Today's guest is Esfira Zakas, CMO at payabl, one of Europe's fastest growing payment service providers, and the engine moving money for merchants across the continent, from online checkouts and POS machines to multi-currency accounts and card issuing, at a company that has scaled to over 300 people.

Esfira describes herself as marketing agnostic. Before fintech she worked across insurance, logistics through COVID, and a string of tech and startup companies, driven less by any one industry than by a childhood dream of being Don Draper from Mad Men. Advertising was in the family. Her father sold ad space for the local newspaper and her brother works in social media strategy, so she was watching Mad Men before it was cool and always knew she wanted to build brands.

What makes her story unusual is how she landed in fintech, and where she started. Originally from Riga and now based in Vilnius, she was payabl's first hire in Lithuania, with no office and no colleagues to learn from. 

Her first workspace was a free co-working desk in a shopping mall sponsored by Ikea, so for months every internal and external call went out with a giant Ikea logo behind her while she ran back and forth between the mall and her car. She knew nothing about payments beyond how to tap her card. Four years later she runs a 20-person marketing team and is General Manager of payabl's Lithuanian business.

This conversation moves from that early career into how a challenger brand actually competes: what it takes to market payments against the giants, why fintechs are betting on sports, and how AI is reshaping marketing without replacing the people behind it.

In the full episode, we cover:

• Why fintechs are pouring money into sports sponsorships
• How a challenger payments brand stands out against giants like Stripe
• Why she won't let her team go all-in on AI, and where it actually helps
• How she learned fintech from scratch as the only person in the room
• Scaling a marketing team from 5 to over 20 people across Europe
• What she looks for when hiring, and why curiosity beats a polished CV
• Her advice for young people trying to break into fintech
  
  

Connect with Esfira Zakas:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/esfira/

Matthew Cheung (Host & Founder Work in Fintech):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

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