There was a time, not very long ago, when fintech firms seemed to herald a sea-change for what financial services could look like. Some positioned themselves against banks directly, framing their speed and usability as a corrective to institutional sluggishness. Others leaned on transparency or simplicity. Even where products overlapped, brand identities felt distinct, but that distinctiveness is not what it once was.
Spend a few hours moving across fintech websites, onboarding flows, launch campaigns, or conference stands and the similarities will be obvious. Colour palettes repeat the same restrained tones. Messaging around empowerment, control, flexibility and simplicity appears over and over. Interfaces increasingly resemble one another in layout. Executive interviews are interchangeable. Even firms that operate in entirely different parts of the market now present themselves with a remarkably similar tone and visual identity.
This similarity isn’t due to a lack of imagination. In reality, fintech firms are often exceptionally sophisticated in their operation. They analyse onboarding abandonment rates, optimise conversion funnels, reduce payment friction, and monitor customer acquisition costs with exacting precision. Product teams obsess over interface behaviour at the scale of fractions of a second, while marketing teams work within detailed attribution models. Huge effort goes into understanding and optimising the customer experience. But over time, that same culture of optimisation has gradually squeezed the difference out of the sector.
The same pressures that drive fintech growth have, in part, produced a standardised response. Companies moving through successive funding rounds need to appear credible, scalable, and low-risk, and just differentiated enough to justify attention. These needs, in turn, shape decision-making. Design choices and messaging skew toward what has already proved acceptable to investors, regulators, or existing customers. The result is that even firms which once positioned themselves as challengers now present themselves in much the same way.
Regulatory obligations narrow the options further. FCA financial promotions rules govern how financial products can be described and marketed for businesses operating in payments, lending, crypto assets, or embedded finance. But, while compliance may shape what firms are willing to say publicly, it doesn’t really explain the lack of individuality evident in brand identity within those limits.
The more disappointing explanation is that sameness may, simply, be commercially safer.
A familiar onboarding flow may feel less uncertain than a genuinely distinctive one. Established visual conventions reassure tepid investors because they resemble companies that have already succeeded. Copy-and-paste messaging feels perhaps less risky than developing an individual voice. At the scale of the single business, none of these decisions are particularly significant. Over time, however, they produce a market where every company appears equally professionally credible. And none at all are memorable.
This matters because financial products are themselves becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate by functionality alone. Open banking infrastructure, embedded finance providers, API-first platforms, and digital payment services have matured rapidly over the last decade to the point where features once considered distinctive, such as fast onboarding, instant notifications, digital wallets, and automated budgeting tools, now form an expected baseline.
Research from Edelman consistently shows that trust in financial services is grounded in familiarity and perceived competence. That creates an uncomfortable tension for fintech firms who, through advertising spend and conference appearances, have succeeded in becoming highly visible and barely recognisable.
There is something slightly ironic in this. An industry that prides itself on reducing friction has stripped too much texture from its public image. In smoothing away the rough edges, firms have lost their personality and distinctiveness too.
Fintech branding doesn’t need to grow louder or more theatrical; in financial services, trust still matters too much for that. Customers handing over their salaries or transaction data are unlikely to respond well to branding that feels unstable or attention-seeking. But there is a meaningful difference between professionalism and uniformity, and the sector now struggles to separate the two.
Event content is one of the few remaining places where authentic identity can actually emerge. Real environments and genuine interactions are harder to standardise than a website or a campaign, which is precisely what makes them worth planning for. In our work covering financial and fintech events, the firms that come across as distinctive are almost always the ones that treated the event as a content opportunity rather than a logistics exercise, deciding what they wanted to say, and how it should look, weeks before anyone arrived.
Those firms likely to stand out over the next few years won’t be the ones spending the most to produce the highest volume of marketing output. They will be the firms capable of developing an identity that survives contact with the wider market, rather than one which dissolves into it.
Visibility is less valuable in a sector where everyone is already visible. What matters is whether, after all the optimisation and spend, anybody remembers who they were looking at in the first place.
Serge Bejjani is co-founder and CEO of Shootday, a global photography and video production partner for businesses, operating across 150+ cities worldwide.