FinTech Marketing That Moves the Needle: Lessons from Tonik Digital Bank’s Head of Marketing

I started Oblique partly because I wanted to build a community of marketing leaders — people who are trying to raise the bar on how we go to market and how we advocate for our work. Because there's a version of this job where you spend a lot of time defending your existence, and there's another version where you're actually running part of the revenue engine.

My conversation with Wanda Pascua, Head of Marketing at Tonik Digital Bank, ended up being one of the clearest articulations I've heard of what separates those two versions. And a lot of it tracked with what I've been figuring out at PayMongo — sometimes uncomfortably so.

Vanity metrics are a slow death

Wanda came up the same way a lot of us did. Ten years in advertising. Big celebrity-led FMCG launches. TVCs. Mall activations. The whole funnel — build awareness, drive engagement, convert in-store. Success was measured in impressions and engagement rates.

Then Tonik broke that muscle memory.

"I was so used to targets like engagement rate, impressions. Now, I find them like vanity metrics," she told me. "My targets are really loan volume. It's a shared target — not just by marketing, but by the business."

Everything she runs now traces back to cost per acquisition, negotiated directly with her CFO. Not brand building as its own separate phase. Not awareness before conversion. Both, simultaneously, with every peso expected to show up somewhere in a loan volume dashboard.

I've been pushing the same frame at PayMongo. Every marketer on my team — whether they're doing brand, creative, or performance — needs to be able to tie their activity back to an active user, a transaction, or a volume outcome. My CTO put the principle as bluntly as possible early on: how do we put a dollar in and get two dollars out?

When you start thinking that way, a lot of the comfortable marketing activity just falls away. It's clarifying in the best and most brutal sense.

The last 20% is where the real work is

The conversation that's making everyone in marketing anxious right now is AI. Wanda was direct about it: executives can reasonably ask whether a content writer can be replaced by ChatGPT. You're no longer just justifying your campaigns — you're justifying your headcount.

My reframe: pre-AI, the hard 20% was strategy and planning. The remaining 80% was executing on what you'd decided. Post-AI, that 80% is increasingly automated. Which means the 20% that was already the hard part now expands. More knowledge work. More discernment. More quality assurance. The job doesn't get easier — it demands more at the top of the stack.

"AI is sort of like a 10x-er," I told Wanda. "It helps get the best and more out of us. But if your base is lacking, what is AI going to multiply?"

Her answer was sharp: "If you use it lazily, you get lazy output. If you use it smartly, you get smart output."

Where I've landed: I use Perplexity for research and actual quantitative data, then a separate LLM to process and synthesize. Wanda's moved from using AI as a glorified search engine to feeding it her own transcripts and internal data — generating reports and starting points she then refines. It's a meaningfully different workflow from "please write me a caption."

The near-term picture we both see is lean: startups worth billions running with headcounts in the low double digits. Marketing teams of five people running AI-augmented growth engines. And the people who stay are the ones who, as Wanda put it, "know how to read the business and have genuine concern for it." That's not soft language. It's a filter.

The communication tax

One thing I've been thinking about for a while that came up in the conversation: I call it the communication tax.

When you work with an agency, the quality of their output is directly proportional to your ability to brief them. And sometimes you're so deep in the internal problems of the business — the operational friction, the risk issues, the things you can't fully share externally — that the quality of your brief degrades. When the brief degrades, the work degrades with it.

Wanda added a dimension I hadn't fully articulated. Having spent a decade agency-side before moving client-side, she knows what external partners can only ever see: the goal you give them. They miss the whole internal picture — what's happening in collections, in product, in operations — that a good senior marketer has to factor into every campaign decision.

So a big part of what I'm actually hiring for right now isn't just skills. It's the ability to translate messy internal context into a crisp, actionable brief — to help pay that communication tax — so that the external partner can execute what actually needs to happen.

Activations I can actually justify

I'll be honest: I've grown pretty skeptical of the traditional expo booth. The full-day setup. Tarps and backdrops. Your team standing there waiting for foot traffic. The math rarely closes on qualified leads.

