Journalist-turned-marketer Charlie Gilbert of Volt on the key to mastering brand messaging

I had grand aspirations to become an investigative journalist. I went to Queen Mary and City University in London, and realised that the starting salaries for an entry-level journalism position made that career path less viable. I instead went into the relatively new profession of content marketing. I cut my teeth with a few agencies, and worked with clients directly.

After a couple of years, I definitely wanted to move in-house. I was frustrated with the effort I was putting into projects but I wouldn’t see the impact that those projects were having. I picked travel as an industry because, at the time, it was fully transitioning to an online-only industry – which, in a highly competitive space, meant that brands had to act cleverly to stand out. I wanted to be part of that. I worked for legendary cartographic company Stanfords, then later a tour operator called Discover The World. Next, I launched my own travel firm, Indigo East, which enabled travellers to book ATOL-protected trips with verified local suppliers across South Asia. I did this for three years.

I started a family and needed to get a mortgage so I went back into full-time work and started to carve out a niche at an organisation called Stylus. That was where, for me, content marketing met brand marketing and brand comms – the disciplines merged. I learned the importance of what underpinned external comms: brand personality, brand voice, brand positioning.

Stylus was historically a trend forecasting agency in the fashion space – which didn't really reflect its core services: unpacking trends and making sense of them across the creative industries. We did a big brand refresh. We moved away from becoming a trend forecasting agency to a trend intelligence agency. We started talking about cross-industry innovation and the importance of looking at one sector to help you inform creative decision making in another.

I moved to Enterprise Nation – the small business support network next. I worked with its strategic partners who would help fund small business support programs – companies like Google, Amazon and Uber. I was invited to join Volt around a year into that journey. I was sold this incredible vision for what was then an early-stage startup that aimed to disrupt the global payments landscape by allowing people to pay for things in an e-commerce environment directly from their bank account and bypass payment cards altogether.

I thought it was fascinating. It was clear to me that the founder had this amazing vision, but there was a real gap in terms of how this brand resonated with its target customers. It needed to move from a monochromatic, quite obviously alpha-male look and feel to a more tangible and objective brand proposition.

I’ve been here over three years now. Volt is now one of the leading global real-time payment providers. It has been brilliant to see that growth over the last three years and that the articulation of our offer has been key to us winning a number of global brands.

Volt.io offers real-time payments for products and services – straight from your bank account

What is the offer at Volt?

If you’re a big company, we offer you a single integration into a world of real-time payments. What does that mean? A real-time payment is an account-to-account payment. A payment from me to a business that I’m buying a product or a service from. It’s an automated bank transfer. There’s no card, there’s no middlemen.

As an open banking provider, Volt initiates that payment from within the customer’s bank account. Prior to Volt, you would have had to have multiple integrations into each of the different payment systems across the globe – but we’ve removed that problem because we have integrated all of them into our network.

We offer this single integration by offering ‘pay by bank’ as a product. We’ve created a payment experience that is unified across all of the markets that we are live in.

It looks like you’ve had several successful rounds of funding. How are things going at Volt?

After successful Series A and B funding rounds, we’ve really doubled down on our product capabilities. We recognized that, in open banking, the opportunity lay beyond payment initiation. It’s why we’ve built a suite of value-add products that help Volt stand above the competition, and from my perspective it’s been incredibly rewarding telling the stories underpinning them. We’re technology-first, not brand-first, which perhaps paradoxically gives me more to work with.

Because we do what very few other businesses do, we’ve been able to win big brands such as Farfetch and XE.com and expand into markets like Brazil and Australia. The US will follow in 2025.

This geographic reach, coupled with our product depth, has allowed us to differentiate from the competition. The opportunity for me is how we get consensus on the best way to articulate our offering, increase our reach and ensure that our value proposition is as tangible and truthful across all of the markets that we operate in.

Charlie (center-left) and the Volt.io team

How is your marketing team structured?

I spent 2023 leading the marketing function. There were just two of us. Me doing the brand marketing and one other doing the events. She manages our physical brand presence at industry events for open banking, payments and the verticals in which we operate: travel, retail, crypto.

2024 has seen us build out the team. We hired a CMO in January this year, followed by a VP demand generation and VP product marketing. We also brought in a content marketing lead to support our content efforts.

What is your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of, where you felt: “This is me. This is the role for me.”

In 2009, I was looking after the industry news section of the Skyscanner blog. When I moved to Snack Media, which was an early-stage content marketing startup, I brought Skyscanner along with me. That was, without doubt, my first memory of a marketing win.

How do you value creativity in great brand advertising?

As a business, we greatly value creativity which, I think, is relatively rare in a corporate environment. I am, in effect, the Volt brand guardian: defining and articulating what Volt is, how we talk, what we look like – while simultaneously recognizing that Volt is evolving.

Having boundaries in place to make sure that you can stay objective is really important. We need these because it doesn’t take much for good brand work to be undone by events that are out of your control.

The thing about creativity is that everyone has an opinion. This can be fantastic – having collaborative discussions around the creative direction of a brand – from color palettes to the application of Volt at checkout, like the terminology we use and our badge compared to other payment methods.

There can also be incredibly strong opinions that aren’t always objective. It’s my job to be as objective as possible and always have the interest of the brand first and foremost. I try not to think subjectively about what I prefer as an individual.

Managing the Volt.io brand includes all customer touchpoints

How do you rate the value of emotional connection with marketing campaigns?

I’d say it’s very important, but in the B2B space, I think it’s slightly different. It can be over-egged. We exist in a bubble of our business within a larger bubble – the payments industry – and we need to be very aware of both.

