Who are you?:

Paul Bowhay, SVP Global Head of Fintech, Hotwire

Who are your key clients?

GoCardless, bunq, BIAN, Signifydscribe to LFG!

Describe your PR firm in one sentence. What makes it different?

Hotwire is a specialist fintech communications agency that helps fintech brands solve real business challenges and win in a fast moving regulatory and commercial landscape.

Who is your typical client?

Our typical clients are midsized fintech companies and scaleups at a critical growth inflection point expanding into new markets, launching new propositions, or repositioning their business as they scale. Subsectors span banks, payment providers, and reg-tech organisations navigating regulatory change, competitive pressure and growth.

Fintech is a crowded and noisy sector. How can founders cut through when everyone claims to be "revolutionising" something?

Every fintech I've ever met thinks they're revolutionising something. Most aren't, and journalists know it immediately.

The word 'revolutionary' has been so overused in fintech it's become a red flag rather than a differentiator. The moment a pitch leads with it, credibility walks out the door.

The founders who cut through do the opposite. They get ruthlessly specific about the problem they solve, back it up with real evidence, and say it the same way every single time. No jargon. No hyperbole. Just clarity.

Differentiation in fintech isn't about being louder. It's about being clearer, more consistent, and more credible than everyone else in the room.

What's the single biggest misconception founders have about what PR actually does?

People think PR is a tap you turn on when you need coverage and off when you don't.
Founders come to us after a funding round or crisis expecting overnight results, then pull back the moment the pressure lifts. That's not PR; that's panic communications.

The founders who get the most out of PR understand it's a long game. Reputation isn't built on a single press release. It's built through consistent, credible storytelling over time. The journalist covering your Series C didn't just discover you that morning. Someone planted that seed months earlier.

And PR without alignment is just noise. I've seen brilliant campaigns neutralised because the sales team was saying something different and the founder went off-script in an interview.

PR is a strategic investment that compounds. The founders who treat it that way are the ones you keep reading about consistently, in the right places, at the right moments.

Which types of founder personalities are easiest/hardest to work with?

The founders we work best with understand the role of PR as a strategic partnership rather than a transactional service. They’re collaborative, invested in shaping a clear narrative, willing to prioritise time for media engagement, and realistic about how coverage is earned, recognising that momentum is built through consistent briefing and relationship building, not guaranteed outcomes from every meeting.

Founders are hardest to work with when they don’t recognise PR as a strategic discipline, and see media engagement as a distraction rather than a priority. Partnerships are especially challenging when there’s reluctance to engage with journalists, unrealistic expectations around guaranteed coverage, or a belief that PR expertise can simply be overridden. Effective collaboration requires mutual respect for both the founder’s business knowledge and the specialist skill PR brings.

How do you measure success in your work? Does this differ from the metrics that founders often rely upon?

Vanity metrics are the enemy of great PR and too many founders don't know they're measuring the wrong things.

Coverage volume and press release pickups feel good but rarely tell you whether PR is actually working. I've seen clients drowning in coverage that moved nothing, no pipeline, no perception shift, no competitive advantage. Impressive spreadsheets, zero impact.

We measure what matters. Are we reaching the right audiences? Is the message landing in the right context? Are we shifting how the market thinks about this company? Are competitors reacting?

The tension with founders is real. Everyone wants the big Sunday Times profile and those moments matter. But they don't happen in isolation. They're the result of months of consistent, credible storytelling that builds the kind of reputation journalists want to write about.

The metric I care most about though is whether PR is visibly contributing to business outcomes. Everything else is noise.

Pitching to journalists can be tough. What should founders know when trying to get coverage?

Journalists receive hundreds of pitches a week. Most get deleted in seconds and say the same thing.

The founders who get coverage understand one thing: it's not about them. A pitch isn't a press release. It's an answer to a journalist's unspoken question: “why should my readers care about this, right now?”.

Get that wrong and nothing else matters. Get it right and you become a valued resource. You don't need a perfect pitch, just need a relevant one.

