Shakepay Builds One Campaign to Win Both Customers and Merchants at Once 🇨🇦
We're also covering Revolut paying employees to sign up business banking clients 🇬🇧, Mercury riding the AI startup boom 🇺🇸 & Stripe investing to make sure its marketing team is using AI more 🇮🇪
🇨🇦 Shakepay Builds One Campaign to Win Both Customers and Merchants at Once
Canadian crypto exchange Shakepay has launched a 21-day campaign that recruits consumers and local businesses through the same loop, turning a card waitlist into a two-sided growth engine. Customers earn bitcoin rewards by tapping their virtual Shakepay card in-store, and the same taps let participating merchants claim bitcoin tied to that activity at their location.
Customers can refer local business owners to Shakepay for Business, the firm’s existing corporate product, and both the customer and the merchant earn bitcoin when they do.
A map layer drives the loop as stores “turn orange” when enough customers tap there, and shoppers compete for status by becoming the “Mayor” of a location, which pushes them back into the same shops to keep spending and keep the map lit.
The campaign lets customers earn an asset they own rather than points locked inside one programme, chief executive Jean Amiouny (pictured above) said. “Most rewards programs give people points they can only use inside someone else’s system. We think Canadians should be able to earn an asset they can actually own,” he said as quoted by PR Newswire.ca
Access is capped to fuel urgency with the top 21,000 on the waitlist get early access to the physical card, and the top 2,100 receive a launch edition engraved with their rank.
Growth metric: 21,000 early-access spots
The waitlist caps physical card early access at the top 21,000 customers, with the top 2,100 earning a rank-engraved launch edition card.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider
🇬🇧 Revolut Is Paying Every Employee to Sell Business Banking Ahead of Its IPO
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, pictured above, offering all 10,000-plus employees £1,000 (1,350 USD) each to bring in new business customers.
Revolut reported record 2025 results, £4.5 billion (6.1 billion usd) in revenue, up 46% year on year, and £1.7 billion (2.2 billion USD) in pre-tax profit. But business banking accounted for just 16% of that revenue despite growing 53% year on year, faster than the consumer side. The company had roughly 767,000 business customers by end of 2024, up 33%, a strong growth rate sitting inside a business that is still overwhelmingly consumer-led.
Revolut is targeting an IPO no earlier than 2028 at a reported valuation of $150 billion to $200 billion. To justify that multiple on a public exchange, it needs to demonstrate it is not just a consumer payments app with strong unit economics, but a full-spectrum bank. Storonsky said as much in his memo cited by Bloomberg, writing that legacy banks treat B2B as “a stagnant side-bet” and that Revolut intends to make it the engine of its growth and valuation.
Growth metric: 53% B2B revenue growth in 2025
Revolut’s business banking segment grew 53% year on year in 2025 yet still accounts for just 16% of the company’s total £4.5 billion in revenue (6.1 billion USD).
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & Bloomberg
🇮🇪 Stripe Created a $198,000 Role Just to Make Sure Its Marketing Team Actually Uses AI
Payments giant Stripe has created a new internal marketing role, the Forward Deployed AI Accelerator, paying between $132,000 and $198,000 annually, to make AI the default mode across the entire marketing organization.
According to the job listing, the person hired will use AI to improve workflows, coach team members on adoption, and systematically scale what is already working across the marketing function. “We’re looking for people who have already lived the transformation they’ll be driving for others,” the posting reads. “You’ve used AI to fundamentally change how you work not as a novelty, but as your default operating mode.”
The role is borrowed from a model Palantir pioneered which is placing forward deployed employees inside organisations to drive technology integration. Stripe, led by CEO Patrick Collison (pictured above), is applying the same logic internally, which is a meaningful distinction. Stripe’s hire suggests that closing the adoption gap requires requires a dedicated internal champion with a mandate and a budget to match.
Growth metric: $132,000 to $198,000 salary
Stripe’s Forward Deployed AI Accelerator salary range signals how seriously the company values closing the gap between AI availability and AI adoption inside its marketing organization.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & Inc.
🇺🇸 Mercury Is Betting That AI Startup Formation Is the Most Reliable Growth Engine in Banking Right Now
US-based neobank Mercury is seeing a direct surge in new account openings driven by the AI startup boom and is building AI agent tools to serve that wave.
A third of early-stage US startups already bank with Mercury. CEO Immad Akhund, pictured above, told CNBC that the growth is coming from both AI startups and non-AI companies using AI to build and launch businesses faster than ever. “We’ve seen a lot of growth, especially recently, and a lot of that comes down to AI being a big enabler for entrepreneurship,” he said. Mercury opens accounts at the earliest stage of company formation.
To serve that customer base, Mercury recently launched AI agent tools that let businesses manage their accounts through conversational language. Later this year it plans a broader AI interface covering payments, invoicing, and financial management, replacing the traditional banking dashboard with a tool that works.
Mercury has been profitable for four years and hit $650 million in annualised revenue. It also recently received conditional approval to become a federally regulated bank, which would expand its lending capability and reduce reliance on partner banks.
