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Picture the worst content hire you could make. She’s probably technically fluent and never misses a deadline. She knows the difference between ACH and RTP, can define synthetic identity fraud in its sleep, and never makes a grammatical error. And despite all this, she has absolutely zero taste. She has no ear for your brand and no instinct for what makes your company sound like itself instead of the company down the street. She’s the technically perfect writer who communicates facts flawlessly and says nothing interesting ever.
Now picture that every fintech company in your category hired that exact same person. Same writer, same instincts, same default voice, working for all of you at once.
Welcome to fintech writing today. AI has evened the playing field and wiped out distinction and voice in the process. We’re not experiencing a productivity revolution; we’ve stumbled into a homogenization event.
Uh Oh. Volume Wasn’t Your Problem
I’ve worked with fintechs for the past two decades, and the biggest hurdle has always been capacity. “My team’s too small.” “We downsized and marketing was the first to get the buzz cut.” Content wants and needs almost always outpaced budget. So teams focused on repurposing or just let content go dark. Volume was a real constraint. And now it’s not.
Everyone solved it, at the same time. In the same way.
The unspoken thing? You solved the volume problem the same way everyone else did, and while it saved you money, it cost you an advantage. AI truly is the great equalizer, but in the content game, you don’t want to be equal. Parity is a death knell in a crowded market like fintech. Sure, it’s cheaper — a cheaper way to disappear. Every player in payments fraud is publishing the same competent, fact-forward, AI-assembled explainer on vendor impersonation, the explainers cancel each other out. You’re all loud at the same frequency. The reader hears noise.
Then, they start to ignore it.
The thing that was supposed to be your edge became the price of admission. And it happened so fast that most teams never noticed the ground shift under them. They’re still celebrating that the blog is full.
Boring Is a Business Risk, Not a Style Preference
Let’s be precise about what’s wrong with this content, because “it’s a bit dull” undersells it.
AI writing is boring in a specific, structural way. It regresses to the mean of everything ever written on a topic, because the mean is literally what it was built to produce. Ask it about KYC and you get the median KYC article. Ask ten different fintech companies’ content teams to do the same and they get ten versions of the same median, lightly reskinned. It’s not bad output in the traditional sense; it’s simply interchangeable. Not memorable. Not you. Which raises the question: what is the point of producing this drivel en masse?
A senior finance buyer reading your sanctions-screening piece is not learning what sanctions screening is. They know. What they’re unconsciously deciding is whether you’re someone worth trusting with a real problem. That decision runs almost entirely on voice and perspective: do you sound like you have a point of view and a take they haven’t heard? Median content fails this test. It was engineered to offend no one and therefore registers with no one. Boring is risky.
The Deeper Damage: Brands Forgetting They Need a Voice
This leads to the bigger problem I’ve seen in a far more prevalent way in fintech: few have a distinctive voice.
When you could only produce four posts a quarter, you had to make each one count. Scarcity forced a kind of editorial discipline. You and your team had to ask yourselves what you actually believe. You had to nail down your angle—what you wanted to be known for. AI removed the scarcity, and with it, the forcing function. Now you can fill your editorial calendar without ever asking what you stand for. The machine will happily generate infinite competent content about your category whether or not your company has a single distinctive thought about it.
As a result, brand voice has stayed by the wayside as a consideration. No need to wrestle with positioning when the blog populates itself.
And a lot of fintech brands were already shaky here, which is why I said “stayed” and not “fallen by” the wayside. Plenty never had a real voice to begin with, just a logo and a feature list and a tone best described as “professional.” For those companies, AI is a permission slip to skip the work of ever developing one, while producing enough output to make it look like they did. They lean on content volume to create the illusion of a content strategy. The blog is full, the metrics tick up, and nobody notices there’s no one home.
You can run a fintech company for years on borrowed, machine-built content. But don’t be fooled: you can’t become a brand anyone remembers that way.
Treat Content Like Product, Because It Is One
It’s easy for me to treat content like a product because it is one of my products. But you should, too, and here’s why.
You would never let AI design your entire product end to end, ship it unexamined, and call it a strategy. The problem isn’t that AI can’t produce something functional. I bet it could. You wouldn’t do it because you understand that a product has to be *differentiated* to justify its existence. If yours does the same thing as five competitors, in the same way, with no distinct point of view about who it’s for and why it’s better, you don’t have a product. You have a commodity, and commodities compete on price until everyone loses.
Content obeys the same law. It is a product. It’s often the first product a prospect ever experiences from you, months before a demo. And the instinct to let AI build all of it, undifferentiated, is exactly the instinct you’d recognize as suicidal if we were talking about the thing you actually sell.
To be clear: the fix isn’t to abandon the AI tools. The fix is to stop thinking like a technician whose job is to communicate the facts accurately and start thinking like a brand whose job is to be worth remembering. I’m sorry to say, facts are table stakes. We know the model has the facts. What it doesn’t have—what it can’t have—is your perspective. It’s incapable of formulating (based on your years of experience, context, and mistakes) the opinion you’ll defend and the thing you believe that your competitors are too cautious to say.
This part was always yours to own. So own it.
The Question Worth Sitting With
The question isn’t “how do we produce more content faster.” We know the answer, and we know the cost: uniformity.
The question is the one you’d ask about anything else you ship: what makes this *ours*, and would we recognize it as ours if our logo fell off? If the honest answer is no, you have a brand problem and a content problem. And you’re using AI to sweep the root issue under the rug.
You don’t need to build everything from scratch, but you do need to be honest about how you’re serving your ICP. If you wouldn’t let AI build your whole product without human insight, why are you letting it hijack your voice?
