Marqeta’s Jeff Otto: Category Creation Needs Recognition, Competitors, and Early Adopters

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Burdened by decades-old technology, ruled by strict regulation, and risk-averse by necessity, the financial sector presents a complex challenge for innovators. But don’t mistake a difficult market for an unprofitable one. Opportunities abound—if you know where to look. Modern card issuing and embedded finance platform Marqeta is proof.

The fintech company dismantled the archaic “black box” of card issuing, and put the control back in the hands of developers. Still, for Jeff Otto, VP of Marketing at Marqeta, building a brand new category in an industry known for its glacial rate of change hasn’t been easy.

I caught up with Jeff to discuss how Marqeta built the modern card issuing category, what it takes to stay at the forefront of the market, and why the category definitions are constantly evolving.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you create a new category in an inflexible industry?

With category creation, you need a few things. First, you need to influence the  market to recognize the new category. Often, that means playing ball with analyst firms so that they recognize the need for a new ‘wave’ or ‘magic quadrant’ that they can place you within.

Next, you need new entrants to recognize that your category is an attractive part of the market and to compete against you.

Even as the first mover in the category, we take every opportunity to deepen and expand the category and our place within it.

Before I joined, Marqeta’s founder and CEO Jason Gardner saw an opportunity to change the archaic black box approach of legacy card issuer processors. He wanted to give control back to the innovators, offer them the ability to create differentiated offerings, and ride alongside their growth as a trusted adviser. We started by building relationships with the big innovators—the Blocks, Coinbases, and Klarnas of the world. We helped them unlock new experiences that drive growth.

You also have to continuously deepen the moat around your category and demonstrate why you lead it. Even as the first mover in the category, we take every opportunity to deepen and expand the category and our place within it.

For example, we've seen a pattern where crypto innovators are looking to drive deeper engagement with their customers via modern cards. For example, Fold leverages our platform APIs to offer a Bitcoin cashback debit card with a gamified experience. Differentiated experiences like this create endless possibilities for increasing loyalty and engagement. When we see a pattern like that, we invest in positioning for that cohort of prospective buyers and make sure we're fitting it inside the umbrella of our category.

How do you differentiate between a long-term trend and a temporary blip?

The first thing to look at is the leads coming in by channel. What messaging and tactics are working? What is generating sales-accepted opportunities? What did we do six to nine months ago that is resulting in closed (won) business today?

When you feel something is more than a blip, there’s an opportunity to say, “Alright, let's invest in the go-to-market cycles to research that space.”

What did we do six to nine months ago that is resulting in closed (won) business today?

One trend I’m particularly excited about is a wonderful partnership with a large bank called FNBO. They recognized there is tremendous potential to modernize their tech stack to create opportunities to serve more customers and expand to new markets. They created an innovation subsidiary within the bank where they can reinvent their technology stack with modern tools. 

I was at a conference called Finovate Spring, and we were talking about some of the early successes FNBO was having. Other large regional banks were engaging with us and saying, “We're thinking about doing that as well, and we'd love to talk to you.”

It sounds like intuition plays a key role. Is pattern identification more art than science?

Today, it is more art than science. Although, I will say that we have better machine learning every year. We have intent data and lead enrichment technology that is really useful for fine-tuning our inbound and outbound motions. I think there is always an opportunity to be more scientific and to use ever-evolving martech to identify trends and patterns.

When I was at Salesforce, we relied on human expertise to supplement technology. We had hired a bunch of great people with 20+ years of experience to cover every industry sub-vertical. We empowered them to do pattern recognition because the human brain is so good at it. That's how we built out Salesforce’s industry vertical go-to-market strategy.

What role does content play in category creation and expansion?

As we climb the maturity curve, our content strategy has been top of my mind. In fact, we recently noticed that some of our best writers were on the communications team. They were delivering trends, imperatives, thought leadership, and primary research. We decided to bring together content strategy and communications, and empower them to start conversations and create audiences at the top of the funnel.

Then, content strategists can do several things. They can extract themes from internal subject matter experts, from deal cycles, from other sources.

Then, content strategists can do several things. They can extract themes from internal subject matter experts, from deal cycles, from other sources. Perhaps they can formulate a content pillar or an ‘anchor’ longform piece of content.. Then they can atomize that longform piece of content injecting all of the derivative pieces into various owned, paid, and earned media channels. It gets atomized content to our other teams like demand generation so that they can create more reach for each theme.

Perspectives is a weekly series interviewing the best marketing leaders. Subscribe for interviews straight to your inbox.