How Fintechs Can Make an Impact with PR and Comms in 2026 (Part 2)

If Part 1 was about why the landscape has shifted, Part 2 is about what you do with that shift.

We left off with a simple reality: As KPMG’s latest report shows, capital is coming back, exits are reopening and, within Europe, London is still the place to be. But money is more selective, regulation is far more central, and the companies attracting attention share three traits:

• They tell grown‑up growth stories
• They show credibility in regulated markets
• They’re plugged into the financial system, not trying to sit outside it

This is exactly where PR and comms can move you from “interesting” to “investable”,  and from “noisy” to “genuinely trusted”.

What follows is the practical side: How to use communications in 2026 to match the new market reality.

1. Start with the grown‑up version of your growth story

If 2021 was the era of “look how fast we’re growing”, 2026 is the era of “look how resilient and valuable we’re becoming”. For me, that starts with reframing what a “good story” looks like:

• Less emphasis on abstract market size; more on proof you’re earning your growth. This means stronger unit economics, better risk management, deeper integration with partners and platforms.
• Funding announcements that explain what the capital unlocks - regulatory permissions, new product lines, critical hires in risk and compliance - rather than treating the number as the headline.
• Real honesty about the journey. If you’ve made tough calls on focus, pricing or profitability, say so. Done well, that level of transparency builds trust rather than undermining it.

A useful internal test is: “Would this story still hold if the market tightened again?” If the answer is yes, you’re probably in the right territory.

2. Make regulation part of your value proposition

In Part 1, we talked about how Consumer Duty, tighter rules on promotions and incoming regimes for areas like BNPL and embedded credit have raised the bar in the UK. The instinct can be to minimise all of that in your narrative. I’d argue the opposite: the strongest fintech communications I see now put regulation front and centre as a marker of quality.

That might mean:

• Explaining in plain language what “good outcomes” look like in your product, and how you measure them.
• Being specific about your approach to affordability, fraud, financial crime or operational resilience, and why you’ve made the choices you have.
• Talking about how you work with regulators, partners and industry bodies, not to boast, but to show you’re building something that’s designed to last.

When you do this well, regulation stops being a dry risk topic and becomes a trust narrative: evidence that you’re thinking several moves ahead.

3. Anchor your story in real human outcomes

The more selective the market gets, the more tempting it is to retreat into safe, abstract language: infrastructure, orchestration, optimisation. It sounds sophisticated – but it’s also where a lot of fintech stories start to blur into one another. The way out of that is to get very concrete about who you help and how their lives change:

• The SME that now gets paid in hours instead of weeks.
• The renter who finally has a route to home ownership.
• The risk team that can spot fraud in seconds instead of days rather than wading through spreadsheets.

You don’t need lengthy case‑study tomes. You do need to weave these kinds of journeys into your media, your speaking opportunities and your owned content.

It’s a simple discipline: every time you talk about a product, ask, “What’s the real‑world moment this changes for someone?” That’s what people remember.

4. Build leadership voices, not just brand volume

In cautious markets, people look for leaders they trust, not just logos they recognise. That means investing in voices, not just channels:

• Founders, CFOs, CROs and Chairs who can talk credibly about the market, regulation and the future of their category, not only your feature roadmap.
• A steady drumbeat of thoughtful commentary in UK national, business and trade titles, even when you don’t have hard news.
• LinkedIn content that feels like a conversation with peers, sharing lessons, dilemmas and practical advice, rather than a stream of polished announcements.

Over time, this moves you from “quoted in funding stories” to “go‑to commentator in this part of fintech”. In a world where exits and strategic M&A are back on the table, that reputational equity really does show up in the room when decisions are made.

5. Join up your comms and capital strategies

With exit markets reopening and liquidity improving, perception isn’t a nice‑to‑have – it genuinely shapes who takes your calls, how they frame you internally, and what they’re willing to pay. This is where IR, legal and comms need to be in the same conversation:

• Before a raise or strategic process, use PR and content to establish your positioning in the specific spaces where capital is flowing – whether that’s payments infrastructure, regtech, digital assets or SME banking.
• During the process, be crystal clear about what you will and won’t claim. Over‑stating regulatory relationships or performance metrics might buy a short‑term headline but can create long‑term credibility issues.
• After the deal, focus on reassurance for customers, partners and employees. The goal is to emerge from the announcement looking more focused and more resilient, not distracted or divided.

Done thoughtfully, comms stops being something you bolt on at the end and becomes a lever you pull deliberately as part of your growth and exit strategy.

6. Prepare for the bad days as carefully as the good ones

Finally, a quick but important point: the more regulated and interconnected fintech becomes, the more it matters how you handle your worst days. Every fintech should at least have:

• A clear playbook for incidents, outages and data issues – with agreed spokespeople, holding lines and escalation paths.
• A plan for communicating difficult changes, whether that’s pricing moves, risk‑based off‑boarding, product withdrawals,  in a way that aligns with your values and your regulatory obligations.
• Media and stakeholder training that goes beyond the “sunny day” narrative and rehearses how you talk about mistakes, remediation and learning.

Handled well, a tough moment can actually validate your claims about resilience and culture. Handled badly, it can unravel years of careful positioning in a single news cycle.

Bringing it together

Across both parts of this series, the thread is simple:

• Part 1: the market has changed. Capital is back, but it’s choosier. The UK is still the hub, but with a higher bar. Winners look different now.
• Part 2: your communications need to change with it,  from hype to proof, from “regulation as risk” to “regulation as trust”, from generic brand noise to clear leadership voices and real‑world outcomes.

If you’re leading a fintech in the UK this year, the questions I’d be asking internally are:

• Are we telling the grown‑up version of our story,  the one that an investor, regulator and customer would all recognise as true?
• Are we using PR and comms to show (not just tell)  through outcomes, governance and people, rather than slogans?
• And if fintech investment is bouncing back, are we positioning ourselves clearly enough to be part of that next wave,  on our own terms?

Those are the conversations we’re having every day with clients at Clarity. If this is a pivot you know you need to make,  from challenger noise to legacy‑grade credibility, now is a very good moment to start.