Challenge
Unifying a fintech startup's CRM with its marketing automation so that investor reporting draws on one data set.
The symptom is familiar and specific. The marketing slide and the revenue slide in a board deck are built from different systems, so the two numbers disagree and the meeting is spent reconciling them rather than deciding anything. In a fintech that disagreement also carries a compliance cost, because the consent state attached to a contact has to be the same in every system that touches it.
Approach
Data pipeline integration between CRM and marketing platforms, marketing stack configuration and performance tracking, with the reporting model agreed across marketing and engineering.
The agreement is the work. A reporting model that marketing signs and engineering does not, or the reverse, produces the same two numbers with more process around them. The engagement makes the model a joint artefact: one definition of a lead, one definition of an opportunity, one place each is written, and one flow that carries them.
Consent belongs in that flow rather than on the website. A consent state is captured once, stored somewhere authoritative and propagated to every tool that reads or writes customer data. That design decision is what keeps a regulatory change from becoming a re-platforming project.
Outcome
CRM and marketing automation unified into one pipeline, with investor reporting produced from it and operational efficiency gains across the two teams.
Reporting produced from one pipeline has a second effect beyond accuracy. It removes the reconciliation step, which is where most of the time in investor reporting was going.
The market context for work like this
The figures below are published industry and regulatory facts, not this project's results.
Activation moved into the warehouse across 2025 and 2026. Fivetran acquired Census in May 2025, Databricks announced CustomerLake on 16 June 2026, and Hightouch repositioned as an agentic CDP in the same month. The CDP Institute found warehouse-native vendors growing headcount 7.8 per cent organically against a 1.3 per cent industry average. On the consent side, from 15 June 2026 the Google Signals setting in GA4 no longer governs Google Ads collection and the Consent Mode ad_storage parameter alone does, while Australian automated-decision disclosure obligations commence on 10 December 2026.