The brands making finance fun on TikTokBy Mia
Mia

News17.05.24
4 min read

In the last decade, modern banks and fintech brands have been working hard to shake off the stuffy stereotypes of their industry. And honestly? They’re doing a great job. Across the board, we’re seeing finance brands adopt a more personable tone of voice, experiment with current design trends and—you guessed it—have more fun on social.

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The brands making finance fun on TikTok

A new era for finance

Take Nude, for example, they’re an app helping people save for their first home. On TikTok, they’re jumping on trending sounds and creating relatable content for their target audience—like this video that peeks into the notes app of a first-time buyer.

Juno is a financial education app for women—“The Duolingo of Money” as it says in their bio. We love how they curate topical articles on the subject of women’s wealth and use their videos to add further context. The content itself might not be particularly “funny”, but it’s a fun and engaging way to educate people about money (without sending them to sleep)

A special mention has to go to Starling Bank, which does an incredible job of partnering with creators. Our faves include Jack’s impression of that friend with an inconvenient bank or Monica and Christopher’s hairdresser gossip about Chris and his new bf opening a joint account (with Starling, ofc). This is an ideal social strategy if you, or the people in your marketing team, would rather sit through a 12hr crypto-bro podcast than be on camera

One thing we’ve noticed about these fun-ance brands (sorry) is that their content is less about money itself, and more about people’s personal relationships with money. From the challenges of saving for a home, to buyer’s remorse—it’s all about relatability. When you think of the ways money can impact your audience’s lifestyle, you’ll have a fat stack of fun content ideas in no time

Dive deeper 🤿

Step Bank’s Educ-ATE series teaches Gen Z how to save money on food

Go Fund Yourself masters the art of crowd-sourced content

Monzo’s senior social media manager talks about their content strategy

New obsession: The Fintech Marketing podcast from 11:FS

Cleo uses this ‘duet this’ feature to find their new ‘Chief Spending Officer’

Insights from the team

Watch the video : Content ideas for fintech brands

In the pool with…Yoann from Nude Finance

Yoann Pavy is the CMO of Nude Finance, the app that helps you save for your first home. He’s based in London and previously headed up growth for the likes of Depop and Deliveroo.

👉 Connect with Yoann on LinkedIn and subscribe to his podcast, “In Growth We Trust

Why do you think finance, in particular, has had such a massive tone-shift in the last decade?

I think it has a lot to do with the rise of mobile-first banking. Before, banks would always speak to their customers face-to-face in-branch, but now, a lot of people manage their money through apps. Without this human-to-human contact, finance brands are bringing a more human side to their tone of voice and content.

What advice would you give to marketing teams in finance who want to start making fun content, but they’re working for a very traditional brand?

I would say, forget everything you’ve done, forget all the processes, and all the rigid branding and go back to “what do people actually share with each other?” Either, one-to-many (e.g. on TikTok) or one-to-one (e.g. what do you send to your friends on WhatsApp?)

My other piece of advice would be to prioritise being responsive. For a piece of content to resonate, you can’t plan it 3 months in advance. And it can’t go through multiple rounds of approval. You have to monitor what’s happening on the internet today and be ready to react.

What’s your favourite piece of fun content from Nude?

Our Time to Buy a Calculator. It’s basically a lo-fi version of what the Nude app does. It’s fun, it’s interactive and it still brings us customers.

For you, what’s one of the easiest fun content ideas to execute?

Pay content creators (not influencers, content creators) to make videos for you every day. They can either shoot content at home, or interview people on the street. It’s super straightforward.

And if you want to start even smaller, create memes. Research the trending memes that are doing the rounds on the internet that week, and tailor them to your business or industry. You could make up to 5 in half an hour. Easy.

Content idea of the week 💡

What would be in your target customer’s notes app?

That's a wrap on finance for this series. Did we cover the best brands or is there some we've missed? Drop us a DM on social and let us know what you think.

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