Positioning & Messaging
Positioning and messaging that says something.
Positioning strategy, a message architecture, and financial services communications. A core narrative your team can actually use.
Who this is for
Three signals your messaging isn’t landing.
Financial services communications are layered and complex. In some cases, the website reads fine, and the deck is clean. Nothing in the language is wrong, exactly, and that tends to be the problem. Somewhere between what the company does and what the words say, the reason to choose you goes missing.
Your messaging would work on a competitor’s site.
Secure. Compliant. Seamless. Built for scale. If a competitor could paste your homepage onto theirs and nobody would notice, the words are doing decorative work rather than commercial work. What usually helps is finding the one claim you can defend that they cannot, and building outward from there instead of assembling the same four adjectives in a different order.
every team describes the product differently.
Sales says one thing, the website says another, the founder says a third in every meeting. When the message is not written down and agreed on, it fragments, and a fragmented message is a weak one. You need a single narrative the whole team can run on, from the homepage to the first sales call to the investor deck.
buyers don’t understand what you actually do.
The product is complex, the category is new, and prospects leave the call still unsure where you fit. That is a positioning problem, not a design problem, and no amount of new copy fixes it. It gets solved upstream, by deciding what you are, who you are for, and why it matters, before another word gets written.
How I work
Messaging, positioning, and financial services comms you can defend.
Most financial services communications fail at review rather than at strategy. The narrative tests well, a claim gets flagged, the qualifier goes in, and what reaches the site is a hedged version of something that was interesting three drafts earlier.
Positioning comes first, which means settling where you sit in the category, who you are for, and what you can say that a competitor genuinely cannot. That last part is where the constraint starts working in your favor. In a regulated category, the defensible claims are a shorter list than the ones you want, and the defensible ones are usually more specific, which makes them harder to copy.
Message architecture is what holds the story together downstream. A core narrative, a value proposition, and the proof underneath both, structured so the homepage, the deck, and a first sales call stay recognizably the same argument. Claims get pressure-tested against review while there is still room to change them.
Expression is where most of it survives or gets lost. The message has to work in the mouths of people who did not write it, which means a founder on stage and a rep on a first call reach for the same language without being handed a script.
What twenty years in payments and treasury mostly buys you here is speed. I know which claims will not clear review before we build a narrative on top of them, and I can argue positioning with a subject matter expert while we are still in the room.
— Inside a typical engagement
Engagement models
Three ways to work together.
Choose financial services communications services packaged as a focused sprint to build the strategy, a monthly retainer when ownership is ongoing, or a custom engagement. Different shapes, same standard of judgment.
Positioning Sprint
A focused four- to six-week engagement on a single deliverable: a positioning framework, a message hierarchy, a launch narrative, or a website message rewrite. Built to drop straight into what your GTM team is already doing.
— Investment
Strategic Messaging Advisor
Ongoing positioning and messaging counsel. You own the through-line on how the company and its products are described in market, on a standing strategic cadence with async access for the calls that surface between sessions. Three-month minimum.
— Investment
Custom Messaging & Positioning
Repositioning programs, major product launches, market entry, or analyst-relations builds that span positioning and messaging across multiple workstreams.
— Investment
Early-stage pricing available for fintech companies pre-Series B, pre-Series A regardless of headcount, or under 75 employees. Pricing reflects the cash constraints of building before scale, not the value of the work.
How an engagement moves
From buyer research to a message your team can run with.
This isn’t months of workshops and slides before anything gets done. I get clear on your audience, sharpen your positioning, and give your team a message they can use—in weeks, not quarters.
01 / Weeks 1 to 2
Audience and message auditConversations with customers and sales leadership. Sales call reviews. An audit of your current messaging and where it blends in. Competitive messaging analysis. By the end of week two, the picture of who you are talking to and where your message is losing them is on paper.
02 / Weeks 2 to 4
Positioning and narrativePositioning, core narrative, value proposition, and the proof that backs it. The strategic decisions that everything downstream will ladder up to.
03 / Weeks 4 to 6
Architecture and standardsMessage architecture, hierarchy, voice and tone, compliance-aware claims, and the framework documentation. The infrastructure that lets the message survive contact with the team that has to use it.
04 / Ongoing
Ongoing operations and recalibrationFor retainer engagements, I run message rollout across website, sales, and content, and quarterly recalibration as the product, category, and competition shift.
Let’s talk
When financial services communications need direction, start here.
A thirty-minute call to figure out whether a content marketing strategy engagement is the right fit. Honest answers, including when it isn’t.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Frequently asked questions
We compiled a list of answers to address your most pressing questions regarding our services.