Growth metric: One third of US early-stage startups bank with Mercury
Mercury serves more than 300,000 customers, including a third of early-stage US startups
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & CNBC
🇺🇸 Parker Raised $200 Million and Still Failed and Its Founder Says Compounding GTM Was the Missing Piece
US-based corporate card startup Parker has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy following a failed $90 million acquisition deal, ending a seven-year run that included $200 million in funding, $65 million in revenue, and over $1 billion in annualised processing volume.
In a LinkedIn post, founder Yacine Sibous, pictured above, listed six things he would do differently. Number five in his list is to invest in compounding go to market (GTM) channels early. Parker’s GTM approach, based on its own published content, leaned heavily on case studies, founder testimonials, and product-focused blog content which are channels that serve existing customers well but do not compound into brand awareness over time. Meanwhile competitors like Brex and Ramp were investing early in community and word-of-mouth loops that compounded over time.
Compounding GTM channels such as SEO, community, referral programmes, thought leadership are slow to start and hard to justify when paid acquisition delivers faster results. But they are the channels that keep working when paid budgets get cut and market conditions tighten. Parker found that out the hard way.
Growth metric: $1 billion in annualised volume, zero surviving brand
Parker processed more than $1 billion in annualised card volume before filing for bankruptcy
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & PYMNTS
🌐 Fintech Marketers Are Paying for Intent Data They Cannot Convert
US-based demand generation firm Energize Marketing has published an industry report showing that almost every fintech marketing team now buys third-party intent data, but hardly anyone of them think it works. Some 99% of B2B technology marketers use it, while just 7% rate it very effective.
ignals about who is ready to buy arrive fast and in large numbers, but teams cannot line up their outreach, message and follow-up at the moment a buyer is paying attention. Once that moment passes, the brief says, fintech buyers simply move on.
According to the report, marketers point to slow or patchy sales follow-up (54%) and unclear lead scoring (46%) as the main reasons good leads never turn into deals. In fast fintech sales cycles, a late reply chips away at buyer confidence and makes the seller look disorganised rather than careful.
Intent data only pays off when it changes what people do. A signal left as an alert just adds clutter but a signal that triggers a clear action, with someone responsible and a set response time, turns into pipeline. So the next dollar, the report suggests, is better spent on a system that acts on the data than on buying more of it.
The report also stated that leaders have stopped asking how much activity a campaign created and started asking which campaigns drove real deals and how fast those deals moved.
Growth metric: 99% adoption, 7% effective
Nearly all B2B technology marketers now use third-party intent data, but only 7% rate it as very effective, the widest execution gap in the report.
Source: Fintech Growth Insider
🇬🇧 Monzo Adds Three Million Customers in a Year With Word of Mouth Doing the Heavy Lifting
UK-based digital bank Monzo added a record three million customers in the year to March 2026, and most of them came through recommendations rather than advertising.
Some 79% of the new joiners signed up via word of mouth, the largest single cohort in the company’s history, while its Net Promoter Score, a measure of how likely customers are to recommend a brand, rose to 76, according to the company’s 2026 annual report.
Monzo’s chief executive Diana Layfield framed this as customers handing the bank more of their financial lives rather than just trying it out. Monzo lifted total marketing costs 46% or £44.7 million (60 million USD) to £143.1 million (193.22 million USD), partly to launch a UK-wide business banking brand campaign. But the sharpest rise was in referral costs, which tripled, up £21.6 million (29.16 million USD) to £29.5 million (39.83 million USD), as the bank paid to reward customers who brought in others. Monzo’s customer now stand at 15.2 million.
Monzo is spending more on the channel that already works rather than chasing reach through traditional advertising. Referred customers cost less to acquire than those from other channels, so pouring money into referrals lowers the average cost of each new customer even as the total marketing bill climbs.
Revenue rose 39% to £1.7 billion (2.3 billion USD) and adjusted profit before tax climbed 20% to £172.6 million (233.05 million USD), the bank’s third straight year of profit.
Growth metric: 79% of new customers joined through word of mouth
A record three million customers joined Monzo in FY2026, with nearly four in five arriving on the recommendation of an existing customer.
Source: Fintech Growth Insider
🇮🇳 Fintech Ad of The Week: PhonePe Is Using Travel Content to Sell Its Way Into the Credit Card Market
India-based digital payments giant PhonePe, backed by Walmart and valued at $14.5 billion, with over 650 million registered users and a merchant network of more than 47 million, is running a creator-led campaign to promote its co-branded SBI credit card.
The campaign is part of a broader PhonePe strategy to move beyond payments and deepen its presence in financial products, credit cards, insurance, and wealth management, by embedding them inside content that its target audience is already consuming. Rather than advertising the card directly, PhonePe is using travel creators to position its credit benefits as a natural part of a lifestyle its users already aspire to.
Source: Fintech Growth Insider
Who Am I?
Hi, my name is Julien Brault.
From 2017 to 2024, I was the CEO of Hardbacon, a fintech I co-founded, which reached 400,000 unique visitors at its peak.
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