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Trust in an organisation is vital and as CMOs we need to learn how to foster it and encourage behaviours that enable trusted relationships, which has a great impact on improving performance.
In this edition of our “CMO talk” interview series, we hear from Leeya Hendricks, Chief Marketing Officer at Delta Capita.
Delta Capita is the financial services arm of its parent company, Prytek, of which Leeya is also the CMO. Headquartered in London with offices all around the world, Delta Capita works with financial institutions to help them stay on top of compliance with regulations, simplify operations, reduce costs and innovate their business models and leverage leading fintechs.
As the world of fintech develops, financial regulations increase and more companies move towards the cloud and digital, Delta Capita's offering is becoming more relevant than ever. In our chat, Leeya touches on Delta Capita's recent rebranding and how the company has navigated the process during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She drops some very interesting tips on why and how to reinvent a brand and develop a successful brand strategy, including:
You joined Delta Capita last year, right in the middle of the pandemic. What was the year like for you in your new role? What’s it like to be a CMO at Delta Capita?
We are all operating in busy times, everybody experiencing their own challenges but for me, it has provided an opportunity to strengthen relationships as you can engage more frequently with your customers and create one community. The same with your teams, the key to your customer and teams’ relationships will be 'trust'. Delta Capita is a great firm focused on trust. Trust in an organisation is vital and as CMOs we need to learn how to foster it and encourage behaviours that enable trusted relationships, which has a great impact on improving performance.
I enjoy being part of an environment of designing and developing new services and tools leveraging our proprietary technology and our fintech portfolio companies which is a great space for ideation and innovation. I am also involved in merger and acquisition strategies and driving diversification and expansion. I lead and manage two strategies; as I also perform the CMO role for our parent company, Prytek. Prytek runs a number of verticals and Delta Capita is the financial services arm of Prytek. Prytek focuses on building technologies and delivering managed services, a combination of Deep Tech Solutions with Managed Services and Capital, providing the capability to lift out entire operations to create more efficient businesses.
What’s unique about marketing a fintech? And do you have a favourite fintech brand or campaign?
Delta Capita is a managed services, technology solutions and consulting provider. A core focus is on brand building and positioning our business as an authority and highlighting our expertise across our various solutions and services and positioning ourselves different to our competitors in a highly saturated market.
B2B marketers in this space are also used to dealing with smaller budgets and being able to do a lot with a little, and as such being more creative and innovative in campaigns and marketing strategies. As a B2B fintech marketer, you are at the forefront of technology and finance and not only marketing this to your clients but leveraging it as well, engaging with finance, business development and the solution teams to achieve outcomes.
I would not say I have a favourite fintech brand, there are several innovative brands especially in the data insights space such as TipRanks, a Prytek portfolio company that serves as a comprehensive investment tool for traders and financial institutions. It ranks financial experts based on measured performance and the accuracy of their predictions, so investors know who to trust when making investment decisions.
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In February, Delta Capita went through a complete rebrand. Can you explain why the company decided to rebrand?
The rebrand marked the next phase in Delta Capita’s continued growth as a company. It aligned with the need for our brand to reflect the pace with which Delta Capita is changing the Financial Services space and is geared to better serve clients. A market strategy focused on creating a unified brand and reinforcing our unique positioning whilst communicating why we are different from our competitors and gaining a greater market share. Delta Capita’s new strap-line; ‘Reinventing the Financial Services Value Chain’ reflects Delta Capita’s focus to reinvent our customers’ ‘value chain’ and considers the way value is added along the chain, both to the products and services we offer, and what Delta Capita can perform on their behalf.
What has become clear is that we need to continue to reinvent ourselves to stay relevant and to consistently deliver value to our clients.
What did the rebranding process look like? Can you give us a behind-the-scenes insight into the overall rebranding campaign?
To rebrand a business is to take it in a new direction, which we had. It is about getting to the core of what you stand for, consolidating your aims and vision, and then modifying your image to reflect these changes.
In any rebrand strategy, you want to first do a brand audit, gather all relevant information, before making any decisions to rebrand. Then once the analysis is complete you develop the architecture and the positioning. Then create a brand identity and aligned with this, develop content and map out the persona-driven content to activate the brand and drive lead generation. A few key steps:
Start with the business reason and purpose
Research your firm and your target clients
Use positioning and messaging to capture your brand strategy
Build your brand identity
Build your website and online presence
Develop marketing collateral
Outline a brand building plan
Let’s talk about the brand. What are the main features of the new brand?
