We Do the Boring Stuff So You Don't Have To | Katie Hayes

In this episode of Marketers of Technology, Andres talks with Katie Hayes, Head of Marketing at Ozone API, the standards-based platform that handles the complexity of open banking and open finance for banks and financial institutions worldwide. As Ozone API's first marketing hire, Katie has spent four and a half years building the department from a barely functional website into a global brand that looks far bigger than its four-person team.

She explains how she markets a white-labeled, highly regulated product to banks and regulators, why closed roundtables with a handful of regulators beat broader tactics, how a campaign built around "we do the boring stuff so you don't have to" gives a compliance product personality, and how DOJO AI and Claude let a lean team punch well above its weight.

Topics Discussed:

• Katie's path from agency work in South Africa to in-house roles across luxury brands and non-profits, and how she became Ozone API's first marketing hire in 2022
• What Ozone API does: helping banks and financial institutions deploy standards-compliant open banking and open finance APIs, from account access and payments to embedded finance
• How the founders' role in shaping the UK's open banking standards produced a blueprint for what good looks like, now deployed across regions at different regulatory maturity levels
• Why Ozone API is white-labeled, and what that means for marketing to banks, central banks, and regulators rather than end users
• Rebuilding the brand from a minimal, barely mobile-friendly website into a new positioning, visual identity, and messaging that has been sharpened through prospect and client feedback
• The "we do the boring stuff so you don't have to" campaign and the idea of marketing to people rather than just businesses
• Making thought leadership central through an active blog, an open finance tracker, video demos, and conference speaking
• Running marketing with four people in-house plus a brand agency, an SEO consultant, and AI marketing agents, while the brand is perceived as far larger than it is
• Using DOJO AI and Claude to automate reporting and scale output on a lean budget
• Why niche events and closed regulator roundtables work best, and which social channels Ozone API tested and dropped, from Instagram and X to Reddit as a listening channel
• Katie's goals for the rest of 2026: aligning marketing to a new go-to-market strategy and optimizing AI and HubSpot pipeline workflows

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Make a compliance product feel human. Ozone API's long-tail campaign, "we do the boring stuff so you don't have to," turns regulatory complexity into a promise of relief, giving a technical category some personality.

• Market to people, not just to businesses. Katie's framing of "B2P" reflects that the CTO, procurement, legal, and compliance contacts at a bank all need different explanations of the same product.

• In regulated B2B, a small room of the right people beats a big crowd. Closed roundtables and niche open banking events, where a few regulators from around the world are in the room, have been among Ozone API's most effective channels.

• Optimize for LLM discovery, not just Google. Because Katie's buyers increasingly search their category in AI tools, the team is prioritizing AEO and the keywords that get Ozone API indexed and recommended.

• A lean team has to be ruthless about channels. After testing Instagram and X without results, Ozone API concentrates on LinkedIn and YouTube and uses Reddit mainly to listen to technical questions.

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