self-identified the problem before reading a single word of copy.
5. Klarna x Snoop Dogg
Klarna's campaign featuring rapper Snoop Dogg is credited with shifting the public perception of buy now, pay later services from a financial fallback option to a mainstream payment behavior, according to Brighter Click. Klarna later priced its September 2025 New York Stock Exchange IPO at $40 a share, raising about $1.4 billion, and stated it had about 111 million active customers as of June 30, 2025, according to Renaissance Capital. The IPO figures describe the company's market outcome, not the return on this one campaign.
Why it works: Pairing a stigmatized product category with an unexpected, culturally credible celebrity gave BNPL a mainstream association it could not have earned through product messaging alone.
6. Wealthsimple content engine
Wealthsimple grew to more than $50 billion in assets under administration by 2024, according to BetaKit reporting cited by Brighter Click, becoming one of Canada's most recognized fintech brands through a single, consistently excellent owned content format rather than paid acquisition.
Why it works: One well-built content format done consistently does the trust-building work that expensive paid ads cannot, pre-qualifying audiences before they ever see a conversion-focused message.
7. GoCardless x Swim England partnership
GoCardless partnered with Swim England to demonstrate how freeing up administrative time with its payment product lets charities like Swim England run more efficiently, according to Growth Gorilla's roundup of 2024 fintech campaigns.
Why it works: Showing the product's benefit through a nonprofit partner's real efficiency gain, rather than a corporate client's profit growth, demonstrated genuine social value that resonated beyond a typical B2B case study.
8. Starling Bank "The Dessert" and "Night Owls"
Starling Bank produced emotionally driven ads including a story about a child saving for her own place and long-distance partners staying connected, according to Growth Gorilla.
Why it works: Telling human stories about what the money represents, rather than what the banking app does, connects with audiences who care more about how a product makes them feel than its feature list.
9. Nuvei x Ryan Reynolds
Actor Ryan Reynolds invested in payment company Nuvei in early 2023 and starred in tongue-in-cheek commercials typically reserved for consumer brands, bringing comedic advertising into B2B fintech, according to Mint Studios.
Why it works: Using a recognizable, comedic celebrity investor in a B2B payments category known for dry, technical messaging made the brand memorable in a way a typical enterprise ad campaign could not.
10. Cash App x Timothée Chalamet
Cash App CMO Catherine Ferdon has systematically rebuilt the brand around talent-led short-form film, with a cinema-premiered short featuring actor Timothée Chalamet turning a modest production budget into a far larger amount of earned media impressions, as reported by Ad Age and cited by Ballistic Media.
Why it works: A cinema premiere made the content newsworthy on its own, generating press coverage that a standard digital ad placement would never receive.
11. Chime x Jason Momoa "Bank Smarter This Season" (October 2025)
Chime's first holiday campaign cast actor Jason Momoa as several different everyday shoppers, including a stressed dad, launching across national TV, digital, social and streaming, according to Ballistic Media.
Why it works: Casting one recognizable actor in multiple relatable roles let Chime cover several customer personas in a single campaign without the cost of casting separate talent for each.
12. Monzo "The Book of Money"
Monzo produced a campaign called "The Book of Money" as part of a wave of 2025 and 2026 fintech creative that leaned into physical, tangible metaphors for financial concepts, according to Ballistic Media's roundup of recent campaigns.
Why it works: Giving an abstract concept like personal finance a physical object (a book) to represent it gives an audience something concrete to picture and remember.
13. SoFi "Face of Finance" and stadium naming rights
SoFi ran a campaign called "Face of Finance," part of the same recent wave of fintech creative documented by Ballistic Media, positioning the company across its expanded suite of banking, investing and lending products. SoFi had earlier signed a 20-year naming rights deal for the Los Angeles stadium that opened in 2020, reportedly worth around $30 million a year, which put a personal-finance app alongside legacy financial institutions at Super Bowl level.
Why it works: A single unifying campaign name across multiple financial products (banking, investing, lending) reinforces one brand identity instead of running disconnected product-specific messages, and the stadium deal borrowed credibility from the NFL.
