Fintech marketing that clears compliance first time.

The work is the same shape as any marketing: a website, search, content and ads. The difference is that a fintech has an approval route, and most agencies write copy that has to be rewritten once it reaches it. We write to the constraint first. That means knowing which regime you are authorised under, who signs your promotions off and what they will object to, then drafting so the first version clears rather than the third. The saving is mostly time, and time is what kills fintech campaigns.

From 7 February 2024 an authorised firm needs specific permission from the FCA, known as approver permission, before it can approve a financial promotion for an unauthorised person. The application window ran from 6 November 2023 to 6 February 2024. There are narrow exemptions, including approving promotions for unauthorised members of the approver’s own group and for its appointed representatives. The practical effect for an unauthorised fintech is that the pool of firms willing and able to approve your marketing got smaller, so approval takes longer and needs planning into the campaign timeline.

Yes. The Consumer Duty applies to firms authorised or registered under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 and the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, which includes payment institutions, electronic money institutions and registered account information service providers. The FCA has published a portfolio letter to payments and e-money firms on implementing it. For marketing, the consumer understanding outcome matters most: communications have to equip customers to make effective, timely and properly informed decisions, which in practice means plainer copy rather than more disclaimers.

It depends on what you are promoting and how you are authorised, which is exactly why the generic answer you get from most agencies is unhelpful. A firm promoting a regulated investment or credit agreement is in a different position from a payments firm, and an unauthorised firm is in a third position again. We are not your compliance function and we do not give regulatory advice. What we do is ask which route your copy goes through before we write it, then write to that route.

Yes, with verification. Google requires financial services advertisers targeting the UK to complete an advertiser verification process, and it covers every ad format. The two things that most often fail the check are an Ads account whose contact sits on a different email domain from the registered firm, and business details that do not match the register exactly, usually because of an old trading name or a domain that was never added. We handle the application and the account setup as part of the ads work.

No. We do not take crypto or digital asset promotion work, and we do not take payday or high-cost short-term credit. That is a standing decision rather than a judgement on any individual firm. It keeps our work inside the areas we can do well and defend, and it means the firms we do work with are not sitting alongside something that damages their own position.

The Glide Retainer starts at £1,000 a month plus VAT and covers the website, hosting, SEO foundations, AI-search readiness and compliance-aware marketing, with no setup fee and a three-month minimum, then 30 days notice. Google Ads management is separate from £500 a month plus your ad spend. A deeper ongoing SEO campaign is separate from £1,000 a month. We publish the prices rather than quoting per enquiry.

Only if it can read and understand what you do. Answer engines quote clear, self-contained passages from pages they can crawl, and they lean on structured data, plain product descriptions and third-party mentions. Most fintech sites are built to impress investors rather than to be understood, so they get skipped. AI-search readiness is part of the retainer: schema, a machine-readable summary of the business, crawler access and content written in a form an assistant can lift and cite.