Making marketing pay

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Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the XTech podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host for the XTech podcast and as a curator for the X Tech community. Now today, I’m delighted to be joined by Alex Hammond, the Head of Communications at Nuvei. Welcome, Alex. It’s great to have you here today.

Alex Hammond:
It’s great to be here. Very happy to be on.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thanks. Now what we like to do here is to start by understanding you a little bit more as a human before we get into the world of tech. So, Alex, some of my guests were born with a laptop in hand. Others of us woke up one day and found that they were in the world of tech. How about you, how did you get in?

Alex Hammond:
I went to university to study law. I thoroughly enjoyed elements of that and it was a good grounding in the way to kind of present material in an engaging way. I left university, or I should say, I did graduate from university, I didn’t leave university, I graduated university with the intention of becoming a professional poker player. Surprise, surprise, didn’t go as well as it had done in my dreams. That experience gave me access to a lot of high level poker players. I was at a lot of tournaments, a lot of events, stuff like that. And I sort of got back into writing, sort of through that, through sort of consumer journalism. And then that sort of piqued my interest in kind of the gambling industry as a whole. And I sort of transitioned into B2B journalism from there.

Alex Hammond:
Sort of not really looked back since. So I worked in financial markets, B2B, I worked in payments, B2B journalism. After about 10 years of being a journalist, decided to make the leap into the world of corporate communications. Firstly for a payments company called Paysafe, who was heavily involved in providing payments for the gambling industry. The online gambling industry in particular is incredibly focused, built on payments, it’s pretty much the bedrock of how the online gambling industry works. Started there and I was there for four years and then four years ago I moved to Nuvei to be the Head of Communications here.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Lovely. So you are my first guest who was a, let’s call you a semi professional gambler. Right. I like that.

Alex Hammond:
I would say I was a winning player, but not a professional player.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. Which is probably better, I think, you know, if you’re going to pick your adjectives, that’s a better one to do. Okay, super. So what did you find that transition from one side of the fence to the other, from the journalist to a communications professional. Were there some advantages to you when you came across?

Alex Hammond:
So look, I mean, I think the first thing I would say right is that I, I had some fantastic mentors in the space, right. So Kate Aldridge and Anna Bertel Strong, who were kind of the Head of Communications at Paysafe when I joined, they were fantastic in kind of getting me to speed in stuff, not least because they kind of let me do what I was good at in the first instance, right. So I was bought in sort of with the mindset of we want an in house journalist. So we want somebody on our comms team who has that sort of journalistic slant who can essentially digitally walk around the business, find interesting stories and help us place content either on our blog or through earned media opportunities. So the introduction was, you know, a pretty soft landing. It didn’t really change much of my day to day.

And then I guess the other thing I would say was I joined, what was it, 2017 and I spent two years with my mouth shut, sitting next to people who knew what they were doing and sort of had the attitude of be a sponge and that was how I got up to speak speed on a lot of the sort of nuts and bolts of the corporate world, in the comms world, all of that kind of stuff. So that was kind of how I made the transition, I guess.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think there’s the key. There’s two things I want to draw up from what you’ve said there. The first one is thinking about that comms because I always remember when I have worked with comms professionals that always needing to be reminded the journalists ‘so what’, that we’ve got to get past that ‘so what’, and so you would have had a lot of bad pitches to you and you think that helped sharpen the pitches you then tried to make?

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’m sure it’s even more difficult now, right. I’m talking about, you know, closing in on 10 years ago. But, but even back then the volume of pitches that you’d receive was unbelievable in terms of, especially, you know, something like the fintech industry, which has got lots and lots of different areas, avenues that, you know, if you’re a relatively broad fintech media publication, you could easily be getting dozens of press releases a day. There’s some very autopilot filtering that goes on, I guess, because to survive as a journalist in that environment, it’s almost inevitable that you make snap decisions in sort of second on a lot of the pitches that you get.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. And I think a lot of the things that you were talking about that was interesting because you were going around trying to find interesting stories, not starting from, here’s the message we want to get out. I think sometimes if we start with the message we want to get out, the ‘so what’ is the hurdle. But if you start with something that is interesting, you’re already starting to pry that door open slightly.