14. Robinhood gamified stock referral program
Robinhood's referral program offers both the referrer and the new user a randomly selected free stock, revealed through a virtual scratch-off card, rather than a fixed cash bonus, according to Extole's analysis of finserv referral programs.
Why it works: Turning the reward into a game with a variable, exciting outcome makes the referral feel like a gift rather than a transaction, encouraging new users to engage with the core investing product immediately.
15. Chime performance marketing and referral incentives
Chime built paid campaigns across Meta and Google that directly highlighted pain points with traditional banks, paired with real customer testimonials and a referral program offering cash bonuses deposited directly into new accounts, according to Everything-PR's analysis of the neobank sector. Everything-PR is a separate company from 5W, published by a shared interest group that includes 5W's founder. Chime later priced its June 2025 Nasdaq IPO at $27 a share, raising $864 million, and reported 8.6 million active members as of March 31, 2025, according to Renaissance Capital. Those IPO figures describe the market outcome, not the return on any one campaign.
Why it works: Avoiding the abstract skyscraper-and-handshake imagery of traditional bank advertising in favor of relatable language and diverse casting signaled accessibility to an audience traditional banks had underserved, and the comparison to bank fees gave customers a simple reason to switch.
16. Stripe developer-first mission narrative
Stripe built its marketing around a mission narrative, positioning itself as a foundational layer of global commerce rather than simply a payment processor, according to Everything-PR's review of fintech marketing campaigns. Its documentation and developer experience did much of the persuading that a consumer ad campaign normally would. In its 2025 annual update, Stripe reported that businesses running on it generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34% from 2024.
Why it works: Positioning the company as infrastructure for the entire internet economy, rather than a single product, gave developers a larger reason to build on Stripe beyond any single feature comparison.
17. Square small business spotlight campaigns
Square built campaigns spotlighting real small businesses as the protagonists of its marketing, humanizing fintech in a way traditional banks had not attempted, according to Everything-PR.
Why it works: Making real merchants the visible face of the brand, rather than the company itself, let prospective small business customers see themselves in the marketing directly.
18. Coinbase Bitcoin referral incentive
Coinbase rewards successful referrals with roughly $10 in Bitcoin for both parties after the new user completes their first trade, according to Extole's review of financial services referral programs.
Why it works: Paying the referral bonus in the company's own core product (cryptocurrency) instead of cash gives new users an immediate, hands-on reason to use the platform for the first time.
For brand visibility benchmarks in answer-first search, see 5W's crypto AI visibility benchmark, which measured how frequently brands like Coinbase and Fidelity appear across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Which fintech PR cases show how brands win legitimacy and lose trust?
Four more cases are judged on earned media, public-market moves and regulatory outcomes rather than creative: a direct listing, a blocked acquisition and two data-led media programs. A fifth, Robinhood's 2021 trading halt, is the cautionary tale.
19. Visa and Plaid merger collapse (2020 to 2021)
Visa agreed to acquire financial data platform Plaid for $5.3 billion in January 2020, but the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in November 2020 alleging the deal would let Visa eliminate a nascent competitive threat to its online debit business, according to the DOJ's own announcement. Visa and Plaid abandoned the merger in January 2021 rather than continue a years-long court fight.
Why it matters: Borrowing a younger company's technology and credibility drew the regulatory scrutiny that killed the deal, a case now cited whenever a fintech infrastructure acquisition draws attention from regulators.
20. Wise direct listing on the London Stock Exchange (2021)
Wise (formerly TransferWise) went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO roadshow, a structure rarely used by a company of its size at the time. Wise shares opened at £8 on July 7, 2021, valuing the company at about £8 billion ($11 billion), according to CNBC.
Why it matters: Letting existing shareholders sell directly to the public, without the standard underwriting process, was a deliberate departure from how fintech listings are normally staged.
21. Bitcoin IRA data-led media program
5WPR paired Bitcoin IRA's company data with commentary from COO Chris Kline to give cryptocurrency, technology and personal finance reporters specific material for market stories. According to 5WPR campaign reporting, the program recorded more than 140 industry-focused placements and more than 2 billion media impressions, with coverage in U.S. News & World Report, CNBC, Yahoo Finance and The Wall Street Journal. Those figures measure earned media activity and estimated exposure, not account openings or investment returns. The full program is in the Bitcoin IRA PR case study.
