Boku’s analyst relations halves the major competitor’s lead

Six of the seven most valuable companies in the world use Boku’s platform to enable people to buy with their mobile phones.

In 2021, Boku engaged CCgroup to design and execute programmatic analyst relations. Within a year, it had halved the gap between it and the competitor leading in share of voice.

Challenge

Although most payments worldwide are now made by mobile, industry analysts advising global retailers and financial institutions tend to be in North America and Western Europe, where online payments are almost exclusively made with payment cards. As a result, analyst awareness of native mobile payments that are highly popular in the rest of the world were lacking. Compared to five peer firms, Boku had the lowest share of voice in 2020.

Boku had built the world’s largest local payments network with over 330 mobile payment methods connections in 90 countries. Its payment customers include most of the world’s leading digital retailers. However, due to Boku’s dominance of the niche carrier billing market, it was rarely positioned as a fintech player because analysts rarely understood the emergence and dominance of mobile wallets to eCommerce, nor Boku’s offering in that space.

Boku understood that the market needed a single cohesive narrative that was as relevant to investors as to potential customers and industry analysts.

Consultancy

CCgroup was engaged in 2021 to develop the firm’s positioning. Our Catyalst research of buyers in the fintech market showed us that industry analysts are as influential as the trade media in driving awareness of technology suppliers. Leveraging our deep expertise with clients in the payments industry, we identified the simultaneous needs to evangelize the importance of mobile-native payments in eCommerce as well as to establish visibility for Boku with fintech analysts.

CCgroup proposed a program at targeted briefings with a thought leadership campaign to increase awareness of mobile wallets.

In the first three months, we worked with Boku to prioritize the analysts and deeply research how to maximise its relevance to the leading analysts.

Consequence

In a series of ‘test and learn’ briefings we honed the firm’s message with analysts we knew were likely to offer rich feedback. The result was a heatmap to show which messages were cutting through and where there were development opportunities. One key gap was go-to-market insights.

Boku profoundly expanded its research into the analyst community. In the first quarters, it briefed several analyst firms for the first time (Forrester, Frost & Sulivan, Glenbrook, and Recon Research). CCgroup also hosted an analysts-only event online to discuss a new Mobile Wallets report, commissioned by Boku.  Analysts highly valued the report with several following up to get more insights into regional growth differences.

A detailed analysis of the debriefing notes crafted by CCgroup’s fintech AR specialist showed that it had filled the gap around to-to-market approached. Indeed, analysts were highly engaged by Boku’s enhanced narrative around growing client relationships and geographical expansion.

At the end of the program’s first year, the three key firms had all been briefed multiple times. Several secondary firms had been engaged in one-to-many activities. Boku’s share of voice had risen notably in research, halving the gap between it and the share of voice leader and positioning it strongly in reports on digital payment fraud.