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, I agree. And my sort of route into a comms team almost requested into the world of comms from being a journalist, made that sort of transition quite smooth because that was kind of what I was there to do. I know comms professionals from other companies, other industries that really struggle with that. I think comms professionals in general know this, that they need to create stories that resonate with audiences, right, but when you sit within a broader marketing team where, you know, potentially a different set of broader KPIs that are really focused on performance marketing and, you know, ROI and what revenue are you bringing into the business and all of that kind of stuff, you can get to a point quite quickly where you become an arm of the sales team. Right. And you’re less focused on what is that secret sauce that will unlock actual audience engagement in what you’re trying to say.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s what I want to come back to a second. The other thing that you mentioned that I want to just put as an aside for us to think about when you’re listening to this is, I am a huge fan of working remotely. I am a huge fan of hybrid working. But I think the one thing we always need to think about, that is a great way to keep people productive. But we do need to think then about how do we do what you were describing, that sponge period in which we’re trying to soak up as much information as possible.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think when we’re setting up teams, when we’re bringing on new ones, and particularly the more junior the role, but for anyone new, we have to get more intentional, don’t we, about how do we get across how we work, the way we work, our ethos, our values, our ways of working? And that’s something to put to the side. But back to your more interesting point in thinking about what I like that you were talking about is how do we reconcile the different things of marketing versus comms versus everything. I mean, from your perspective and where you are right now, how unified are the content and the comms strategies in the organisation?

Alex Hammond:
Well, I think it’s not always the case, but the comms team that I lead sits within the marketing function, so there’s some clear objectives of us just through that. And actually the Head of Content Marketing and I, we both report put into the same SVP, so we are very much kind of in lockstep on a lot of stuff. I think there’s some really good reasons for that. You know, quite often we are looking at very similar topics in terms of industry trends and where things are progressing and where Nuvei sits in the broader ecosystem and what our core brand messaging should be and all of that kind of stuff. So that, I think makes a lot of sense for us to kind of digitally sit side by side.

Where there is sometimes tension and it’s kind of what I alluded to already, right, is there needs to be a balance between performance marketing and brand marketing. And when you sit in the broader marketing team, you know, when you kind of, level up to kind of the marketing function as a whole, the key metric, right, is how much money are you bringing into the building? And, you know, I’m sure every one of these interviews you’ve done with a comms professional will tell you the same thing, like measurement is the hardest element of what we do. Right. You’re either, you need to have faith, you know, you kind of demonstrating what comms does as a commercial exercise is beyond incredibly difficult.

Debbie Forster MBE:
We should start probably offering a cash bounty for anyone that can finally come up with the magic metric that does that. So you’ll have heard from it first here.

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, I’ve said to people on multiple occasions, you know, if you can show me revenue generation, if you can show me positive ROI on comms activity, then I’ve got an unlimited budget for you. Honestly, I’ll write you a bank cheque, but if you can’t, you know, it’s a very different picture I’ve got to paint for you unfortunately.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Comms wars begin now. We’ll let everyone find it out.

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, that’s where, you know, I have to fight my corner against content marketing a little bit, let’s put it that way.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. And you know, how then does GEO start impacting this? Is it a help? Is it going to force it together? What impact are you seeing of GEO?

Alex Hammond:
Well, I mean, my perspective is that GEO is a godsend to the comms community. That’s my philosophy, right. And I think GEO itself is a, it’s a bit of a black box. Like, I don’t think anybody who tells you they’ve got the answers as to how GEO works, you know, good for them, I guess, but I’m going to take that with a massive pinch of salt. But, you know, my understanding, my philosophy, everything that I’ve read and what I am evangelising in our business, right, is the shift from SEO to GEO is a shift from owned content to external channel content. Right.

