How trust, compliance and relationships shape growth in UK payments

In this interview, we speak with Anna Bykova, a marketing and brand expert with experience across gambling, trading and payments, including several years in the UK market. We discuss how regulated industries shape marketing, why compliance becomes part of the customer experience, what buyers care about beyond branding, how relationship-led growth works in B2B payments, and what she expects from external partners.

This interview is conducted by our FinTech Growth Strategist, Diana Dalkevych.

Compliance and marketing in regulated industries

Diana: What did working in highly regulated industries teach you about marketing?

Anna: Most of my career has been in industries with heavy restrictions. Before payments, I spent around 6 years in gambling, and after moving to the UK, I worked in a trading platform, CFD-focused.

That experience taught me to treat compliance as part of the work rather than something that appears at the end. In gambling, for example, we once wanted to run advertising in cinemas in India around a cricket tournament. India is a restricted market, but there are lots of legal gaps. We were told that we could not use the campaign with a real brand ambassador. But our compliance team found the solution - animation was allowed. We turned the concept into animation and ran it.

That was how I learned to work: understand the rule, understand what is still possible, and find a way to achieve the commercial goal without breaking the regulation.

Diana: How did that change when you started working in the UK?

Anna: The mindset felt different. In the UK, compliance teams can be much more conservative. Sometimes the easiest answer for them is simply no.

At the trading platform, I would ask whether there was another compliant way to do something. The response was often: I am not going to look for a gap because I do not want the risk.

In UA, we work with compliance like one team with a shared goal; in the UK, sometimes it felt like compliance worked against us.

That difference matters in marketing. In a regulated business, you need compliance people who are willing to understand the commercial objective and work through the details with you. Otherwise, ideas get stopped before anyone has tested whether there is a compliant route.

The UK FinTech market and compliance as customer experience

Diana: What do you see in the UK FinTech market now?

Anna: It is difficult to talk about FinTech as one market because the category is too broad. Payments, digital banking, trading and wealth products work differently.

At a recent London FinTech Week event, I looked at startups at very different stages. Almost everyone had a polished website, a defined visual identity and some version of an AI story. Many were proud to describe themselves as AI-native.

That raises the baseline for how a new company presents itself. Looking modern is no longer much of a differentiator. For established companies, an outdated website can still create a gap between the business they have become and the way the market sees them.

What I do see in the UK is a market with a lot of money in it, but also a lot of friction. Competition is high. Regulation is heavy. Companies can have long sales and onboarding cycles.

In B2B business, the time between meeting a prospective client and going live can take months. And UK regulation is very strict, so once both sides decide to work together, in most companies the client will still need to pass compliance checks and provide documentation before anything starts. 

That changes how you think about growth. Winning interest is only one part of the job. The process that follows can determine whether the deal moves at all.

Diana: Where do you see the biggest gap between marketing and compliance?

Anna: A simple example is documentation.

We built a platform where sales can send clients to upload the documents needed for compliance. We should make the instructions much easier to understand and show people exactly what counts as each document.

Someone once submitted a photograph of their house as proof of address. That sounds absurd, but it tells you something useful: if people misunderstand a requirement, the interface has not done enough to explain it.

You can show examples. You can explain what is accepted and what is not. You can add a short description or link to more information.

That is customer experience. Compliance may define the requirement, but the company still decides how a customer experiences it.

Trust, brand and relationships in B2B payments

Diana: Do you think FinTech buyers care about brand, or mainly about the product and terms?

Anna: They care about the brand, but in our market the decision often comes down to trust, security, service and the process.

If the provider is secure, does not create major problems and gives the client good service, that relationship can last a long time. A competitor can come in with lower pricing, but aggressive discounting alone is not a great long-term strategy.

There is also a relationship component in the UK market. Connections matter a lot.

That is why you see so many private dinners, breakfasts and invitation-only events. I attend them myself. A lot of B2B marketing happens through people spending time together, talking and building familiarity.

Diana: Has AI changed that?

Anna: AI is changing the tools people use, but I think it also makes human contact more valuable.

I was recently at a private dinner for marketers where the topic was AI and how it is changing the industry. My reaction was: look at what we are doing right now. We are all physically sitting together, sharing food, and talking about AI.