Wanda's tilted toward the same conclusion. For Tonik's shop installment loan — a buy now, pay later product distributed through retail partners — they still run on-ground activations. Barangay events, community sales at covered courts. But the reporting changed. They don't count foot traffic anymore. They count loans booked. The measure changed how the whole organization sees the investment.

For me at PayMongo, the format I'm most excited about is CXO roundtables. Intimate dinners. Getting into the same room as the conglomerates driving Philippine GDP — San Miguel, PAL, the top 100 companies — building relationships before there's a deal on the table. The returns aren't immediate, and you have to socialize that timeline with management. But enterprise deal velocity in B2B has a six-month sales cycle with a cohort of decision-makers — C-levels, Mancom, procurement. One relationship at a dinner table can be worth more than a quarter of digital spend.

Wanda mentioned the Near Creative dinner as a case in point. That networking eventually led to them becoming Tonik's TikTok agency. It all started with the conversation over food.

Building a brand in a low-trust market

Because we're both operating in BSP-regulated environments, we ended up talking about something I find genuinely hard: how do you build a brand that feels human when you're in the business of handling people's money?

Wanda was nearly scammed two weeks before we recorded — a phishing text that came from the exact same sender ID her credit card institution uses for transaction alerts. She clicked the link. "To think I work in a bank," she said.

The scams are getting smarter because AI is making them more polished and harder to detect. Tonik now treats anti-scam education as a formal content pillar, coordinated with BSP campaigns and their own initiatives. But Wanda made a point that stuck with me: format is only half the problem. Tonality matters just as much. Talking about money is intimidating for a lot of Filipinos. They were never formally taught to save or manage finances. If your content sounds like a compliance document, you've already lost.

That's where Tonik's "anti-bank" positioning earns its keep. FMCG in texture. Flirty. Casual. They call customers "love." Some users hate it, say it's unprofessional, complain publicly. Wanda's team lets them churn.

I pushed on this and she was direct: "That's not my market. I'm not gonna make a marketing plan to convert them."

That's how I think about content too. Good content is exclusive by design. To reach the right audience, you have to filter out the wrong one. The polarization isn't a failure mode — it's a signal that the positioning is working.

Social by design

One of the things I wasn't expecting to come away from this conversation thinking about: banking as a community product.

Wanda walked me through Stashes — Tonik's savings feature where you set aside money for specific goals. Travel. Pets. Emergency funds. Other banks do variants of this. What Tonik built that others haven't: the group stash. A barkada planning a trip can open a shared pot, each person contributing until they hit the target together.

"It becomes social by design," she said. "Banking that's social by design."

I think this points somewhere interesting. Social media is increasingly isolating. People feel less connected, not more. What I'm starting to see as a product direction — and Tonik's group stash is a small but real example — is solutions that intentionally foster connection. You're not just budgeting for a trip. You're accountable to your friends. There's shared progress. There's a goal that belongs to the group.

That's a meaningfully different relationship between a user and a financial product.

The version of this job that survives

Wanda runs a team of eleven. She presents to management, to the board, to the BSP. Then she opens her laptop and writes copy for the an ad.

I operated most of last year with three people on the team and did a full PayMongo rebrand — new visual identity, new website, brand launch event at Uma Nota — from that. I still design sometimes. I still write copy.

We both do it because you lose credibility if you don't. The T-shaped marketer isn't a career archetype. It's a baseline requirement. You need depth somewhere, competence everywhere else, and the ability to make trade-offs as if you own the outcome.

"If you own the business," I told Wanda, "if you have real ownership of what needs to happen, you'd do things a lot differently. You're not just doing checkbox marketing."

That's the version of this job that survives the next few years. Not the one that reports activities. The one that moves the needle and can tell you exactly why.

Wanda Pascua is Head of Marketing at Tonik Digital Bank. This article is taken from the Oblique Podcast.