So whereas an SEO strategy was traditionally managed by a content marketing team because it’s all about how you leverage your own content and SEO optimise it, you can’t generate one tenth of the impact with owned content as you can with credible external citations, which essentially boils down to, you know, media coverage.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Brings you to the front of the bus. Right. You’re no longer at the back of the bus, are you?

Alex Hammond:
Yeah. And look, going back to what I was saying before about you need people in your corner, having faith in what you do, actually, GEO is an incredibly easy thing to explain across the business in terms of, you know, this is something that’s, it’s measurable. We can visibly see the impact. Everybody understands the importance of it. And that’s what I mean when I say it’s, you know, it’s a real bonus for comms teams to kind of be able to lead that type of activity.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so that makes sense about GEO. But if we think a little more broadly, what would you say your biggest marketing challenges are at the moment?

Alex Hammond:
There’s a couple. I mean, so how do we better leverage our tier one customers in our overall marketing campaigns? And that obviously includes comms. I think there’s an imbalance, but especially when you’re talking about kind of PR and that type of activity, there’s generally an imbalance. When you’re looking at doing a sort of announcement content around winning new business. There’s a lot of pushback, you know, particularly from kind of the big international brands, which are our kind of key sort of customer demographic. What do I get out of this? Not only what do I get out of it, but also, you know, slippery slope argument – if I do this for you, then I’m going to be doing this every day.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. And time is money. So what is it? What is their return?

Alex Hammond:
You know, you got to think outside the box in terms of, how do you tackle that subject? I mean, I don’t know who coined the expression the answer to all your questions is money, but I find it works in quite of circumstances. So we see people in the industry take that approach. Whether that’s something to do with fees or whether it’s something to do with, you know, enabling, paying for co marketing opportunities that are advantageous to the customer, we kind of want to take a more creative approach to it.

You know, my philosophy is if you, if you create a piece of content that not only enables your partners to get across the messages that they want to get across, but because obviously they’ve got comms teams and they’ve got comms objectives as well, but that you do it in a way that makes you inseparable from the concept. So you come up with something that is, got the creative chops to really sort of stand out from kind of the run of the mill ideas, then that’s how you get traction in that area. It’s a really, you know, you’ve got to be honest about these things. It’s a really hard uphill battle to kind of get some of that stuff over the line.

Alex Hammond:
I mean, the second challenge that I would say is again is an interesting challenge, it’s not a daunting challenge is the way that the media landscape is changing. You know, I think there’s a lot of scarce statistics around about the drop off in audiences for tier one, tier two media titles. My view on that is that the desire for information is not changing. Right. It’s just that the media landscape is changing and actually some of the democratisation, you know, some of the removing of the gatekeepers around content is interesting. It’s a good thing. You’ve seen the rise of B2B influencers on LinkedIn. That’s kind of, that’s kind of one thing that’s relatively, it’s not new new, but it’s relatively new. Certainly was not something when I got into comms 8 years ago that we considered at all.

Debbie Forster MBE:
LinkedIn is unrecognisable from where it was 5 years ago.

Alex Hammond:
I mean, other media channels, you know, you can get fintech content on TikTok these days. Obviously, stuff like Substack and, you know, growth of kind of independent journalism is something that’s really interesting as well. So that’s the challenge for comms professionals, really, just to keep on top of where the media landscape is, where the audiences are. As I say, I don’t think it’s an issue of people are no longer engaging in content. And if, and if your argument is, well, actually people just get their information from ChatGPT. They don’t get it from media sources anymore. I would say, well, where do you think ChatGPT gets it from?

Debbie Forster MBE:
I was just gonna say follow that argument all the way through and you’ve got your answer.

Alex Hammond:
That’s still your audience. You still need to be telling the right stories in the right places to reach an audience, even within the ecosystem of ChatGPT.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And to some degree, you know, you could almost argue it brings the art back in because, you know, too much and too literally use of SEO just becomes about the numbers game, doesn’t it? And a very mechanical process where if media is changing to really meet the demands of GEO, you’ve got to get your message other places. That creativity that you were talking about keeps us in play and keeps it an interesting job, doesn’t it?

