The Rise Of Edutainment In Fintech: How TikTok Accelerating Finance Literacy

With consumers conducting more and more financial transactions via their mobile phones and interacting with a variety of fintech apps every week, there is a growing desire for greater financial literacy. More than 89% of TikTok users believe finance is an important topic and are actively trying to educate themselves, according to TikTok*. But they don’t want to be bored with heavy financial information; instead, they want entertaining, fun and educational content.

How TikTok accelerates financial literacy through edutainment content

Edutainment content, which blurs the line between education and entertainment, is booming on TikTok and has helped drive finance into the fastest growing category on TikTok in Southeast Asia. TikTok is now the go-to place for consumers to learn about fintech in a fun way, with one in two users discovering a new financial product on TikTok*.

But how can marketers harness this appetite for fintech edutainment to grow their brands and attract new customers?

Human-centric storytelling

Suki Lin, senior regional director, APAC, Nativex, said brands need to be aware of how significantly consumers and consumer behavior have changed due to the pandemic.

“The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital solutions and reduced the use of cash. Fintech has grown at a dizzying pace driven by innovative mobile-first companies that are attracting massive investment in the region.

“The Southeast Asian consumer is becoming highly sophisticated and tech-savvy – especially the new generation, who expect seamless integration of financial services into their everyday lives. To meet this demand, our financial service providers must shift from a product-centric focus and look into the consumer journey for a more human-centric perspective and offer more personalized solutions to consumers,” Lin said.

Sutirapan Sakkawatra, First Executive Vice President (FEVP), SCB, said: “When consumers are looking for fintech products, they turn to the opinions, reviews and comments of influencers and people around them.”

To capitalize on this, SCB has engaged its staff to create and run its content channel, ensuring all outputs are authentic, engaging and delivered by trusted sources – the real people behind the financial institution. SCB’s channel was launched in 2021 and has attracted 660,000 followers and almost three million likes.

Create and curate TikTok content

Creating engaging, high-quality content is critical to engaging users, according to Vangie Hu, vice president of marketing, Atome. Hu said marketers need to avoid repurposing content from other platforms and ensure they create and curate content specifically for TikTok if they want to achieve success.

“At Atome, we believe that we must engage with consumers in a way they like, and in the places they are. Take TikTok as an example; we never adapt a big idea to the platform, but we co-create with the TikTok team, and we create the engagement with the consumers and influencers on the platform. We engage TikTok at the early stages of campaign creation and design the campaign on the TikTok platform and in the TikTok way to leverage the team’s expertise and content lab.

“We also design the specific mechanics of campaigns according to TikTok features; for example, joy is very important. We always follow these principles to ensure that we achieve our goals across awareness, engagement and lead to conversion,” said Hu .

Hu said engaging with influencers and communities to tap into consumers’ passion points would help create a connection. Yet, ultimately, brands must ensure that their products and services are attractive to consumers.

“All consumers, especially the young generation, want to adopt a more omnichannel solution and have more choices as payment options. They value flexibility, the flexibility to manage their budgets and maximize promotions and rewards, keeping it simple, transparent and easy to use.

“It’s not just about payment solutions or just about fintech – it’s about everything in life. And the way we help consumers follow their own lifestyles by leveraging all the financial solutions,” said Lin.

Promote awareness and loyalty

With consumers searching for solutions that improve their lifestyles, fintech marketers have a unique opportunity to create awareness of their products and services and convert these users into customers.

The combination of high-quality content and a full-funnel strategy helped Flip achieve success, according to Andri Rahmad Wijaya, Marketing Manager of Flip (Indonesia).

Wijaya said Flip used a full-funnel strategy on TikTok by leveraging key moments of always-on activity through organic content and feed-integrated ads, then retargeting to maintain strong engagement and increase purchase intent to help generate high-quality leads and to finally convert these into sales.

The result was a significant boost to the brand’s followers and customer base.

“Flip was one of the early adopters of TikTok in Indonesia. One thing we felt was very beneficial for us to grow our user base was to follow a full-funnel strategy with TikTok, where we started with awareness and then retargeted those who were already interacting with our content.”

Flip also used TikTok to push beyond awareness and work on retention and loyalty among existing customers.

“This full-funnel strategy, [which followed users] from the awareness stage to the retention or loyalty stage, has really helped us achieve our marketing objective,” said Wijaya.