Why it matters: Company data plus a named executive gave journalists a fact and a source in the same pitch.
22. Payoneer executive thought leadership program
Payoneer, a financial services company that facilitates cross-border B2B transactions across 200 countries, worked with 5W on contributed pieces and media interviews for CEO Scott Galit, plus company research offered to journalists as original data. The program has produced more than 65 million unique media impressions, with coverage in Forbes, Fortune, Entrepreneur, CNBC and TechCrunch, as well as international and payments trade press. The details are in the Payoneer PR case study.
Why it matters: Original research paired with a named CEO gave reporters something to cite, the same pattern as the Bitcoin IRA program.
Cautionary tale: Robinhood's GameStop trading restrictions (2021)
Robinhood built its brand on democratizing access to the stock market, then restricted exactly that access at the moment millions of users needed it most. During the January 2021 GameStop short squeeze, Robinhood halted purchases of GameStop, AMC and several other heavily shorted stocks, citing clearinghouse deposit requirements. The restriction triggered sustained backlash from users who saw it as protecting Wall Street hedge funds at retail traders' expense. CEO Vlad Tenev testified before the House Financial Services Committee in February 2021 to defend the decision. Robinhood was ultimately cleared of claims that it acted to protect hedge funds, but the episode remains the clearest case of a fintech brand's core promise colliding with its own operational reality.
What connects these fintech campaigns?
Every campaign on this list did one of four things: it turned an abstract financial concept into a physical or visual symbol audiences could picture immediately, it built a self-sustaining acquisition loop like a referral program instead of relying only on paid media, it paired the brand with a real customer, celebrity or cultural moment specific enough that it could not be mistaken for a competitor's campaign, or it gave reporters data and a named executive to cite. None treated financial trust as something a single ad alone could establish.
How can a fintech brand apply these campaign patterns?
A fintech brand can apply these patterns by choosing one of four moves and attaching a named metric to it before launch. The table maps each pattern to the campaigns above and to the first step a team can take.
| Pattern | Campaigns on this list | First step for a team |
|---|---|---|
| Turn an abstract product into a visible symbol | Airwallex, Revolut "Money Possibilities," Monzo | Pick the one physical object that stands for the product's promise and build the creative around it |
| Build a referral loop | Revolut, Robinhood, Coinbase, Chime | Pay the reward in the product itself and measure referral share of new accounts |
| Tell a real customer story | Starling, Square, GoCardless x Swim England | Collect testimonials that name the problem and a concrete outcome, then make that customer the lead |
| Give reporters data and a named executive | Bitcoin IRA, Payoneer | Offer company data and a spokesperson in the same pitch |
Stories work in fintech because financial products are complex and trust-sensitive. A story that starts with a customer's problem, shows the change and ends with a result lets a prospect see their own situation in the outcome. Compare story-led content against feature-led content on time on page, conversion and customer feedback to see which moves prospects to act.
Five steps turn the nine PR and positioning lessons into a plan:
- Make the product experience part of the story, as Stripe did with its documentation.
- Borrow institutional credibility on purpose, as SoFi did, and check first whether the borrowing invites regulatory scrutiny, as Visa found with Plaid.
- Name the fee or friction a traditional competitor charges for, as Chime did.
- Give reporters company data and a named executive in the same pitch, the approach in the Bitcoin IRA and Payoneer programs.
- Test the brand's central promise against its worst operational day, the test Robinhood failed in January 2021.
Which metrics should fintech marketers track?
Fintech marketers should track customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion rate by channel, the share of new accounts that come from referrals, and app store rankings and reviews. These tie a campaign to revenue, where reach and engagement alone do not.
What rules apply to celebrity and influencer campaigns?
Celebrity and influencer campaigns must disclose any material connection between the endorser and the brand. The FTC's Endorsement Guides FAQ explains that connections such as payment or free products that consumers would not expect should be disclosed clearly. This matters for campaigns like Nuvei's, where the actor is also an investor. Fintech teams should have compliance counsel review any endorser relationship, along with the claims the endorser makes about rates, returns or product performance.
