By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
The first fintech founders sold wonder. An app, a card in a new colour, a bank that felt like a game. Wonder is out of inventory. CB Insights counted 33.7 billion dollars of global fintech funding in 2024, down 20 percent on the year, across 3,580 deals, down 17 percent, while the median deal grew by a third. Capital did not leave. It became selective, and selective capital reads. This guide is for founders choosing an agency in a market where the pitch is no longer a party trick, it is a diligence document.
33.7 billion dollars: global fintech funding in 2024, down 20 percent (CB Insights State of Fintech, 2024) 85 million dollars: estimated shortfall between Synapse partner bank records and what depositors were owed (bankruptcy trustee, 2024) 73: mega rounds above 100 million dollars closed in 2024 (CB Insights State of Fintech, 2024)
I Fides
A fintech sells custody of other peoples money, and custody is a trust product
Strip the interface away and every fintech asks a stranger to hand over money, data or both. The distinction that decides your communications: consumer brands sell preference, fintechs sell permission. Permission is granted slowly, revoked instantly, and researched obsessively by everyone from users to sponsor banks.
Your agency is therefore not buying attention. It is assembling a public record that survives three separate diligences: the investor's, the partner bank's and the journalist's. If a candidate talks only about the third, they have not understood your business.
Trust is the only feature that cannot be shipped in a sprint. It accrues at the speed of evidence.
II Machina
The machine that funds you reads backwards from risk
Founders imagine investors reading forward: product, traction, team. Post 2022, the serious money reads backwards. Who is your sponsor bank. What does your compliance bench look like. What happens to customer funds if you die on a Tuesday.
Coverage feeds that reverse reading. A sober profile in a banking title, a founder quoted accurately on a regulatory development, a trade piece explaining your ledger architecture: these become exhibits in the data room nobody admits to assembling from Google.
An agency that knows this machine writes for the diligence file, not the launch party. Scan the library of industry guides for adjacent financial categories and notice how differently each one defines proof. Then ask your candidates which definition they wrote for.
III Ruina
Synapse is the case study your agency must be able to tell in its sleep
In April 2024, Synapse Financial Technologies, a middleware provider sitting between fintech apps and their banks, filed for bankruptcy. The trustee later estimated an 85 million dollar gap between what partner banks held and what end users were owed. Customers of apps built on the platform lost access to their savings for months while the ledger was reconstructed.
Two months later, on June 14, 2024, the Federal Reserve ordered Evolve Bancorp, one of Synapse's principal partner banks, to strengthen its risk management over fintech partnerships and anti money laundering controls, and barred it from adding new fintech partners without approval.
If your agency cannot explain that sequence, and what it changed about sponsor bank expectations, it is not a fintech agency. It is a technology agency with a finance mood board. The founders who understood the moment used it: they published their reconciliation practices and direct bank relationships before prospects thought to ask.
IV Damnum
The cost of a hype cycle is paid at your next bank review
CB Insights recorded 664 fintech mergers and acquisitions in 2024, up 6 percent, against only 28 initial public offerings. Translation: most exits are now acquisitions, and acquirers diligence your public record line by line.
The cost calculation is therefore concrete. A launch story that overclaims your regulatory status can end a sponsor bank relationship, and sponsor banks are now the scarcest resource in your stack. One enforcement headline outranks a hundred launch features in every search that matters.
Cheap publicity is the most expensive kind. It leaves receipts.
The pattern was wider than one middleware collapse. Banking Dive's running tally of the period lists consent orders against a string of sponsor banks between 2023 and 2024, among them Blue Ridge, Cross River, Sutton, Lineage, Piermont and Thread Bank, each citing third party risk management around fintech programmes. Read together, those orders redefined what a bank expects to find when it searches a prospective partner. Not momentum. Supervision. Your public record is now part of your examination file whether you filed it there or not, and the founders who internalised that earliest rebuilt their communications around it first.
V Pecunia
Funding scarcity is the variable, and it changes what a story must carry
In the fat years, a funding announcement was the story. With funding down a fifth and deals down a sixth, announcements alone no longer clear the bar. The median deal size rising 33 percent to 4 million dollars (CB Insights, 2024) tells you where the money went: toward companies that could document revenue, compliance and unit economics in public, credibly.
So the editorial test for every pitch becomes: what does this prove. A customer story must prove retention. A product story must prove a regulatory capability. A hiring story must prove the bench a bank will ask about.
Ask candidate agencies to bring three published pieces for other startups and annotate, in the meeting, what each one proved and to whom. The exercise takes ten minutes and tells you everything. A firm that also publishes its own working methods, as on this services overview, is showing you the standard to hold it to.
