For the record:
- No one is paying me to say to nice things about their blog. Hell, at least one of these vendors isn’t even a client (but, hell yeah, they should be).
- This isn’t a ranking. These aren’t necessarily the three “best” fintech vendor blogs (although they might be). Your fintech company might have a blog, and it might be worth reading. but I’ve chosen to talk about the three listed here. I’m not trying to slight yours, but sorry, not everybody gets a gold ribbon just for participating here in Snarketingville.
- This blog post makes me uncomfortable. It feels so off-brand to say nice things about somebody else. How un-Snarketing! We’ll see how this is received. Hell, if people like it, maybe I’ll try to be a little nicer and say good things about other people in the future.
With the disclaimers aside, there are three four fintech vendor blogs that you should be reading (if for no other reason than the fact that I read them — although, not nearly as often as I should). What makes them readworthy?
1. They’re well written. When a blog post starts off by stating “a couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with a friend, and we got to talking about algorithmic trading,…” you know you’re not dealing with your typical blogger (or person, for that matter). Melanie Friedrichs, who writes (all of?) Andera’s blog posts is an excellent writer, and that makes the Andera blog a helluva lot easier to read.
2.They contain original content. “The Rise of the Machines” on the Andera blog and posts like the impact of payments on health care on Perficient’s blog are examples of the original — i.e, not rehashed summaries of studies or articles found elsewhere — content found on these blogs. The last thing I want is someone summarizing something I can read elsewhere (especially if there is no new point of view added).
3. They discuss a variety of topics. This is clearly a personal bias, as I imagine some of you are boring, narrow-minded drones who care only about the one single topic that dominates your dreary little lives. Deluxe’s ForwardBanker blog might not be for you. I, however, like seeing blog posts on “3 New Things That You Should Know About Google,” “Data Doesn’t Die. You have to Kill It,” and “Utility or Spam-City: Twitter opens up Direct Messages.”
4. They’re not overly sales-y. We’re talking about fintech vendors here, so you know they’re going to talk about themselves and slip into sales-mode at some point. But it happens fairly infrequently on the three blogs listed here, and usually tastefully done when it does happen.
5. They publish regularly. Deluxe’s ForwardBanker blog has published 10 posts in October alone. Andera’s published 10 posts since August (their posts tend to be longer, more in-depth than Deluxe’s), and by milking the Money2020 conference and its Future of Payments panel, Perficient has also published a slew of posts in the past two months. In contrast, one large fintech vendor’s blog contains six posts for the entire year. You can’t build readership unless you publish regularly.
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20131205 update: Need to add Zoot’s blog to this list. It meets all the criteria listed here, and I really like how it deals with topics that go beyond the credit decisioning and loan origination solutions the firm provides.
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Know of any fintech vendor blogs (not your own company’s) you think people should read?