Wirex is a digital payment and crypto wallet platform. Founded in 2014, it offers banking infrastructure, card issuance, as well as card-based payment products. It has over seven million users and processes payments across 130 countries. Its business is split into two areas: end users and businesses. For end users, its payment cards are to support day-to-day usage. For businesses, it provides banking-as-a-service (BaaS) APIs, payment rails and card issuance, for digital platforms to be compliant when launching card programs of their own.
Wirex was going to launch its brand, as well as a product, into the US market and wanted to leverage heavily media relations as a key channel. The brief for Wise Up PR was to generate high-visibility earned media coverage for Wirex to gain audience awareness of its brand, support customer acquisition, as well as build the company’s credibility in the US market.
Market expansion PR is hugely effective in meeting such objectives. However, it presents brands with a very specific challenge: how can US journalists, unfamiliar with your brand, cover your market and product launch? They lack context about a fintech’s offering or position within the market. Such announcements are likely to be the first time they are even covering the company in any depth.
Rather than distributing widely a launch press release, the Wise Up PR team built a bespoke launch communications strategy. Timing was critical and our team broke this strategy into three distinct phases: (i) pre-launch (ii) launch day and (iii) post-launch media outreach.
Pre-launch was crucial for preparing media-facing materials that were adapted to a US audience, such as the press release (written in American English), imagery, a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document, as well as the creation of a highly targeted media list of journalists based on deep knowledge and research of their news beats. With this upfront work completed, we then shifted to conducting extensive pre-pitching and early seeding of the news with the most important media contacts to try to ensure meaningful earned media coverage could be secured.
Selection of the launch day was also tightly coordinated by our team, carefully avoiding any federal or major public holidays in the American market, including a US-friendly embargo lift time. In this way, we avoided any issues of media availability to review the press materials under embargo.
One often overlooked issue is how to leverage such a market expansion announcement with a fintech brand’s home markets too. We ensured in our pre-planning that media which had existing relationships with the brand were pitched into, thus maximizing the potential coverage footprint on launch day.
Post-launch, our approach was to shift gears to focus on podcast placements to offer executives for pre-recorded interviews, which provide greater insight and depth than an online news article which has a strict word count. This was a way to sustain post-launch media interest and coverage potential far beyond the initial news cycle.
30 Articles
Coverage secured in top fintech, crypto and financial services publications.
4.7 Million
Estimated audience that viewed the coverage generated.
61
Aggregate Domain Authority (DA) score of the publications which published.
262.6 Million
Combined audience that are unique monthly visitors (UMVs) to the media outlets that covered Wirex stories.
1,148
Organic social posts prompted by the launch media placements.
Wise Up PR secured 30 pieces of earned media coverage for the Wirex US launch, including key placements in crypto-native outlets like CoinDesk and The Block, as well as influential financial industry publications like The American Banker.
An aggregated total of 4.7 million online views were secured for all the pieces placed, with an average domain authority (DA) of 61. The combined media outlets that published either articles or podcasts attract approximately 2.7 billion monthly website visits, while also having 262.6 million monthly unique visitors (UMVs). More than 1,100 organic social shares came from the press coverage secured.
In PR, a market launch is exactly the same as the release of a new product; you only get one chance to launch. This means your fintech brand needs to have a plan, with a clear timeline attached. Nothing should be left to chance, including legal review of all press-facing materials. Get started early on agreeing on key launch messaging, a draft press release and assignment of a launch spokesperson (and organizing media training if necessary).
Don’t leave it until a few weeks before launch to select a fintech PR agency to manage your US market. This puts your own team under much strain to make a decision on a partner under a compressed timeline, without stress testing if the agency is the right match. For the agency to succeed, it needs a minimum of a month to six weeks before launch day. This gives it enough time to review and feed into a launch press release so that it is credible to a US audience. In addition, the PR agency needs to create a bespoke media list and be able to pre-pitch your approved press release two weeks before the go-live date. By not giving your agency partner enough time to pre-pitch to time-poor journalists, the success of your critical US launch will likely suffer.
For a US launch, it is quite likely your company will have limited brand awareness and reputation in the country. The quality and background of your spokesperson should be leveraged heavily in media outreach to signal to journalists that your company is reputable as well as credible. Ensure this spokesperson is not only media trained but also knows the key messaging and launch details that can be publicly discussed and disclosed. In addition, have a frequently asked questions (FAQs) document related to the launch for this spokesperson to have in hand and be able to reference when speaking to media. One final but essential consideration is any time zone difference between you and a spokesperson’s interview. Make sure to provide contact details to both parties in the event of a last-minute scheduling issue.
When launching into such a critical market like the US, brand building shouldn’t end immediately after launch day. Creating awareness and reputation needs to be a long-term PR play, yet you only get one market launch. One smart tactical approach to sustaining momentum post-launch is to invest heavily in placing spokespeople on fintech podcasts as guests. Firstly, the fintech and crypto media vertical has an incredibly large number of high-quality podcasts, meaning a wide pool of opportunity. Secondly, these interviews are long-form, very friendly discussions, so, spokespeople should be at ease. Finally, when a podcast interview is published, this content can be sliced and spliced into countless clips and formats for social media posts, ensuring you maximize the brand visibility of a podcast interview across all channels.
