Someone pushed back with the most reasonable objection in the world. I'd spent weeks on the research, built the business case, got product on board, mapped the ICP, defined the buying criteria. And the response was: they mean the same thing. Why go through all of this?
Here's why it was worth it. And what it taught me about PMM in fintech.
When I joined a fast-growing fintech compliance company, the product suite had a naming problem nobody had officially named.
Two solutions. Both doing related things in the AML space. Both sold together. Both referred to internally by their initials: TM and TS. Transaction Monitoring and Transaction Screening. Bundled, abbreviated, and quietly confusing everyone.
Sales wasn't always sure which one to lead with. New team members struggled to articulate the difference. And buyers, sophisticated compliance professionals who read every line of a contract, were being asked to evaluate two solutions that sounded interchangeable.
They weren't.
What the products actually did
Transaction Monitoring was cumulative. Long-term pattern detection. It watched cross-border payments over time and built a picture, flagging behaviour that only looked suspicious across months of data.
Transaction Screening was real-time. Instant. A payment instruction arrives: a SWIFT message, a wire transfer, a SEPA payment, and before the funds move, the system screens it against sanctions lists, embargoed countries, restricted entities, watchlists.
Two different products. Two different use cases. Two different buyers within the same compliance team.
The problem wasn't the products. It was the name.
Why Transaction Screening had to become Payment Screening
I spent the first weeks not touching messaging. I got into the product. Sat through demos. Ran the product myself. Sat through competitor demos. Brought what I found back to the product team.
That's when the distinction became clear. So did the naming problem.
The buyers we were targeting, new fintechs, banking operations teams, sanctions compliance professionals, had their own language for what they did. They called it payment screening. Not transaction screening. They screened SWIFT messages, wire transfers, ACH payments, CHAPS, SEPA, FPS. They didn't screen card transactions or crypto transfers. That was a different problem, a different team, a different solution.
Our scope was narrow in the right way. Their language was specific. And the name we had wasn't matching either.
I ran it through independent analyst firms covering the financial crime compliance space. They confirmed what the customer conversations had already suggested. In the market, solutions doing what ours did were categorised under payment screening. The category already existed. We just weren't in it.
The objection
When I presented the case, one of the most pointed pushbacks was the simplest one.
"Transaction and payments mean the same thing. Why go through the whole exercise of changing it?"
It was a fair question. And for a moment it was a difficult one.
What I'd come to understand, through the product deep dive, the customer conversations, the competitor analysis, the analyst input, was that the similarity in language was exactly the problem. The subtlety mattered.
All payment screening is transaction screening. But not all transaction screening is payment screening.
Payment screening refers specifically to the screening of payment messages and payment instructions: SWIFT, SEPA, wire transfers, against sanctions and AML risks. Transaction screening can be broader: card transactions, crypto transfers, security trades.
If your ICP is a sanctions compliance team at a fintech or a banking operations team screening outgoing payments, they call what they do payment screening. They don't call it transaction screening. And if the product name doesn't match the language they use for their own job, you've already lost a layer of credibility before the conversation has started.
I held firm. The research was there. The product distinction was there. The buyer language was there. We renamed it.
What I got wrong first
I almost didn't have that research.
My instinct in the first weeks was to start with the messaging. Find the value proposition. Write the positioning. Get something out.
That's the wrong move in fintech.
In a compliance-first product environment, messaging without product depth isn't just weak. It's dangerous. Get the product wrong in a one-pager and you're not just off-message. You're potentially misrepresenting a regulated financial solution to buyers who will catch every inaccuracy. Compliance professionals don't forgive vague claims. They query them.
Once I stopped trying to market something I didn't fully understand and started learning the product: demoing it, sitting through competitor demos, reading the regulatory landscape, everything changed. The positioning wrote itself because I understood what we were actually selling and to whom.
The framework for fintech PMM: don't touch the messaging until you can demo the product. Not perfectly. But convincingly.
The framework: the fintech PMM immersion sequence
Before writing a single word of messaging in a regulated market vertical, do this first:
Step 1: Learn the product before you learn the market. Get into the product. Demo it yourself. Know its scope, its limitations, its use cases. If you can't explain what it does to a non-technical person in two sentences, you're not ready to market it.
Step 2: Sit through competitor demos. Not to steal ideas. To understand how buyers are being educated by the market. What language are competitors using? What does the buyer experience look like before they reach you?
Step 3: Let buyer language define your product language. How do your ICP buyers refer to what they do? Their terminology is the category. Your product name, your messaging, your ICP definition: all of it should map to how they describe their own job.
Step 4: Build the buying criteria, not just the ICP. ICP tells you who to talk to. Buying criteria tells sales when to talk to them. In fintech, the qualifying signals are regulatory: what mandates is the company operating under, what jurisdictions, what payment types are in scope.
Step 5: Run everything past the analysts. In regulated markets, analyst firms track the category taxonomy. If you think you're repositioning into a new category, check whether the category already exists and what it's called. You might just be late to a party that already has a name.
Next issue: the broader fintech GTM picture. Transaction Monitoring, Fraud Detection, and why marketing three compliance products to the same buyer requires three completely different conversations.
Hit reply if this resonates. I read every one.
Sneha
PMM Ungated is a newsletter about real product marketing. One story per issue. No theory. No gate.
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