obconnect: urgent lead generation for a looming CoP implementation deadline

obconnect are a leading UK provider of Open Banking and Confirmation of Payee (CoP) solutions. With expertise dating back to Open Banking’s inception in 2017, obconnect have become industry experts since. Founded in 2019, the obconnect mission has been to deliver exceptional SaaS and Hosted by Client solutions to Financial Institutions and Corporate Banks. 

In 2022, the Payments Services Regulator mandated that certain institutions must participate in CoP. This meant that around 400 Payments Services Providers (PSPs) in total needed to start their journey to implementing CoP by early 2023. Consequently, obconnect reached out to STM Agency to help them increase awareness around the CoP implementation deadline and generate high quality, in-scope leads using content creation. 

In addition, obconnect also wanted to raise awareness of its Chief Strategy Officer, Simon Lyons, as a leader in the open banking space.  

We created stand out creative assets implemented across a variety of formats, including a downloadable PDF guide to CoP and campaign landing page. ‘Your complete guide to implementing Confirmation of Payee’ was written and designed entirely by STM Agency, and detailed what CoP is, why it was being mandated, and what PSPs need to be able to implement it. The landing page covered similar information but in a condensed, more top-level format. This put more of a focus on the timeline and urgency of needing to implement CoP soon and less focus on the ins and outs of CoP itself. Both assets were designed to drive enquiries and leads from PSPs looking to get their complete CoP solution from obconnect.  

We then created a highly targeted social media campaign to deliver these to our audience of PSP decision makers. Utilising LinkedIn job targeting and 1st Party Data to ensure the posts were seen by the right people, this campaign used a combination of brand and product messaging to target our audience and produce engagement.   

Overall, this 6 week ABM campaign generated 8 leads, producing 71 clicks from our defined audience. Job titles of the leads generated included Chief Risk Officer, Head of Compliance, Technical Lead, and other compliance based senior roles.  

Two ad formats were tested and used in synergy to capture the attention of users in different ways: document ads and static lead gen ads. Document ads aim to generate user attention by teasing and showcasing part of the content and its quality. Static lead gen ads allow us to present our own visuals and messaging to the user while encouraging downloads. In this campaign, both formats performed equally well with four leads each. 

The creative used for the static lead gen ads also performed well, with the direct 'are you ready to implement CoP' messaging generating the highest click-through rate and amount of leads. Subsequently, these assets were scaled up, allowing more budget to be distributed towards them as we turned off lower performers.  

As a result, this campaign generated a number of high quality leads for obconnect, as well as increased awareness of CoP and obconnect as a leading provider of CoP.