How to define an effective strategic positioning when you are an entrepreneur in a fintech start-up?

When you are an entrepreneur, branding could be the last of your concern. This would be a huge mistake. Indeed, the way people perceive your brand should be your top priority. One of the key components of your brand strategy is positioning. Positioning will allow you stand out from the crowd of fintech competitors. Your prospects need to understand why they should buy your products as much as why they should not choose your competitors over you.

There are 4 key questions that you must answer to have an effective strategic positioning:

• What you do
• How you do it
• Why you do it
• Who you do it for

This article explains how to effectively define your brand positioning as an entrepreneur in fintech and provide you with some useful example.

How to position your fintech company as an entrepreneur: What do you do?

What you do is the core of your business. Your prospects that come to know about you must know what you exactly do. The easier they understand, the better it is for your brand to stand out.

You must provide your prospects with a clear statement. Let’s take the example of a successful London fintech start-up:

Can you guess what this fintech start-up does?

Crowdfunding but through their page, they articulate their specific brand positioning. They focus on entrepreneurs raising funds through individuals.

Ideally, you should always do something your competitors don’t. Indeed, what you don’t do is at least equally important. Michael Porter from Harvard Business School said: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”. For example, if you are in the banking sector, you must decide if you are going into insurance as well or not.

How to position your fintech company as an entrepreneur: How do you do it?

The more unique your “how” is, the more unique your brand will be. How you achieve what you do is part of your brand strategy. This could be a working method, or in fintech most of the time a technology. If the technology is unique, consider protecting your intellectual property through a patent.

This is the case of PayKey, one of the most promising fintech start-up:

How to position your fintech company as an entrepreneur: Why you do it?

What is the reason why you started this business? But no Your reason shouldn’t be only about for making profit. Most of the time, an idea comes from an ascertainment. Your business should answer a problematic. If you answer an unsolved problematic, your positioning will be unique. But most of the time, several solutions are offered to answer one problematic. In any case, you must know the most relevant problem you can solve. In other terms, why do you do what you do?

For example, Privitar, another fintech start-up, figured out that nowadays unprecedented collection of data has created new and increased privacy risk. Therefore, they propose a secure data service for companies in different industries such as the pharmaceutical industry, financial services, telecommunications and retail.

How to position your fintech company as an entrepreneur: Who do you do it for?

Everyone knows a good positioning means having a specific target audience. Your products and services cannot be for everyone, you have to find a niche market. A niche market can still be very large. Here is an example:

Know who your target is. Monzo created a new bank for everyone, even the “unwanted”. This fintech company has chosen a revolutionary approach to enter the financial market.

Finally, complete this short exercise

Fill in the blanks and create your unique fintech positioning.  

For (Who)… , we (What)… , by (How)… , because (Why) … .

For example:

For every mobile user, we offer a new way of paying by integrating a payment option directly into your favourite chatting apps, because we noticed people lacked quick and distant payment services.