How Fintech Companies Do Content: How Nuvei Repurposes its Celebrity Campaigns
What do payments have to do with Ryan Reynolds? Or Formula 1?
At first you may say – not much.
But even though they aren’t highly related industries, the two campaigns Nuvei ran with Ryan Reynolds and Formula 1 proved otherwise, surpassing even their highest expectations in terms of impact. They were able to get on CNBC, get featured on publications that were difficult to get into before, get millions of views, and they now have an opening they can use forever by their SDRs.
In fact, it’s likely you’ve heard of Nuvei thanks to either of those two campaigns.
Today, Nuvei is a darling of the Canadian tech scene. In September 2020 they went public, which at the time was the largest ever technology company offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange (although they are now going private again). They’ve also won multiple awards including Payment Service Provider of the Year at the American Gambling Awards in 2024.
In this content case study, we talked with Nuvei’s Head of Content Marketing Alexandra Bucur to learn more about how the company thinks about content, how they create their content strategy and how they like to measure the impact of content on the business.
Note: Every couple of months we release a new case study on how a financial services or fintech company does content. Join our newsletter to make sure you get each issue in your inbox!
Nuvei’s story
Nuvei was started by Phil Fayer, who started the company when he was in his early twenties while attending Concordia University.
Today, Nuvei is a technology company that allows its customers to accept next-gen payments, payouts, and benefit from card issuing, banking, risk and fraud management services. Some of the products and services they offer include:
Point of Sale terminals
Online payments
Mobile payments
Integrated payments
Other payment services such as merchant accounts and multi currency pricing
They have customers in over 200 markets, with local acquiring in over 50 markets, 150 currencies and over 700 alternative payment methods.
Although the company went public in 2020 at a $700 million IPO, they were taken private in 2024 and Fayer explains in detail in this blog post: Nuvei CEO Phil Fayer on the perils of running a public tech company – and why he’s taking it private
The company is based in Montreal with over 2,500 team members across six continents and generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2023.
What is the role of content at Nuvei?
Nuvei’s content team is in charge of, in Alex’s words, “driving awareness and interest in the brand while contributing to revenue”. The team is made up of herself and 3 other team members, who are responsible for creating all content across ABM, organic, paid lead gen and awareness campaigns.
Like many payment companies, Nuvei’s target audience is large enterprise merchants. These are accounts that are notoriously difficult to penetrate, and therefore the marketing team plays a crucial role in reaching the accounts and raising awareness.
Alex admits that before Ryan Reynolds and the Mercedes F1 team collaboration, Nuvei was not well known. Since those campaigns, they are now one of the best known payment companies in North America. We’ll dig into what the process looked like to create those campaigns and what the marketing impact in a section below.
How do they create their content strategy?
Nuvei’s content strategy starts at the end of the year, where the team does research, creates a plan, decides on objectives and then starts to execute in January.
When it comes to creating the content strategy, their inputs include:
Researching on the challenges and pain points of their customers
Deciding on the story they want to tell their customers
Aligning with the product roadmap
Doing their own research into their market
Looking at what has and hasn’t worked in the past
Following this initial stage of research, they then put together a plan that ties into revenue numbers, which they are given by the commercial team. Typically, these come in the form of target SQLs and open opportunities, which they make sure to hit with everything they do with their content.
The strategy and plan will likely include a few long form white papers throughout the year, based on their own data or external data. Those longer forms of content are then split into smaller bite sized chunks, all which are tailored to customers based on what stage in the journey they are at.
Interestingly, the approach of “create 3 - 4 pieces of big content pieces per year and split those into bite sized chunks” is one that both Pleo and ComplyAdvantage take in their content marketing, which you can read here:
Once they have the plan in hand, they’ll present it to the wider team to get buy-in. And once it’s all approved, they’ll start the year immediately with execution.
For example, in 2024 the team wrote a white paper on revenue acceleration with payments. Once created, the content team broke it down into blogs and webinars about what to do before, during and after integrating payments.
In the payments world, picking a payment provider is a decision that is made through a buying committee. Which is why a big part of the strategy is personalization by creating content for different personas.
For example, as Alex explains, when creating a piece of content targeting a CEO they’ll focus on content about growing the business, and less about how to optimize payments. For a Head of Payments, on the other hand, they will create content focused on optimizing payments. For a CFO, the content will be more about reconciliation, visibility and ERP integration, but not something like improving the checkout experience – that would be more for someone working in customer experience.
Another key way they personalize is to add regional statistics if they are personalizing the content for Europe vs US vs APAC, for example. They’ll also repurpose in different formats. As Alex explains, people consume content in different ways, and by creating content across a podcast, white paper, etc you’re able to cater to more people. At Nuvei, it’s important to know and understand how to enable that personalization.
What attribution model do they use and how do they tie content results to revenue?
Alex shares that the Nuvei marketing team is currently in the midst of moving from a lead gen model to a demand gen model, which means the reporting is a bit more complex.
With lead gen, the reporting was simpler: they’d calculate what they spent on campaigns, how many leads they’ve generated and then calculate the ROI from there.
The demand gen model is more appropriate for larger companies, but it’s harder to measure. As Alex shares, the sales cycle is often 6 to 9 months, or even longer. So they take a different approach: They first look at the ICP, determine which accounts are at which stage of the funnel, which then helps them decide which channels to invest in when and how.
If the prospect is at the Bottom of the Funnel, for example, they know they won’t be interested in brand values. They’ll be interested in how the product works. If they are just at the beginning of their buyer journey, though, there is no point in sharing BOFU messaging.
