When a payment confirmation lands in spam, it stops being a marketing problem.
For most businesses, an email landing in the wrong folder costs a sale. For a FinTech, the emails that matter most are statements, payment confirmations, KYC requests, and security alerts, and a customer who doesn't receive one of those hasn't just missed a message. They've missed something your regulator expects them to have received, and something a fraudster would be delighted to send them a convincing copy of instead. Deliverability in financial services is a compliance and trust question long before it's a marketing one, and it deserves to be treated that way. Digistrat finds out exactly where your customer communications are actually landing, and fixes what's in the way.
The problems are rarely where the last person to look was looking.
Every FinTech has been through a security review at some point, and email authentication usually gets a line in it. What that line rarely covers is whether the configuration actually does what everyone assumes it does, and whether anyone would notice if a statement run quietly stopped reaching customers. These are the patterns that come up again and again.
DMARC that exists but enforces nothing
A DMARC record at p=none satisfies a compliance checklist while doing nothing at all to stop someone spoofing your domain. For a financial brand, that gap is precisely what phishing operations look for, and moving from monitoring to enforcement without breaking legitimate mail takes more care than most teams have had reason to give it.
High-volume transactional streams with no owner
Statements, payment confirmations, and KYC notifications often run through infrastructure that engineering built early and compliance has never seen inside. It sends millions of messages a month, nobody reviews its reputation, and the first sign of trouble is customers phoning to ask where their statement went.
Security emails competing with marketing for the same reputation
When a promotional stream and your account-security stream share a sending domain, a complaint spike on the marketing side can suppress the delivery of the very emails, login alerts, fraud warnings, that regulators and customers most need to arrive.
Brand impersonation nobody's monitoring for
Financial brands are among the most spoofed on the internet, and without DMARC reporting actually being collected and read, a FinTech can be impersonated in volume for months without knowing. The customers who get phished as a result don't distinguish between your email and the fake one.
Compliance sign-off on content, silence on delivery
Customer communications get reviewed carefully for what they say and almost never for whether they arrive. Consumer Duty makes that gap harder to defend, because an important communication a customer never received is difficult to present as good customer outcomes.
Deliverability isn't one fix. It's six things that all have to hold at once.
We use the same framework on every engagement, and for a FinTech it maps onto obligations and risks that carry regulatory weight, not just commercial cost.
Sending setup and authentication
For a financial brand, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC aren't just deliverability plumbing, they're the difference between customers being able to trust that an email from your domain is really from you and fraudsters using your name freely. Getting DMARC to enforcement, properly and without breaking legitimate mail, is foundational work.
Engagement drivers
Customers disengaging from your emails is a signal inbox providers act on across your whole domain, which means an unmanaged marketing list can quietly reduce the deliverability of the statements and alerts your regulated obligations depend on.
Nurturing relationships
A customer who recognises and trusts your legitimate emails is measurably harder to phish, and consistent, human sender identity across your communications is part of what builds that recognition.
Data quality and hygiene
Financial services lists carry particular weight: a statement sent to a stale or mistyped address isn't just a bounce, it's a customer communication that failed, and in aggregate that's a pattern worth being able to evidence you've managed.
Effective content strategy
A fraud alert, a statement notification, and a product announcement carry entirely different levels of urgency and obligation, and running them through the same sending logic with the same priorities is where important messages start getting treated by providers like unimportant ones.
Results measurement
Most FinTechs can evidence that a communication was sent. Far fewer can evidence it was delivered, and under Consumer Duty that second question is the one that actually matters.
Where we usually start with a FinTech
The most common starting point is a FinTech that believes its email is in reasonable shape because authentication was configured at launch and nothing has visibly broken since. The review then typically finds some combination of the patterns above: DMARC sitting at p=none years after it was added, transactional volume running through infrastructure nobody currently owns, and no reporting being collected on who else is sending as the brand.
The work that follows tends to run in a consistent order. First, DMARC reporting is switched on and actually read, which is frequently the first time anyone has seen the full picture of what's being sent under the company's name, legitimate and otherwise. Then the legitimate sending estate is aligned properly, every platform, every stream, so that enforcement can be turned on without breaking statements or alerts. Then the streams themselves are separated so that marketing reputation can't suppress security and servicing email, and monitoring is put in place so the whole picture stays visible rather than drifting quietly out of date again.
None of this is exotic work, but the order matters enormously, and in a regulated business the cost of doing it carelessly, breaking legitimate customer communications mid-migration, is much higher than doing it patiently and properly. That's the discipline the engagement exists to provide.
Frequently asked questions
Our DMARC record is at p=none. Is that a problem?
It means you have monitoring in place, or at least the option of it, but no protection. At p=none, anyone can spoof your domain and receiving servers won't be instructed to do anything about it. For a financial brand that's a meaningful gap, and the reason so many FinTechs sit at p=none for years is that moving to enforcement without breaking legitimate email takes careful, patient alignment work first. That work is exactly what a proper engagement covers.
Does Consumer Duty actually say anything about email deliverability?
Not by name, but the duty to deliver good customer outcomes and communicate in a way customers can understand and act on assumes, at minimum, that the communication arrived. A pattern of important servicing emails landing in spam is difficult to square with that obligation, and being able to evidence that your communications are actually reaching customers is a much stronger position than only being able to evidence that they were sent.
Should our security and servicing emails be on a separate domain from marketing?
Separate subdomains at minimum, and the separation matters more for a FinTech than for most businesses. When streams share a domain, a complaint spike on a promotional send can suppress delivery of fraud alerts and login notifications on the same day, which is precisely the email you can least afford to have degraded.
How would we even know if fraudsters are spoofing our domain?
Through DMARC aggregate reporting, collected and actually read. The reports show you every source sending email claiming to be your domain, legitimate and otherwise, and for financial brands the "otherwise" column is rarely empty. Most FinTechs we speak to have never seen this data for their own domain, which means impersonation can run for months entirely unobserved.
We send millions of transactional emails a month. Does volume itself create risk?
Volume amplifies whatever is already true about your setup. A well-configured, well-monitored programme at high volume is fine; a misalignment or reputation problem at that volume compounds quickly and affects a very large number of customers before anyone notices. The higher the volume, the stronger the case for monitoring that catches a shift in days rather than at the point customers start calling.
How long does it take to get DMARC to enforcement safely?
It depends on how many platforms and streams send as your domain, because every legitimate source has to be identified and aligned before enforcement can be switched on without collateral damage. The investigation and report take three to five business days, quick fixes run across the following 45 days, and a realistic path to full enforcement for a typical estate is set out clearly in the report, staged so nothing legitimate breaks along the way.
Everything above is covered by one engagement.
Every engagement starts with the free health check, and from there the path depends on what it finds. Most FinTech engagements move into the Deliverability Review and Fix, which is the full investigation described above, and many continue into Ongoing Monitoring, because in a regulated business the case for continuously knowing where your customer communications are landing tends to make itself.
Find out where your emails actually stand.
Free. Takes less than a minute. Run the health check and see instantly whether something is structurally wrong with your sending setup.