To understand how Irish fintech can be successful, look at the early days of companies that have already achieved this. Before they became a global success, Wayflyer had to show their first clients and investors that their financing model, which is based on revenue, was both possible and reliable.
Consider this interview with Aidan Corbett, Co-founder & CEO of Wayflyer, discussing the early stages of building a team and a brand narrative:
What Corbett and other successful founders understand is that early momentum isn’t just about the product code; it is about the story you tell the market before the product is even fully ready.
The Irish fintech scene is very vibrant. We have just seen NestiFi close a round of funding that saw them compete with many other companies, ZeroRisk receive €8.6 million, and Seapoint secure €7.5 million. When the ecosystem is changing really quickly, a lot of people who are just starting out think that they should keep working on their product, make sure it’s right for the market, and then only think about how to make their product better known.
This quiet approach might work in the consumer tech space. In fintech, this is a big mistake.
If your job involves lots of rules about payments, compliance and money flow, then the most important thing for you is not the technology itself. Trust is the most important thing. You can’t buy trust from Google Ads, and you can’t use growth-hacking to gain credibility with regulators. Public relations (PR) are not something you buy when you want to sell; they are the foundation you build to make people believe in you and your business. This is how early-stage fintechs can build that foundation without spending as much as late-stage ones.e unicorn.
The Trust Deficit: Why Fintech is Different
If a standard B2B SaaS tool stops working, a company can lose a few hours of productivity. If a fintech platform stops working, a company might lose money, be fined by the regulator, or have to tell its clients that their information has been stolen. Because the stakes are much higher, it is very hard for newcomers to get people to try their products early on.
When a possible business client or an angel investor hears your pitch, the first thing they do is search for your company online. If the only digital footprint they find is a static landing page and your own LinkedIn profile, they will think it is much more risky to engage with you. You are asking them to trust a ghost.
Early-stage PR can help to build this trust. If you get your work published in a reputable publication, it shows that you have done something good that money cannot buy. When a journalist from a well-known news site decides to write about your startup, it means that their readers will see your business as real, your founders as trustworthy, and your mission as valid. This early digital record is like a critical check for any problems, and it helps beta testers, early investors, and the first employees to say “yes” before you have a finished product that is right for the market.
Architecting the Founder Narrative
Reporters do not want to write about your beta software updates. They want to write about the friction in the market and the people trying to resolve it. Before you launch a product, your most valuable PR asset is the founder’s story.
However, you must avoid the standard Silicon Valley cliché of “we are here to change the world.” The Irish business media is highly pragmatic. A successful fintech founder narrative in Ireland is usually built on the “broken pipe” framework.
To formulate this, you must articulate the specific, granular failure in the current financial system that you experienced first-hand. Did you spend ten years working in corporate banking and realise that cross-border SME reconciliation was fundamentally broken? Were you a developer who saw how legacy anti-money laundering (AML) protocols were stifling merchant onboarding?
By focusing the narrative on the founder’s deep industry expertise and their frustration with a specific, systemic flaw, you position the startup not as a risky gamble, but as a logical, necessary solution built by insiders. This is the angle that gets attention from profile writers and tech editors.
Finding your way around the Irish media
You don’t need to spend a lot of money on PR to make an impact. What you need is to focus your PR on the journalists who can actually influence the Irish market. PR for fintech businesses that work with other businesses is not about reaching a million people. It is about reaching the specific 1,000 people who control money, partnerships, and how new technology is adopted in Dublin and other places.
For Irish fintech startups, the media targets are very clear:
- Silicon Republic: This is the bedrock of the Irish tech scene. They are deeply interested in indigenous tech growth, funding announcements (even at the pre-seed level), and founder profiles.
- The Business Post: Crucial for reaching the traditional financial sector, venture capitalists, and policy-makers. Pitching here requires a heavier emphasis on market economics, job creation, and regulatory disruption.
- Fintech Ireland: A highly influential community and digest. Being featured in the Fintech Ireland media map and updates guarantees visibility among the exact cohort of peers, regulators, and investors you need to impress.
When you contact these media outlets, make sure you give them everything they need: a clear press release, high-quality photos of the company’s founder, and a clear opinion on something that is happening in the industry right now, like the effect of the new GRAI rules or the change in European open banking.
Leveraging Awards and Industry Recognition
If you don’t have many clients yet, industry awards are a good way to measure success. If you win an award, or even just make the shortlist, it will make people take you more seriously. You can use this to your advantage in all your marketing.
This is a strategy deeply understood by established players. For instance, when Simpson FT PR secured the New Media Award featured in Silicon Republic, it wasn’t just a trophy; it was a verifiable proof point of their tech PR expertise. Similarly, the long-term value of structured PR campaigns is frequently validated by industry bodies, such as the PRCA award for the FMS campaign covered in The Irish Times.
If you’re a new fintech, you could try to win an award at events like the AI Awards Ireland or the various national tech excellence awards. The PR cycle here is simple and effective: you announce who’s on the shortlist, you network at the event, and you use the result to contact journalists and investors again.
The Compliance Minefield: Promoting without breaching.
Finally, if you want to use PR to promote fintech, you need to know what you can and can’t say. The Central Bank of Ireland and European regulators have very strict rules about promoting financial services.
If a startup wants to create excitement, they need to be careful not to tell lies about their finances.
You can never be sure that customers will come back. If you’re dealing with a new wealthtech app or a B2B treasury management system, remember that your press releases should never promise specific financial returns.
Avoid making guesses about future trends: Don’t use PR to make guesses about the financial markets to make your product look good.
Clear Distinctions: If your platform is not regulated yet, or is operating under a specific exemption, your communications must be completely transparent about this status. Don’t use language that makes it sound like you have banking-level security or approval from the regulators if you haven’t been given that approval yet.
The best way to deal with this is to focus your PR on the technology and the team, rather than the financial product itself. Talk about how fast your API is, how your data is kept safe, and the knowledge of your board of advisors. This means you can stay within the world of tech PR without getting into any of the problems that come with financial promotion compliance.
It might feel like it’s too early to build a public profile if you haven’t yet found the right mix of products and markets, but in the fintech sector, it’s actually the key to finding that perfect mix. To make sure that when your product is finally ready to go on sale, the market is already ready for it, you need to control the story you tell people, get the press to say good things about you, and make sure people trust your company.en.