The marketing team combines their HubSpot, Salesforce and 6Sense data to get to a point where they can view all the accounts and analyse MQLs, SQLs and open opportunities. One of their favourite things to do is that once they’ve signed a contract, look through all the touchpoints and the journey the account went through. The goal is less to match it back to the asset, but more about matching it to the channel.
Alex shares that they have a close relationship with the sales team and they work a lot together to do roundtable events, or campaigns if there is an active RFP with an account.
What attribution model do they use?
It’s one of the most complex parts of measuring results from content: where do you attribute a lead?
At Nuvei, they assign a specific % to every channel. For example, if a contact engages with an ad about Ryan Reynolds, the attribution is low because the ad doesn’t tell the prospect much about Nuvei. If the contact registers for a webinar, then the % is higher. In their attribution model, channel and content type matters more.
Another unique part of Nuvei’s approach is that the inbound deal SDRs are part of the marketing team rather than the sales team. That way, if someone watches a webinar and then reaches out to an SDR, the salesperson knows what the webinar was about and can better understand the prospect’s questions. This removes disjointment from the process.
The marketing team also supports outbound SDRs with marketing assets – such as Ryan Reynolds themed emails and collateral – which helps a lot with getting in the door.
Why do they track as much as possible?
There is always a debate in the content and marketing world about how much tracking should be done.
On one side, you’ve got people who say you should trust the process and not bother tracking too much. On the other side, other marketers believe in tracking as much as possible. Ultimately, it depends a lot on the company’s culture and approach. In our experience, financial services companies lean towards being more numbers driven and therefore prefer to track as much as possible.
Nuvei is in the latter group, where they track as much as they can.
There are quite a few benefits to this approach:
It helps them understand the customer a lot better
No one on the team questions the value of the data, and therefore of content marketing
They’re able to learn a lot more with the date they get from A/B testing
It helps build confidence in the team that what they are doing is working
Having said that, although they track as much as possible, that doesn’t mean they don’t invest in marketing activities that are harder to track down to leads and sales (they do track impressions and reach, but it’s harder to know who is engaging with those campaigns). In fact, very often it’s the activities that you cannot track as well that have a huge impact – a clear example is the Ryan Reynold’s ad, which Alex shares had a huge impact (we go into more detail down below).
For example, they used to only invest in LinkedIn for lead gen. But once they started doing awareness campaigns, their lead gen campaigns did a lot better. Even though awareness is just technically “eye balls”, by having the lead gen tracking in place they were able to see the big impact those campaigns had on their lead gen activities.
The impact of Ryan Reynold’s videos
In April 2023, Ryan Reynolds invested in Nuvei and as part of the deal, created a series of ads that hit the fintech industry by storm and was the talk of the town for months: You can view them here: Meet Ryan Reynolds
Ryan and Nuvei leaned into their common ground for the ads: the fact that they’re from Canada. Ryan was in full control of the ads, and this allowed Ryan to use his self-deprecating humor while still showing off the company.
What was the impact? Huge, Alex shares.
The biggest impact was on awareness. Not just because of the ads, but because the collaboration allowed Phil and Ryan to expand that awareness by, for example, going on CBNC. Some other impacts Alex shares:
It helped them get into publications that were difficult to get into before unless they paid
It’s opened the doors for SDRs, who can phone someone with a Ryan Reynolds specific opener
They were able to get millions of views that would not have been possible with paid advertising
They were able to use a lot of Ryan Reynolds’ assets for email nurture campaigns, marketing campaigns, outbound messages and a lot more. Now, the Nuvei team has those assets and can maximize their use of them.
Ryan Reynolds is not the only celebrity they’ve worked with. They’ve also worked with Lewis Hamilton and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, in an amazing campaign about performance: Mercedes AMG Partnership
Celebrity collaborations prove that even non-industry icons can skyrocket brand awareness, delivering huge gains for marketing and sales. This highlights the value of investing in awareness campaigns that might not be fully trackable down to leads and sales, but can still drive significant long-term results. Sometimes, it’s not all about metrics—it’s about making a memorable impact.
What are Nuvei’s proudest pieces of content?
Alex shares these three pieces of content:
Payment Orchestration white paper
Alex shares that this is the best performing asset the Nuvei team has ever created. It’s a trendy topic that is still not well understood by most people – which is what the whitepaper addresses.
Once created, they broke down the whitepaper to use it in webinars, events and roundtables.
Accelerating Revenue Growth white paper
This is another white paper that performed well. It’s heavy with statistics and proprietary information that Nuvei was also able to use in a lot of their other marketing.
Documentary with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team
In this 9 minute documentary, Nuvei and Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team team explain how the two businesses are quite similar. It includes an interview with Lewis Hamilton and the rest of the team. Again, like the other pieces of content, they were able to break down the video and use it in other marketing assets (and for sales!).
Nuvei’s content: don’t underestimate the value of high brand awareness
If there is a theme in this case study, it’s about tracking. The Nuvei team tracks as much as they can in order to get deeper insights on their audience, understand what is and isn’t working across their marketing and prove the impact of content marketing. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t willing to invest in activities that are not as trackable down to leads and sales, such as Ryan Reynolds’ ads and promoting the partnership with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team (having said that, the team do track brand metrics like impressions and reach).
Marketing is a delicate balance of the two, and it’s about understanding when to make a decision on data, and when to make a decision based on intuition. That’s why marketing is a science and an art, and why Alex describes herself as a marketer with a soft spot for data. I think a lot of marketers would describe themselves this way.
Huge thanks to Alex for sharing Nuvei’s process for creating a content strategy and for talking to us about their results from these two amazing campaigns! We’re excited to see what Nuvei creates in the coming years and what other celebrity collaborations they explore next.