Maria Hart is chief marketing officer for global trading platform Octa. She leads the company’s marketing strategy in South Africa, focusing on growth, innovation, and building strong partnerships to drive success across the country.
Visualise a successful fintech trader. Are you picturing a single mother of two?
When it comes to financial products, only 32% of fintech firms customise their financial products to female consumers. However, a majority of firms believe that women are more loyal to brands than men. So, why aren’t more fintech businesses tailoring their products to tap into this audience?
Considering that 42% of South African homes are led by women, addressing this disconnect would mean increasing female employment, opening pathways to financial security, and improving their welfare.
At Octa, a global multi-asset broker who provides a platform for consumers to trade and earn money, we saw this gap between fintech firms and women. A new strategy began to emerge: not only would we tackle this disconnect with our creative assets and messaging, we’d also invest in education and training.
See how this blend of digital marketing and grassroots-level investment led to thousands of new female fintech users across South Africa.
Relatability drives action within marketing
Forty percent of Africa’s fintech users reside in South Africa, making it not only a powerhouse location for firms looking to expand on the continent, but also a market ripe for testing the viability of fintech product adoption among women.
Last year, our internal surveys revealed that 50% of Octa’s users in South Africa were women — a revelation we were excited about since adoption among women sits between 10-15% in other countries. Additional data from Google showed us that women make up 44% of people interested in finance in South Africa, which further confirmed the landscape of our user base.
Our research also showed us that many adult women in South Africa are single mothers searching for ways to earn additional income. And we learned that when women do enter the world of trading, it’s to find a group of like-minded people — a community — in addition to making money.
Using this newfound knowledge, we utilised Google Display and Video 360 to implement a two-pronged approach to reach potential women traders aged between 18-55 from all socio-economic backgrounds and relationship statuses. First, we adopted Video action campaigns on YouTube as this could help us with both awareness for our brand and encourage action on the part of potential Octa users. Secondly, we launched Display ads geared towards increasing female customers by offering them a free beginner’s course in trading.
From representation to educational action
Together with our creative agency Fancy Shot and Google, we started by testing a representative creative in our ad campaign to help us engage more female traders. We wanted to reach women between the ages of 18-34 specifically, but without alienating older age groups. That’s why we created a mother-daughter dynamic in our video ad with the younger of the two acting as the savvy trader:
We removed any corporate, formal messaging and focused more on the storytelling of the characters that represent our intended audience. The tagline "Girl, invest in yourself" at the end best encapsulates our messaging and language.
The video ad with the mother-daughter duo achieved a 23% lift in brand awareness for Octa and a 25% lift in consideration.
However, representing female customers creatively was only the first step in making trading more attractive to these users in South Africa. The Display ads didn’t only focus on increasing the number of women using Octa, we also wanted to educate them and help them become expert traders. The Display ads offered a free four-week trading course, covering topics such as an introduction to trading and key mistakes to avoid:
After analysing the performance of the campaign, we were overwhelmingly pleased with the results:
- 65K new female users registered on Octa
- 4.4K women registered for the trading course
- 1105 new female customers actively started trading
In celebration of South Africa’s Women’s Month last August, we took our efforts to reach female customers a step further with the one-day Women in Forex and Entrepreneurship event. The objective of this in-person workshop was to show trading as an accessible, viable avenue for every kind of woman. In total, 200 women attended the event, which converted to 43 new traders.
Women in fintech add to business value
South Africa is home to Africa’s largest financial services market, expecting to contribute $80 billion to the sector’s $230 billion in revenue in 2025. Normalising female users in fintech and trading means walking the walk.
Representation in marketing helps move the needle. But engaging with people through education and programmes is how fintech companies can address social disparities and, in turn, add to business value.
