No one understands what your fintech actually does

You’re not alone.

In fact, you’re in the majority.

Most fintech companies – especially the early-stage or infrastructure-heavy ones – struggle to explain what they actually do. And not just to the general public either. I’m talking about investors, journalists, partners, even prospects who’ve sat through your pitch deck and nodded politely. They walk away fuzzy.

That’s not their fault. It’s yours.

This piece is about why that happens, why it matters, and what you can do to fix it. Because no brand survives on surface-level messaging. Especially not in fintech, where trust, clarity, and competence aren’t just nice-to-haves – they’re what get you in the room.

The fintech fog: where clarity gets lost

You might think the problem is complexity. You’ve got APIs, KYC waterfalls, fraud risk matrices, BIN sponsorship layers. Your product isn’t simple, so your story can’t be either.

But here’s the thing: complexity isn’t the issue.

Leading with complexity is.

Founders often confuse precision with completeness. They want to sound credible. So they reach for detail – diagrams, acronyms, layered value chains. In trying to prove they understand the architecture, they forget to explain the outcome.

Meanwhile, the person sitting across from you is wondering:

“What actually changes if we use this?”

Not: “How does your orchestration engine talk to PSPs in five currencies?”

One earns the next meeting. The other doesn’t.

Symptom check: are you guilty?

If your fintech shows any of these signs, it’s likely the message isn’t landing:

• You use the word “seamless” on your homepage. That word is wallpaper. It explains nothing.
• You describe your product by triangulation. “It’s like Stripe meets HubSpot for LatAm.” The listener may nod – but they’re still guessing.
• You open sales calls with a 7-minute screen-share. If the demo is doing the explaining, the story hasn’t been told yet.
• Your pitch morphs depending on who’s in the room. That’s not adaptability. It’s indecision.
• You’ve updated your website four times this year – but it still doesn’t feel right. Because the writing isn’t the problem. The clarity upstream is.

The cost of being unclear

This isn’t just about messaging. It hits your numbers.

Here’s how it plays out:

• Your sales team start guessing. Low-fit leads. Muddled intros. Misaligned calls.
• Your account managers over-explain. The first 15 minutes of every meeting go to education, not momentum.
• Your paid traffic bounces. Big-sounding ads send people to a page that doesn’t tell them what you do.
• Your product team gets pulled in five directions. Everyone’s selling something slightly different.
• Your competitor – with worse tech but sharper copy – wins the deal.

None of this shows up in one tidy chart. It’s a slow bleed.

And it’s easy to misdiagnose: pipeline, pricing, sales enablement.

But often? The buyer didn’t understand you. So they didn’t choose you.

A quick example: the fintech that hid its own value

I once worked with a company targeting regulated lenders. Their headline?

“Streamlining compliance workflows for modern lending institutions.”

I’m using a touch of artistic licence to protect their privacy, but you get the idea. The headline sounded very serious. But no buyer could tell what it meant.

Inside the team, the real story was clearer: An API that reduced manual checks by 70%, got underwriters to a “yes” in under two minutes, and went live in five days. But none of that made it to the front page of the website.

We reframed to something more like this:

“Pre-approve borrowers in under two minutes – with full compliance.”

Demo requests rose over 30% in a month. Sales stopped improvising intros. The product marketing team finally had a centre to build around.

It wasn’t magic. It was just alignment.

What good messaging sounds like

Real-world examples – tweaked for anonymity, but true in shape:

• “Banking-as-a-Service that lets you launch a card programme in weeks, not months.” = Outcome-forward. Stakes clear. You know who it’s for.
• “A smart escrow layer that protects freelancers from late payments.” = Targeted. Concrete. Instantly legible.
• “A KYC API that onboards users in 90 seconds with 98% match accuracy.” = Performance-based. Sharply quantified. You believe it.

Now compare:

“Accelerating innovation in digital financial experiences for tomorrow’s connected consumers.”

Who’s that for? What does it fix? What happens next?

When clarity fails, so does attention.

How to actually fix it

You don’t get to clarity by asking, “What should we say?”

You get there by answering five harder questions:

1. Who is your buyer, specifically? Not a persona – an actual job role with a pain.
2. What’s broken in their world? Don’t generalise. Name the friction.
3. What are they doing instead right now? Old system? Manual workaround? Custom build?
4. What changes when they use you? What becomes possible? What becomes unnecessary?
5. How do you prove it? With metrics. With a claim. With a visual. With anything that says: this isn’t fluff.

Write a line your sales team would steal:

“We take fraud risk off your roadmap.”

“We replace patchwork payout flows for gig platforms.”

“We help lenders approve borrowers in under two minutes.”

If your own team wouldn’t lead with it, neither will your market.

The framework in motion

Let’s run a weak line through the questions:

“We’re a seamless payments platform helping businesses scale across borders.”

Sounds fine. Means nothing.

• Buyer? “Businesses” tells us nothing.
• Friction? Vague. Scaling is an aspiration, not a problem.
• Status quo? No contrast, no image of what’s broken.
• Change? What gets better?
• Proof? None.

Now sharpen:

“We help marketplace platforms settle cross-border payouts in local currencies – without needing a developer team.”

You can see it. You can imagine someone needing it.

It’s not poetry. But it’s clear. That’s enough.

You can’t scale what isn’t understood

This is where most teams stop. They shouldn’t.

They redesign the site. They hire content marketers. They launch a podcast.

But if the message at the centre is still foggy, none of it sticks. Not with prospects. Not with partners. Not even with their own teams.

If people don’t understand what you do – and what changes when they say yes – you’re asking them to take a leap they won’t make.

You don’t need more words.

You need the right ones.

The kind your sales team wouldn’t dare rewrite.

The kind your buyers quote back to you.

The kind that start a conversation – because they’ve already done the first job:

They’ve made you understood.