Finora Bank: 199% growth in 2025 through human touch and speed

Interview with Justė Žulienė, Head of Marketing & Communication at Finora Bank.

To set the scene, what’s your professional background? 

I’m a communications professional. I worked in PR and communications for more than six years. Then I took on a broader role as Head of Marketing at Finora Bank. I’ve been working in B2B marketing for about two years, but my foundation is definitely communications.

Before joining Finora Bank I worked at a fintech that’s now called SME Go. They operated in five countries: the Baltics, Finland, and the Netherlands. Before that, I worked in politics as a PR person for a liberal faction in the Parliament in Lithuania.

Let’s talk about Finora. Who is your ideal customer (ICP)?

Our ideal client is financially mature SME, a business with solid financial discipline, clear cash flow visibility. That’s the ideal profile—more medium-sized than micro. That said, we do work with micro companies too.

Every bank says they want “clean” clients. What’s different about Finora’s focus?

Traditional, major banks  often don’t focus on smaller business loans—say, a one-million loan—because it’s a lot of work. They prefer bigger tickets and large corporates. We are more relevant for SMEs and mid-sized businesses that still need a bank that moves faster and invests more effort per case.

Financing is mostly inbound: companies apply to several banks at once. So your real marketing challenge is being on the shortlist. 

Exactly. If a business doesn’t need a loan, there’s no point trying to sell it. Our main goal is awareness—so when a company needs financing, they think of Finora Bank and include us among the banks they apply to.

The biggest decision factors are price—and for smaller clients, timing. Big banks and credit unions can take weeks. We focus on speed.

What’s your differentiator once the application comes in? 

Human touch. Marketers love talking about “seamless platforms” and “AI-driven” features, but we found that people want people. Every applicant gets a dedicated loan manager—someone from sales who works directly with them. That relationship can matter a lot while they compare options.

Speed matters—but banking still needs time to review financials. How fast do you respond? 

We can’t give a real decision in minutes, because financial review takes time. But we respond within a day or two, depending on the case. We also use automatic confirmations, and then we follow with a human response—or sometimes sales calls immediately. After the application, it’s mainly the sales process.

Person-to-person service is expensive, though. 

It is. People are expensive—that’s why everyone automates. But we’re still the smallest bank in the Baltic market, so we can afford more human-to-human communication, and we want to keep it.

So how do you build awareness without big-budget TV? 

Through digital channels rather than mass media. In 2025, around 30% of our overall awareness efforts were driven by social and content-led digital activity, with LinkedIn as the main platform—so it’s significant.

We use the corporate profile, but we also focus heavily on people. Organic reach is hard for company pages; people perform better. So we built a group of spokespeople and pushed thought leadership—LinkedIn posts, articles, and media appearances like radio interviews on financing, banking trends, and the economy. Right now we have six people representing the company.

Motivating experts to publish is always hard. How do you get them to do it? 

It’s difficult, but people increasingly understand it builds trust and helps the business long-term. It also helps when they see their own articles performing. Internally, we create a supportive culture.. Sometimes it feels like a game, but it increases reach and engagement.

And because we communicate person-to-person with customers, salespeople also build their own communities. We’ve had clients say, “I heard you on the radio—I need a loan.” We also avoid aggressive hard-sell newsletters, though we do offer follow-on products when we see a customer nearing the end of a loan cycle.

What KPIs do you track on LinkedIn? 

Engagement and impressions. For the business profile, we consider “good” engagement above 20%, though our average is around 23–25%, which we consider strong for our current audience size.We reached 5,000 followers just before New Year and now we’re at around 5,100. For impressions, more than 1,000 per post is a good benchmark, but it varies—images drive impressions, documents often drive engagement. The next step is growing the audience while keeping the same level of engagement and content quality.

Screenshot: Finora Bank’s Linkeidn profile

Do you use paid marketing?