After COVID, people started valuing in-person interaction again. You can see the same pattern outside B2B. There are products and communities built around getting people into the same room — for dating, friendship, professional networking.

People still need people. For relationship-led industries, that matters.

Security, AI and digital banks

Diana: How much does AI influence buying decisions in financial services?

Anna: From what I see, security still matters more.

Our company has published a white paper (How merchants’ expectations and preferences in their payment providers are changing) for the second year, and one of the findings that surprised us was how low innovation and AI ranked compared with security-related concerns.

That makes sense. When money is involved, people want to know that the service is safe.

You can see that in consumer banking too. Digital banks have grown, but many people still keep their main money with established banks. They may use Monzo or Revolut for convenience, travel or everyday spending while keeping a Barclays or HSBC account as the place they trust for their core finances.

FinTech companies need to understand those habits. A new feature does not automatically replace the behaviour people have built around money.

Diana: What does that mean for new digital banks?

Anna: The audience matters.

Revolut built a strong proposition around travel and convenience before becoming more bank-like. That gave people a specific reason to adopt it.

In London, products like Revolut and Monzo fit the behaviour of a very international population. People move between countries, currencies and financial systems.

That does not mean the same adoption pattern will happen everywhere in the UK. Different groups have different levels of trust, different banking habits and different reasons to switch.

Marketing has to account for those differences instead of assuming that a better digital experience is enough.

In-house teams and agencies

Diana: What do you keep in-house and what do you outsource?

Anna: My personal preference is to keep as much strategic knowledge in-house as possible when the product is difficult to understand.

No external team will know and love the product in the same way as people who work with it every day. The internal team should understand where the company is going, what it is selling and why. Execution, however, can be supported externally where it adds specialist expertise or additional capacity.

Diana: Why do companies stay with agencies even when the work is not ideal?

Anna: Relationships.

Agencies often build strong relationships with senior stakeholders over time, and that familiarity can carry a lot of weight when decisions are made about external partners.

There’s also a practical side. Once an agency understands your business, ways of working and internal processes, changing suppliers comes with its own cost. A new agency needs time to get up to speed and build those relationships.

So the decision is rarely just about the quality of the work. It’s often a balance between the relationship, continuity, switching costs and the additional value a new partner could bring.

For a new supplier to replace an established relationship, there usually needs to be a clear reason to make the change.

Choosing and changing suppliers

Diana: What makes you consider changing an existing contractor?

Anna: Performance.

And the overall working relationship.

We work with a contractor who builds our exhibition stands. These projects are significant, and we do around 10–15 events a year.

Initially, I felt the communication could be stronger. I raised this directly and explained that, given the scale of our work together, I needed faster responses and more proactive communication.

He responded really positively and changed the way he worked with me. We now have a very good relationship, and his team supports us beyond the stand itself, including storing, sorting and transporting our merchandise.

So while performance is important, a strong relationship and the additional value a contractor brings can also create a lot of loyalty.

Diana: So what would make you look seriously at a new supplier?

Anna: They need to respond to my actual situation.

I get messages regularly from companies that build exhibition stands. Often, they send a portfolio showing large stands they’ve built for big brands. While that’s useful for context, it doesn’t necessarily help me assess whether they’re right for our needs.

Our typical stand is 3x3 or 3x6 metres. Price matters, and because we do many events, we often reuse components.

So I started replying with a brief: these are our usual sizes, this is how often we exhibit, this is what our stands look like, and I can share our brand book. I then ask them to show me what they would do for us.

One company took that approach and came back with a proposal that really made me think. I’ll probably speak with them again when we plan next year.

That’s the difference for me: they responded to the specific problem I gave them rather than simply showing unrelated work.

Diana: What should an external team understand about selling to a FinTech marketer?

Anna: A portfolio helps, but relevance helps more.

If I already have a contractor I trust, you are not only competing on design or price. You are competing with an existing relationship, existing knowledge and the fact that changing suppliers takes effort.

Show that you understand the category, the scale of the task and the commercial constraints. Respond to what the person is trying to solve.

I see more Ukrainian teams working this way: they take the brief, come back with an idea and try to show how they would approach the problem. That level of initiative stands out in a market where many suppliers are polite, send a deck and wait.

For me, that is much more persuasive than saying you have worked with a famous brand.