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, and I’m fortunate that I have never kind of overseen SEO strategy because I despise that type of content, to be honest. Maybe that’s a bit strong for this podcast. But as somebody who. grew up in the world of journalism and kind of wants to write lovely, you know, silky, flowing content, it’s not something that I’d like to be my bread and butter.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so let’s step back then a little bit. You know, one of the things I noticed when I was prepping for the show is Nuvei’s made some bold early bets on agentic commerce. You know, the idea that autonomous AI agents are increasingly going to conduct transactions on behalf of customers, businesses, etc. Now, how do you do that? What’s been your approach trying to create and define a whole new category?

Alex Hammond:
Well, let me start by saying, when I first got into comms eight years ago, eight, nine years ago, I invested a huge amount of my time in writing about smart cities and smart fridges and the way that payments was going to transform how went to the supermarket because you’d be able to pick stuff up and just walk out and, you know, you wouldn’t need to pay for petrol, you could just fill up your car and leave and all of that kind of stuff like. And very little of that has actually come to fruition, you know, almost a decade later.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah, you know, when I try and walk out of the shops without paying, they don’t buy that, they don’t think it’s very smart.

Alex Hammond:
No, no, exactly. So, I think you have to look at some of this stuff through that lens. But look, it’s certainly true that there’s consensus around this idea that ecommerce is shifting away from, you know, we saw the shift from ecommerce into mobile first and that we’re going to shift again into agent commerce. What that necessarily looks like, I think is not expressly clear whether that will be using a large language model like ChatGPT or whether independent ecommerce outlets will build their own agents, you know, and sort of keep some of that data that of you as an individual for personalisation purposes to themselves. But that, that conversation is ongoing. Right.

Alex Hammond:
I think where we look at it as Nuvei is we want to be part of that conversation, but we want to be part of that conversation as a builder rather than somebody who sort of talks about it. So were maybe sort of slightly behind some of our competitors who, I think, when, you know, I think they were just doing SEO grabs on the term agentic commerce. Just saying kind of this is the future, but not a lot of substance. We want to put more meat on our story there. So we’re sort of not quite in the moment where I can talk about this yet, because we do have some big announcements coming in the next six weeks or so. But our comms strategy really is around kind of taking those ideas around agentic commerce from the hypothetical and actually putting some substance on how we’re going to build it.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So what I’m hearing feels really sensible because there’s always going to be a dozen potential hype curves and you don’t want to be in the one that ends up in the dead end. So I’m hearing that you stay in the conversations but you’re not just talking like you say, getting the SEO grabs. You’re waiting until there is something substantial to talk about that’s real. Avoid the buzz until you have something properly to bring into the conversation. But what I heard, you’re staying part of the conversation. Is that fair?

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, I think so. And look to go back to kind of some of the comms 101 that we talked about at the beginning, like you talk about the ‘so what’ factor. It’s easy to kind of stand there and wave your arms about and say we think that the future of ecommerce is agentic commerce and then not be able to kind of go more than surface deep on that, right.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Wave your arms around too much and you just look like the crazy person. Right.

Alex Hammond:
Yeah, well and you’re wasting your own time because nine times out of ten, nobody’s listening.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah.

Alex Hammond:
For us to take a much more practical approach to something, to a topic like agentic commerce, I think that’s. just an eminently sensible approach, regardless of what topic in tech you’re talking to.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Now let’s look at another thing where I think Nuvei is making some strategic choices. You are in specific verticals. Gaming, construction, hospitality, connected vehicles, EV charging. How do you maintain awareness and reputation across such a diverse range of verticals without spreading yourself too thin?