We have evolved our brand and enhanced the look and feel to be more inclusive and forward-thinking. This highlights how we are driving positive change and development. The brand aligns with the need to reflect the pace with which Delta Capita is changing the financial services space and is geared to better service clients.
We provide a Business Operating Platform-as-a-Service, a trusted best in class service for Financial Services, powered by the best and most modern technology. We help Financial Services institutions reduce costs and improve business processes and technology that allow our clients to focus on propositions that power their business while Delta Capita operates critical functions on their behalf. We also help our clients adopt modern technology in a mutualised way, dramatically reducing the cost of implementation enabling them to be a healthier and more performant business.
What was the hardest part of the rebrand? How did you tackle this? Any lessons learned during the process?
Bringing various stakeholders together on the direction of the brand and being able to manage and align all stakeholders on the single-minded vision. Stakeholders' buy-in is critical to ensure an aligned and fruitful outcome.
As CMO, I am responsible for communications, brand building, brand development and M&A strategies, scaling channels to generate demand, new markets, and work with our board to grow the business globally.
I started with a survey of key stakeholders to determine how they are feeling about the organisation and our brand including the strength of our unique value proposition, our traction against competitive organisations, any concerns etc, without being too biased or leading, which helps the stakeholders come to their own conclusions by getting them to think about the issues that could be solved by a rebranding effort. I then shared the results of the survey, discussed brand strategy refinement.
The key is to ensure the discussion starts out as a strategic discussion; it avoids the issue of people’s attachments to specific brand identity elements.
Then, align customer research to determine brand perceptions. Then finally a consensus-building brand positioning workshop with key stakeholders. The result, a new brand positioning statement including the brand’s essence, promise, archetype and personality. We also revisited our mission, vision and values as well as our purpose, all elements of setting up the messaging matrix.
What about the activation? Did the Covid-19 pandemic affect the campaign? Overall, how has your marketing team navigated the pandemic? Have you made any changes to your overall marketing mix?
Launching a rebrand with a key focus via digital channels, during the pandemic, meant significantly more eyeballs but it also meant you had to stand out from the crowd. During the pandemic, we have focused on helping our customers access expert content to enable them on their technology and transformation journey.
We launched The DC Reinventing Series with a focus on human-centric marketing and a personalised approach and placed human traits and empathy at the heart of our strategy. We leveraged the opportunity to harness an effective content marketing strategy which helped not only connect with our clients effectively but also strengthen living our newly launched brand.
Our content marketing strategy included expert content from subject matter experts. The content focused on storytelling and humanising our brand, through our experts, however allowing the audience to get to know our Delta Capita employees, our innovation, technology, services, and expertise, and how we are reinventing and bringing our clients closer to who we are as a brand.
What are you hoping to achieve from the rebrand over the next two to three years?
After a fresh new rebrand at the start of the year, we aimed to live our brand internally and externally. We launched the DC Reinventing Series, which included a variety of content such as podcasts, interviews, and profile stories. It is a series on reinventing business models, technology innovation and getting to know our experts at Delta Capita. Our core focus on content marketing meant a key focus on ensuring the campaign is consistent and compelling across each stage of the buying journey and focused on the handoff from one buying stage to the next.
Quite often in B2B marketing, you see really good top-of-funnel activity, then it tails off until it gets to a brochureware asset at the end.
Our focus is on how we maintain thoughtfulness across the buyer journey. As B2B marketers are now being asked to give insight into sales and client management, we are looking at extracting data and insights from clients as we are going through the buyer journey to enrich or change our campaigns.
What’s next for Delta Capita?
The ongoing compliance and risk management agenda and the cost pressures on our clients’ businesses are continuing to distract them from their core purpose. In 2021 and beyond we will support our clients to focus on their core propositions that truly differentiate them, whilst Delta Capita runs their complex non-differentiating functions.
Financial Services firms must focus on what is differentiating for their clients and consider alternative approaches to everything else. We are enabling our customers to think beyond traditional operating models and harness the true potential of new technologies. We have focused on how we shape our brand messaging so that we are relevant to the fast-changing financial technology market and align ourselves with our clients.
Also being agile and adaptable and creating responsive campaigns, tailoring the content to data and insights for our customers’ needs and making sure we are offering the right services to be relevant. With an emphasis on our employer brand, we have focussed significantly on living our brand vision of ‘reinventing’ and harnessing our entrepreneurial spirit, our drive to achieve, our diverse colleague base and the collaborative way in our working.
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