08/07/2026
From evaluating growth stories as an investor to building one of fintech's biggest. 📈🏦
How do you escape the "monopolistic pricing of Google" and become the brand small business owners think of first?
In our latest Beyond the Brief Conversation, Casey Akerblom, SVP of Marketing at Bluevine, the largest small business banking platform in the US, shares how he's building brand gravity for a platform with 1M+ customers, $2B in deposits, and $17B in loans delivered.
Here are 3 key takeaways from Casey's playbook:
Bottom-Funnel Only = Expensive: Winning at the last click is possible, but costly. The real goal is customers defaulting to "the first thing I should look into is Bluevine."
Create Information Gain: AI platforms already know what an ACH fee is. Bluevine publishes a new data-driven report every month, built on surveys of real small business owners, and its AI share of voice now leads the category.
Trustworthy ≠ Boring: Financial services must earn trust, but the safe, dull approach gets expensive. Bluevine's first brand-first campaign is proof leadership agrees.
👉 Read the full interview here - https://tr.ee/AkxyIUzpTm - to learn what a Coke bottle in a $50,000 car taught Casey about customer experience, why ChatGPT's citation change boosted AI referrals ~300% in a week, and which comedic actor would ideally play him in his biopic. 🎬