Basiq: building the growth engine that helped get a fintech acquired
Basiq is an open banking platform that lets Australian fintechs and banks connect to consumer financial data. I joined as the first growth hire, part of the core team that built the business through to its acquisition by Cuscal, an ASX-listed payments company, in March 2024. For three years I owned full funnel B2B growth marketing, pulling the strings between marketing, sales, creative and dev.
New inbound lead pipeline
Converted opportunities
High-intent non-brand organic traffic
Total organic traffic
Results over the engagement, June 2021 to May 2024, measured against the baseline when I joined.
What I owned
- Ads
- Paid social and paid search built from a standing start, scaled on pipeline rather than clicks.
- SEO
- An organic search strategy introduced as a channel: content, technical fixes and the pages developers actually search for.
- Lead nurturing
- Sequences that moved developers and product teams from a sandbox account to a sales conversation.
- Data and analytics
- One view of the funnel from first visit to closed deal, shared with sales and the board.
- Marketing automation
- A customer data platform and event-based journeys triggered by what people did in the product.
- Content
- Guides, case studies and product explainers that fed every channel above.
- Website
- A redesign and rebuild of basiq.io, run as a growth project with conversion as the brief.
The brief
When I joined, Basiq had strong technology, a small sales team and no marketing function. Growth was founder-led and referral-driven, which works until it does not. The CMO who hired me wanted a growth marketer who could build the system, not just run campaigns, and who would sit close enough to product and engineering to ship.
The mandate was full funnel: bring in the right developers and product leaders, turn them into qualified opportunities, and give sales and leadership a clear line of sight from spend to revenue.
Organic search
SEO did not exist as a channel. Open banking was a new category in Australia and the people evaluating it were searching for answers, not vendors. We introduced an organic strategy built on the questions developers and product teams ask, paired with the technical work to make a single-page app rank.
Total organic traffic tripled over the engagement, and the traffic that mattered, high-intent non-brand searches, grew eighteen times. Those visitors converted to sandbox accounts at a rate paid traffic never matched.
Paid acquisition
Paid social and paid search were scaled up alongside, targeted at the job titles and companies in the ideal customer profile and measured against pipeline in the CRM rather than leads in a spreadsheet. Budget followed the campaigns that produced opportunities, and the ones that produced only clicks were cut.
Lifecycle and data
The biggest lever turned out to be what happened after signup. We implemented a customer data platform and built event-based customer journeys off product usage: a developer who hit the API for the first time, a sandbox that went quiet, a team that added a second user. Each event triggered the right message at the right moment, and sales got a heads-up when an account crossed the line from trying to serious.
Together with the nurture sequences and the reporting layer, this is what turned traffic into a pipeline: three times the new inbound lead pipeline and twice the converted opportunities.
Website
I led the redesign and rebuild of basiq.io as a growth project. Clear positioning for each audience, product pages written for the person evaluating an integration, and conversion paths that led to the sandbox rather than a contact form. It became the landing page for every channel above.
The exit
In March 2024 Basiq was acquired by Cuscal, one of the largest payments companies in Australia and listed on the ASX. The growth engine, the pipeline and the reporting that showed it working were part of the story the business could tell. I stayed through the transaction and handed over in May 2024.
From the Basiq team
Recommendations on LinkedIn from the people I worked with there.
Chief Marketing Officer, Brainiac
I hired Ben at Basiq when we started building out the marketing function, identifying a Growth marketer as a key hire. Ben fit the bill to a tee, bringing great skills and experience as we drove the Basiq brand forward. A strategic mind with great hands-on skills, Ben was able to introduce new ways of working into the business. Collaborative, open-minded and never afraid to ask questions and give an opinion, Ben was a great colleague to work with and was a key asset to the marketing team and the Basiq business. It was a pleasure working with Ben over the last few years.
Freelance writer and content developer
I had the pleasure of working with Ben for 18 months while he was Basiq's Growth Marketing Manager. He's the type of person anyone would want on their team; a strong strategic thinker, always considering the bigger picture, who also gets the job done. Ben is excellent at what he does and throughout the time we worked together proactively expanded his knowledge and experience as the industry evolved. I very much enjoyed collaborating with and learning from him and would not hesitate to work with him again.
Product Marketing, fintech
To say I will miss working with Ben is an understatement. His level headedness and strategic thinking, mixed with his 'dog-with-a-bone' ability to execute on what he knows will hit the mark is beyond impressive. It was clear the experience and knowledge of his field was immense and was something I admired from the get go and undoubtedly have learnt so much from him the last few years. We started roughly around the same time in the newly formed marketing function at Basiq, when the company was starting to scale and Ben has been an integral part of building Basiq's growth strategy. Without his contributions we wouldn't be where we are today! You will be sorely missed 'lead-gen' Ben and I will miss being able to spitball ideas and call on your wisdom everyday. What a team we made. Thank you for everything!