A few things that kill pitches instantly: leading with company news nobody outside the business cares about, burying the story in jargon, and sending the same generic email to fifty journalists simultaneously. They can tell.

The strongest pitches are short, specific, and human. They lead with the story not the company, the problem not the product, and the impact not the innovation.
Know the journalist. Know their audience. Make their job easier.

What's the most common mistake a founder makes in their first media interview? And how do you fix it?

Talking about their product when nobody asked. It's the single most common mistake I see when a founder sits down with a journalist and immediately launches into features, functionality, and roadmap. Eyes glaze over. The story dies before it starts.

Journalists don't care about your product. They care about the problem it solves, the people it helps, and why it matters right now. Lead with that and you have a story. Lead with your tech stack and you have a brochure.

The fix is brutally simple. Before any interview, answer three questions: What's the one thing I want this journalist to walk away with? Why does this matter to their readers today? What's the human story behind the business?

The founders who nail media engagement are the ones who understand they're not there to explain their product. They're there to tell a story.

Media is changing. How is your budget allocation shifting?

The spray and pray approach to PR is dead and the agencies still doing it just haven't admitted it yet.

Newsrooms are leaner, journalists are stretched, and the bar for what earns genuine attention has never been higher. Sending the same pitch to 200 contacts and hoping something lands isn't a media strategy, it's wishful thinking.

We're doubling down on what actually works. Strategic counsel. Tailored journalist relationships built over time. Research-led storytelling with real data behind it. Thought leadership that says something genuinely worth reading.

And we're pulling back from volume for volume's sake, broad outreach, generic announcements, coverage that fills a report but moves nothing.

The media landscape is fragmenting fast. The winners will be the ones who do fewer things with far more precision and relevance. Quality over quantity isn't a philosophy. It's the only strategy that still works

What's been your biggest win in PR?

It doesn’t come down to a single campaign; it's building something rarer than a viral moment: genuine expertise that founders trust when the stakes are highest.

Over 15 years in fintech PR I've been in the room for acquisitions, category-defining launches, executive crises, and market repositioning the moments where the wrong story can derail everything and the right one can change a company's trajectory overnight.

The win I'm most proud of isn't any individual piece of coverage. It's the phone calls I get when something significant is about to happen and a founder's first instinct is to call me. That's not something you manufacture, it's built through years of being right, being honest, and being useful when it matters most.

Fintech is a sector where trust is the ultimate currency. Building a reputation as someone founders rely on during their most consequential moments, that’s the benchmark I measure everything else against.

Which campaign, stunt, or piece of comms work from another PR team made you think 'I wish I'd done that'?

Monzo’s "Undo Payments" Feature, which isn’t a traditional PR campaign but one of the best product-led stories of the year, really stands out.

The announcement that Monzo's Undo Payments feature had already prevented £350 million in mistaken payments is the perfect example of turning a product innovation into a consumer trust story something every fintech should be doing more of.

That's the mark of truly great comms work. It doesn't just get noticed, it moves the conversation forward. Every PR person's dream.

What advice would you give to a fintech founder who's about to hire their first PR firm?

The best PR relationships I've seen are the ones where the agency pushes (or pushes back) on the messaging, the timing, the story angle, the spokesperson. If your PR firm agrees with everything you say, they're not doing their job.

Before you sign anything, ask three questions. Do they actually understand fintech - not just the language, but the nuance? Can they tell you honestly what story the market is ready to hear versus the one you want to tell? And have they done this before at the stage you're at?

Sector expertise isn't a nice to have in fintech. It's non-negotiable. A generalist agency will spend your budget learning your market. A specialist will hit the ground running.

And one final thing, chemistry matters. You'll be sharing sensitive information and navigating high-stakes moments together. Trust everything.

Want to feature in Fintech PR Unfiltered? Get in touch at [email protected], and we’ll take it from there.

Features are not endorsements unless stated.