VI Segmenta
A lending app and a BaaS platform are not the same company with different logos
| Startup shape | True buyer of your story | Coverage that compounds | Coverage that evaporates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer neobank or card | Users first, sponsor bank always | Personal finance press with honest fee explainers, app store credibility | Valuation gossip |
| Lending or credit builder | Borrowers, state regulators, funding partners | Credit education content, fair lending record, warehouse lender confidence | Growth hacks and referral stunts |
| BaaS and infrastructure | Banks and platforms, almost no consumers | Banking trade titles, risk and reconciliation explainers | Consumer launch coverage |
| Payments for platforms | Software companies and their CFOs | Vertical SaaS press, integration stories | Generic small business features |
| Crypto adjacent | Regulators, banking partners, sophisticated users | Policy press, custody and audit transparency | Price commentary |
Read the table as a budgeting instruction. Each shape has one audience whose permission gates growth, and that audience is rarely the end user. A consumer app can buy users with performance marketing while it waits for fame, but it cannot buy a sponsor bank, an enterprise platform contract or a state licence with the same money. Communications spend should be allocated against the gating audience first, even when that audience numbers a few hundred people and produces no visible buzz. Founders who grasp this stop asking agencies for reach and start asking for the right two hundred readers, which is a question a serious firm can actually answer.
VII Occasio
The opening is competence, publicly displayed, while rivals perform vision
Every category in fintech is crowded with vision decks. Very few founders publish the boring machinery: how funds flow, who holds the ledger of record, how reconciliation is signed off, what the wind down plan says. Since 2024, that boring machinery is exactly what journalists, banks and enterprise buyers ask about first.
The FDIC proposed rules in September 2024 that would require banks to keep daily records of beneficial owners behind pooled fintech accounts. Whether or not every detail survives rulemaking, the direction is fixed: transparency is becoming a regulated feature, and the companies explaining theirs early will sound like the standard everyone else is measured against.
There is a land grab available in plain sight. It is made of documentation.
VIII Aequitas
A seed stage team with receipts beats a unicorn with adjectives
Structure beats scale when the reader is a diligence officer. A twelve person startup that publishes its audit, its bank partners and its complaint handling numbers presents a heavier file than a famous brand offering charisma.
This is why small fintechs should not copy the communications of large ones. Your advantage is specificity. A named chief compliance officer quoted on a rule change does more for a sponsor bank review than a celebrity founder on a podcast about the future of money.
Hire the agency that asks for your documents before your adjectives. Everyone else is selling you a megaphone for a room that now reads filings.
One document deserves special mention because startups produce it daily and never count it as media: the status page, and the incident note attached to it. Every outage writes a paragraph of your permanent record, in your own words, timestamped. Companies that narrate incidents promptly, specifically and without varnish accumulate a visible history of operational honesty that diligence teams quote approvingly, because it cannot be faked retrospectively. Companies that let status pages sit at green through a known incident write a different paragraph, also permanent. Your agency should own the incident template, the approval shortcut for 3 in the morning, and the post incident summary that turns a bad day into evidence. In a trust market, the changelog is a genre of literature.
IX Consilium
Decide with a scorecard weighted toward regulatory literacy
| Agency type | What you gain | What you give up | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fintech specialist boutique | Sponsor bank fluency, trade press trust, crisis reflexes | Consumer brand sparkle | Any startup whose bank partner is a gating item |
| Venture backed startup agency | Launch mechanics, founder brand, fundraise support | Regulatory depth | Consumer apps between priced rounds |
| Financial services agency with a tech desk | Bank and policy media, compliance safe drafting | Speed, startup pricing tolerance | Infrastructure and BaaS firms |
| Freelance ex trade journalist | Superb explanatory writing | Continuity, crisis cover | Technical founders with a strong internal operator |
| Criterion | Weight | What good looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulatory literacy | 25 percent | Explains the Synapse failure and the Evolve order accurately, unprompted | Describes licensing as a detail for later |
| Bank audience record | 20 percent | Placements in banking titles your sponsor reads | A clip book of consumer tech only |
| Proof discipline | 20 percent | Asks for data before drafting claims | Pitches superlatives as strategy |
| Crisis preparation | 15 percent | A written plan for an outage, a freeze and a regulator story | Confidence that crises are unlikely |
| Fundraise support | 10 percent | Has run announcements investors actually cited | Measures success in headline count |
| Founder time cost | 10 percent | Needs ninety minutes a month and uses them well | Needs the founder in every brainstorm |
Whatever the scorecard says, begin with a fixed scope audit rather than a retainer. The deliverable is a diligence file review: every public claim your company currently makes, checked against the documents a bank or an acquirer would request, with the gaps and the overclaims listed in order of danger. It takes a few weeks, costs a fraction of a launch, and produces the foundation on which every later story safely stands. A firm that resists starting there prefers the invoice to the evidence. A firm that proposes it unprompted has understood, before you have spent anything serious, that in this market the audit is the strategy.
X Quaesita
Founders ask these, in this order
We are pre launch. Is it too early for an agency?
For a retainer, usually yes. For a readiness engagement, no. A short project that builds your proof file, drafts your crisis holding statements and prepares your sponsor bank narrative pays for itself the first time diligence goes quiet for a suspicious week.
How do we announce a raise without sounding like 2021?
Lead with what the capital buys in regulatory and product capability, support it with customer evidence, and let the number sit in the third paragraph where adults keep it. Investors in this market discount confetti. CB Insights data says the money followed documented companies, so write like one.