We focus primarily on organic channels and performance driven digital marketing. Paid activity is used selectively, mainly to reach businesses that are already actively searching for financing. We continuously test and review different channels for awareness, but we stay disciplined about where paid investment actually delivers value. For example, we tested Meta for awareness, but I’m skeptical—maybe we ran it too briefly, maybe it needed more time.

What about events? Finora has sponsored in Estonia before. 

Yes—Gazelle conference two years in a row, where we were the main sponsor.There was also an EIF (European Investment Fund) partnership that enabled better financing conditions for the creative sector, and we sponsored major creative-industry events like the Estonian Music Business Awards 2024 gala.

But last year our business goal shifted to reaching breakeven, and marketing shifted toward lead generation. We still participate in events, but in a more targeted and selective way. Events are good for awareness and trust, but for leads they’re too expensive and don’t convert efficiently.

Does PR still matter to you? 

Yes. PR complements Google Ads. PR builds trust—seeing the name in media adds credibility.

How do Estonia and Lithuania differ in customer behavior? 

Estonians care more about digital experience, convenience, and credibility signals—overall polish and UX. Lithuanians care more about human interaction. They don’t mind sending documents by email or uploading many files—they want a reliable person to call.

Latvia is the hardest one for me. In my previous job at fintech - we tested campaigns across multiple countries and nothing worked there. I still don’t understand it.

You run marketing with agencies and freelancers. What’s in-house vs outsourced? 

Almost everything is outsourced: a local PR agency in Estonia, a digital agency for ads, designers. Strategy stays in-house—we own the direction, agencies execute.

Is that the long-term model? 

No, I see it as temporary. We changed a lot last year, rebuilt much of the team, and we’re launching multiple things—new products, a new core banking system, a new website. It’s not public yet, but a lot is coming. Long-term, internal capability is cheaper and faster—less briefing, more flexibility, better context. With agencies, you’re one client among many unless you’re their biggest.

Where do you want Finora to be in five years? 

Very ambitious—we want to expand to a Europe-level presence and become a major digital bank.

Why do you believe that’s realistic in such a competitive market? 

We’re still refining our uniqueness, but the financing gap is real. 2025 was a very strong year: our loan portfolio grew 199% across both Estonia and Lithuania. We were the fastest-growing bank in both markets—although, of course, we’re also the smallest, so the base effect matters.

A big reason is that we shifted strategy heavily toward lead generation, aligned with a company-wide goal of reaching breakeven.

What’s your biggest challenge as a marketer right now? 

Convincing the team that marketing isn’t only leads—it’s also brand awareness, credibility, and PR. Brand activities look like “cost” in the short term, especially when breakeven is the priority, because payback often takes more than a year.

But I’ve managed to show that trust improves lead quality. Earlier, we generated more low-quality leads—sometimes even individuals applying instead of businesses—which wasted time. As we increased content, visibility, and spokesperson credibility, we started attracting larger, more qualified companies who already understood that Finora Bank is a bank and had seen us in credible places.

Everyone says creativity and emotion matter in B2B, but most campaigns are still conservative. Would Finora do something bold? 

We want to. The whole team agrees generic ads are boring—and there’s so much noise that people become blind to it. You need something that truly catches attention, in B2B as well.

But we haven’t done anything very “crazy” yet. It takes time to develop strong ideas—and you have to be brave. In B2B, it’s also harder because your tone of voice has to be consistent across the company. If ads are bold but the people are conservative, it doesn’t feel believable.

What books would you recommend for fellow marketers to read?

Here are two books I would recommend: 

Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman - this is not a marketing book, but very relevant. It’s about time, focus, and limits. It helps put time and priorities into clear boxes and helped me to understand, that in marketing, doing fewer things at the right moment usually works better than doing everything at once. 

And other: 

Everybody Writes, Ann Handley - about the power of words and writing. There’s nothing radically new, but it’s a good reminder that everything is content, so useful for anyone who writes websites, emails, posts, or creates any kind of content. One of the takeaways is that B2B marketing is MORE emotional, not less.