At Volt we trade on two key angles. Firstly: lowering the cost of payment acceptance. Volt is much more cost effective by design than cards and secondly: we can accelerate settlement times. We offer automated bank transfers that settle instantly. Card payments take two or three days by comparison, and it’s the same with refunds and payouts moving in the other direction.

No customer wants to be waiting for two or three days to get their money refunded. So we kind of trade on those pain points and the emotions they trigger.

We’re not just B2B company. We are in effect a B2B2C business. Not only do we want to integrate with as many brands and as many merchants as we can, but we also want shoppers to choose us at checkout as a payment method. We need to be able to connect with customers in a way that encourages them to use Volt over Apple Pay or Google Pay.

We have realized that we need to inform our end users so that they’re aware of Volt much earlier than being aware of the brand for the first time at checkout. For end users the main pain point when making a payment is friction. There is friction around the extra stages that currently exist with card payment, when with Volt, you’re seamlessly redirected to your banking app, where your transaction is pre-populated and there in your bank app, ready to approve. A single tap and it’s done.

We believe it is in any shopper’s own interest to try our technology. In effect, we help turn your bank account into a payment instrument. You’re not reliant on a piece of plastic where all the details on there can be stolen, either digitally or physically.

With Volt, there’s nothing to steal. No data is stored. 80% of percent of first time Volt users return to make a repeat purchase within one month. That’s quite exciting. That’s testament to there being an emotional connection with our end-user customers.

How do you navigate the whitewater rapids of fast moving technology and tech platforms in marketing?

Open banking is where you grant permission to a licensed, regulated third-party to provide a service from within your bank. This could be a payment, or it could be an information-related request. This could be a means to prove your identity so you know you’re signing up to, for example, eBay as a user and you want to start selling. Currently, there are a few ways to do this and they all involve an amount of friction.

At Volt, we have the technological capability to build products that can really make a difference and provide solutions for our clients. We were presented with a challenge by a client: they are a major brand within the gig economy sector. They found it hard to match the names of service providers with the names attached to their bank accounts, making it very difficult for them to get paid.

The naming conventions in some parts of the world, for example, might be reversed on their passport when compared to their bank account. To solve this, we created name-matching technology that takes into account variables, using fuzzy logic, to determine that someone is who they say they are.

When super-smart technology like this is developed in-house, part of my job is to insert myself into conversations as early as possible to understand why we’re creating this, the types of problems it solves, and the types of companies and industries that stand to benefit. Conversations need to be had with the founding team, the strategy team and the product team to arrive at a consensus.

I have to work out how we articulate this new service and whether these use cases can be broadened out. How soon can we start talking about it? When should we educate the sales team about it?

We also need to work out if our competitors do something similar – or not – and then consider the PR angle as if we can be a market leader in this area. We recently brought our PR function into the business, which has proved very effective. Again this allows us to think more holistically across the the impact of any new tech developments on the brand, the content, the sales enablement, and the PR.

Volt.io campaign from 2024

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

Everyone can do marketing. There’s this myth that if you were to job swap with someone, many people would think they could just step into a role in marketing. It’s a myth because of the jeopardy involved in marketing decisions.

If you were to take away my marketing output and our events marketing Volt as a brand actually would all but cease to exist. There would be no brand presence. Of course the tech would still be there – all live and uninterrupted – but there would be no wider context. Nothing driving adoption.

By extension everyone has an opinion about marketing, often with the best of intentions. “Have you thought about this for the new website?” As a marketer one often feels beholden to apologize as to why we might not take the offered suggestion or advice. This doesn’t happen in other departments in a business.

The myth is that everyone thinks they can do marketing when, in fact, there’s a load of very specialist skill sets that are needed, plus a holistic way of thinking about all of the different component parts, so that all the plates keep spinning and the brand continues to evolve.

As marketers we have this duty of care to the brand: we manage perception and credibility. When someone says, ‘open banking’ or ‘real-time payments’ we want Volt to be the brand that pops into your head – and as marketers we do that at the same time as ensuring that no plates come crashing to the floor. Brand recall is really important.

What advice might you offer your younger self if you could go back in time?

There’s a moment in one’s career where you feel much more confident about being able to put forward a case for being right. Especially when it is in the interests of the brand and, by extension, the business. I think when I was in more junior roles, I was a little bit fearful of making a suggestion that I thought would make an impact.

I was hesitant because I feared that someone above me would either disagree or want to back away from my proposal, because it would ruffle a few feathers. Over time you become less scared because you know how to navigate pushback, and you can know from experience the impact that your proposal will have.

My advice would be: if you can’t be absolutely confident in your own decision-making during the first years of your career, don’t fret: it will come. Knowing this may even help you to become more confident about making the right call earlier on.

What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them? You don’t know who it is, but they will be operating at a similar decision making level to yourself within one of the UK's biggest brands.

I would love you to ask them: do they value the discipline of content design? I’d be fascinated to hear that answer.

Volt offers fast, secure payment from account to account

Here is your senior marketer question from another senior marketer: if you weren’t doing marketing, what would you most like to be doing instead?

I’d be a garden designer. I applied for a course at Kew – a garden design diploma. I was interviewed and got a place, and then I chose to defer it. It strikes me as a relaxing yet rewarding career. The ecological, climate crisis issue that our planet faces concerns me on a daily basis, but building wildlife gardens for people and organizations is something that I would definitely be doing if I wasn’t in marketing.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

The impact is profound, but occasionally difficult to measure.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey, is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.