Alex Hammond:
So it’s interesting you say that. So as I talked about a tension between content marketing and comms, there is a second tension within comms itself, which is how do we support those commercial efforts versus how do we tell the broader story? Obviously, the way that you support commercial efforts in the immediate term is by showcasing your, the big tier one customers that you win. Right. You know, I talk to our director of sales quite a lot and he always says, you know, I don’t get out of a meeting without him saying to me, to grow a book, we’ve got to show our book. Right. So that’s how we contribute to the commercial effort. And that necessarily means that you end up speaking to specific verticals. And as you said, you’ve highlighted a couple there. Travel is a big vertical where we feel we have the right to win. It helps us win more travel business. If we talk to the travel business that we’ve already won. But if you zoom out of that, it is incredibly important for us as a business and from a corporate communications perspective and from an investor relations perspective or an investor communications perspective, I should say, to not get pigeonholed into specific verticals. So we have a very fundamental belief that we are a vertical agnostic payment service provider. We’re one of the top five payment providers in the world and we do serve key verticals as a leader in the payment space, but we also have a lot of business across an incredibly wide range of verticals, including general ecomm platforms, marketplaces.

So, yeah, so we’ve recently launched our newbie brand position, every payment everywhere, which kind of encapsulates some of our idea around being vertical agnostic, also mode agnostic, model agnostic. That is very much how we see ourselves. That is a core component of the overall brand position. So, yeah, it’s an interesting dilemma for us as a comms team to try and support those commercial initiatives with specificity as to how our solution operates, but also being able to tell that industry agnostic story at the same time.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Lovely. All right, the real balancing act. Right, so I mean, we could probably do this all day. I think we’ve covered so much and I’ve really enjoyed a lot of the things, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Alex, I love to finish up by returning to you as the human. So what in general on the horizon is grabbing your interest, good or bad, in tech?

Alex Hammond:
I mean, I think we’ve covered a lot of it already. Right. So I don’t know if I can give you a fresh answer. I think that piece around how the media landscape is changing and GEO obviously rolls up into that. Where do you find audiences now in 2026? Are those audiences just – are they held within LLMs? If they are, how do you access them? How is that democratisation of the media landscape affecting where your audience shows up? Obviously, you know, every day your audience demographic changes. Right. Like the average age of readers when I started eight years ago is different from the average age now. Like is there going to be a time where TikTok is the primary way to connect with your audience? I hope not, because I don’t even have a TikTok account. But, you know, is it? I don’t know. Yeah, I’m sort of being slightly flippant there, but I think that’s the thing that makes the role of the comms team interesting. Exciting.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Good. And then, you know, again, your human self, I love to fill my list of things to read or watch or listen to. Do you have something you could recommend to me that you’ve really enjoyed or is really offered value for you?

Alex Hammond:
So the caveat is, I have a two year old and a three month year old child. So unless you want me to go deep on the moral learning of Bluey…

Debbie Forster MBE:
If you want to send me an email on favourite episodes on Bluey, I’ll follow up on that as well. But, but something for the other non parents of small children in the audience.

Alex Hammond:
I’ve just started doing the artist way. I should say, my dream in 2026 is to be a fiction writer. Right. Like it’s, that’s what I do in my spare time. I love to write fiction so I have just started the artist way. I’m very early into the journey of it. If you believe in creativity and unlocking creativity as being valuable to the world of comms, then I found it an unbelievably interesting tool and I read a lot of fiction as well obviously. So you know where I find fiction to be valuable and this, we could go on about all this all day but like, the amount of content that I read in 2026 that I know has been generated by AI that kind of very kind of short, staccato, in your face style is not for me. I’m just incredibly interested in language and language construction and to me language should be smooth and you know, feel like it’s sort of dripping off your tongue.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And like you’ve never seen it before. Wrapping the world up in a sentence.

Alex Hammond:
Yeah. And you know, reading great fiction books always reminds me of like, yeah, this is what great language looks like.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Listen Alex, thanks so much for this. I’ve really enjoyed having you here on this episode of XTech.

Alex Hammond:
It’s been great, loved the conversation.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Love the conversation and thank you to all of you for joining us on this episode of XTech. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a minute. Email us now at [email protected]. I’d like to thank our whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to XTech.

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