Can PR get us a better sponsor bank?
Not directly, and distrust anyone who promises it. PR builds the public half of the file the bank reviews: accurate coverage, visible compliance leadership, no surprises in search. The other half is your examination record, which no agency can edit. For a view of the people who would run that work, the industries team page is the right place to start your own diligence.
What should we never publish?
Anything implying deposits are insured in ways your structure does not support, any yield figure without its conditions, and any claim that a regulator has approved your business model when it has merely not objected. In fintech, the sentence you cannot defend becomes the screenshot in someone else's deck.
Our competitors exaggerate. Must we match them?
No. You must outlast them. The post Synapse market punishes exaggeration at the exact moment you can least afford it, during a bank review or an acquisition. Founders comparing notes across categories will find the same discipline in the guide to choosing a PR agency for payment processing companies, where the buyers are even less forgiving.
What happens to our story if our bank partner receives a consent order?
It becomes a chapter of your story whether you speak or not, because the order is a public document that names the partnership model, and journalists will map it onto every fintech the bank sponsors. The prepared company responds on the day with three things: what the order covers, what it does not cover, and the specific controls it can point to in its own house, reconciliation cadence, ledger ownership, audit rights. The unprepared company says no comment and is thereafter introduced in print with the phrase partner of the embattled bank. Preparation, again, is the entire difference between those two sentences.
How long before coverage affects enterprise sales?
Bank and platform partners move on quarterly cycles, and your file is read during their vendor reviews. Expect the effect inside two review cycles. Consumer sign ups respond faster, but they are rarely the constraint that kills a fintech. The constraint is permission, and permission accrues slowly by design.
What does good reporting from an agency look like?
Meetings created, diligence files opened, pieces a bank or investor mentioned unprompted. If the monthly report leads with impressions, it is reporting to the wrong audience. Your board would not accept that metric from sales. Do not accept it from communications.
XI Methodus
How this guide was built, and where it bends
Funding figures come from CB Insights State of Fintech 2024 reporting. The Synapse and Evolve account reflects bankruptcy trustee estimates and the Federal Reserve enforcement action of June 14, 2024, as reported by Reuters and legal press analysis. No fundraising data was estimated by the author.
Limitations to keep in view. Funding tallies vary between research firms because deal disclosure is voluntary. The Synapse shortfall figure is a trustee estimate inside an unfinished bankruptcy, not a final accounting. And the regulatory posture described is the United States one; a startup passporting across the United Kingdom or European Union faces a second rulebook this guide does not attempt.
A final honesty about money. Agency pricing in this segment ranges from project fees a seed stage company can justify to retainers that presume a Series C, and the correlation between price and the qualities in the scorecard is weaker than anyone selling will admit. Some of the finest fintech communicators work in small firms at moderate prices because they like the sector. The scorecard, applied without deference to brand names, is how you find them before a better funded competitor does. Apply it in writing, keep the scoring sheets, and revisit them after the first crisis or the first bank review, because those two events grade the agency more honestly than any quarterly report it writes about itself.
XII Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits
Frontier Industries runs a financial technology desk that starts with the diligence file: proof first, narrative second, launch third. If your sponsor bank review or your next round is the real audience, that is the order we work in, and we are happy to be scored against it.
Call 401-219-4207 or leave the short version at the campaign page. Bring your bank partner questions. We will bring ours.
Sources
1. CB Insights, State of Fintech 2024, summary by Fintech News Switzerland. https://fintechnews.ch/funding/cb-insight-report-2024-fintech-funding-surges-in-europe-and-latin-america/74027/ 2. Morrison Foerster briefing via Lexology, Fintech Funding Trends 2024. https://www.Lexology.Com/library/detail.aspx?g=824409d4-673b-41d7-bbf8-6064d4a56722 3. Reuters, Fed penalizes Evolve Bank for failing to manage fintech partnership risk, June 2024. https://europeantech.news/fed-penalizes-evolve-bank-for-failing-to-manage-fintech-partnership-risk-by-reuters/ 4. Fenwick and West, Bank Fintech Partnerships Under Scrutiny, 2024. https://www.fenwick.com/insights/publications/fintech-bank-partnerships-under-scrutiny-what-fintechs-need-to-know-about-bsa-aml-expectations 5. Reynolds Center, The FDIC loophole, how a fintech intermediary collapse exposed a gap in digital banking, 2025. https://businessjournalism.org/2025/02/synapse/ 6. The Financial Technology Report, Federal Reserve Orders Evolve Bancorp to Enhance Risk Management, 2024. https://thefinancialtechnologyreport.com/federal-reserve-orders-evolve-bancorp-to-enhance-risk-management/ 7. CB Insights, State of Fintech third quarter 2024, summary by Fintech News Switzerland. https://fintechnews.ch/funding/fintech-funding-falls-25-quarterly-deal-count-reaches-lowest-level-since-2017/72979/ 8. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, rules and resources. https://www.fdic.gov/ 9. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, consumer finance supervision and guidance. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ 10. TechCrunch, fintech coverage. https://techcrunch.com/category/fintech/