How were these campaigns selected, and what do the figures measure?
Cases 1 to 18 are marketing campaigns documented by the named sources in each entry. Cases 19 to 22 are PR and public-market cases. Third-party figures come from the named source in each section, such as the Department of Justice announcement on Visa and Plaid, Stripe's 2025 annual update, CNBC's report on the Wise listing and Renaissance Capital's IPO pricing reports for Klarna and Chime. IPO and listing figures describe the market outcome of each company, not the return on any single campaign. The Bitcoin IRA and Payoneer figures come from 5WPR campaign reporting published on each case study page, and they measure earned media exposure, not account growth or revenue.
How is AI search changing fintech marketing and PR?
Consumers increasingly ask AI engines direct questions such as "which bank has the lowest fees" or "best fintech app for international transfers," and the engines return named recommendations built from regulatory records, review data and citation volume rather than ad spend. 5W's Banking AI Map 2026 and Banking AI Visibility Index 2026 track which banks and fintech brands ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity name when consumers ask which institution to trust.
Where can you find more campaign roundups and fintech guides?
For campaign results ranked across every industry, see the top 25 PR campaigns of all time, and for the business-buyer side of marketing, the best B2B marketing campaigns. The PR side of this category has its own nine-case list in the best fintech PR campaigns, and the best crisis PR campaigns cover what happens when a public promise fails. Fintech teams planning their own program can start with 5W's financial services and fintech practice, the fintech media relations guide, the guide to choosing a fintech PR agency and the guide to personal branding for fintech CEOs. No agency can guarantee media coverage or an AI citation.
Where can you find more best marketing campaign guides?
5W publishes a best-campaigns guide for each industry, with the result each campaign reported. Browse the guides to the best toy marketing campaigns, best alcohol marketing campaigns, best supplement marketing campaigns, best restaurant marketing campaigns, best beauty marketing campaigns and best home goods marketing campaigns.
More industries: the best entertainment and sports marketing campaigns, best pet marketing campaigns, best HR tech marketing campaigns, best franchise marketing campaigns and best B2B marketing campaigns. All of them sit in the 5W blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a fintech campaign successful?
The campaigns on this list made an abstract financial product concrete through a visual symbol, a referral loop, a data-led media pitch or a real customer story, and tied the work to a measurable result.
Do referral programs work for fintech companies?
Revolut, Robinhood, Coinbase and Chime all built growth on referral incentives, and the reported results on this list show referral loops compound without a proportional rise in paid media spend.
Do fintech celebrity endorsements need disclosure?
Yes, when the endorser has a material connection to the brand that the audience would not expect, such as payment or an ownership stake.
Why did Visa abandon its acquisition of Plaid?
Visa agreed to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion in January 2020, but the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in November 2020 alleging the deal would let Visa eliminate a competitive threat to its online debit business. Visa and Plaid abandoned the merger in January 2021 rather than continue a lengthy court fight.
Why did Robinhood restrict GameStop trading in 2021?
Robinhood halted purchases of GameStop, AMC and other heavily shorted stocks during the January 2021 short squeeze, citing clearinghouse deposit requirements. The restriction triggered sustained user backlash, and CEO Vlad Tenev testified before Congress in February 2021 to defend the decision.
How much did SoFi pay for its stadium naming rights?
SoFi signed a 20-year naming rights deal reportedly worth around $30 million a year for the Los Angeles stadium that opened in 2020, giving the fintech brand Super Bowl-level visibility alongside legacy financial institutions.
What makes Wise's listing different from a typical IPO?
Wise went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO roadshow, letting existing shareholders sell shares directly to the public without the standard underwriting process. Its shares opened at £8 on July 7, 2021, valuing the company at about £8 billion.
What results did the Bitcoin IRA and Payoneer PR programs report?
5WPR campaign reporting recorded more than 140 industry-focused placements and more than 2 billion media impressions for Bitcoin IRA. Payoneer's program with 5W produced more than 65 million unique media impressions. These figures measure media activity and estimated exposure, not account or investment performance.
