Client: A rapidly scaling fintech company with 6,500 B2B clients in the European Economic Area
Wallester, an official Visa partner, is a regulated Estonian fintech company with offices in Estonia, Latvia, France, and the UK. In 2024, its revenue for the year reached €17.2M, representing an 87% year-over-year (YoY) increase. At the end of 2025, it achieved 2,070% growth in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50.
As Wallester is rapidly scaling, its 2026 focus is on expanding its footprint across Europe, broadening its product offering and growing its addressable market to include freelancers and solopreneurs.
Wallester has two core products:
- Wallester White Label: an embedded finance solution for banks, loan providers, ERP systems, and other platforms, enabling them to issue their own branded Visa cards and expense management software.
- Wallester Business: a rapid B2B offering that enables companies to issue Visa cards for expense management.
Today, Wallester has 6,500 business clients and has issued nearly 7 million cards.
Challenge: Low brand awareness among the target audience during international expansion
Wallester is growing fast, but brand awareness does not always keep pace with the scale of the business.
Аccording tо Justin Zehmke, Content Marketing Team Lead at Wallester, many potential customers discover the company only when they are already actively searching for a solution. In the international fintech sector, that means lost initiative: if the brand is not on the radar early, it may not be among the top candidates when a vendor is selected.
To grow brand awareness to match the pace of the business, Wallester had to either increase headcount, or optimize the workload of its PR manager. Increasing headcount wasn’t an option, so Wallester opted for the second choice.
Goal: Build a distribution system that ensures consistent media presence in priority markets in a controlled way
During international expansion, it became clear that a traditional PR process based on manual outreach could not keep up with the business expansion. The team needed a controlled way to secure regular placements in authoritative third-party publications across priority markets, including the UK, Spain, Italy, France, and the Netherlands.
“Our goal is to build a repeatable distribution system that ensures a consistent media presence. In 2026, that means being visible not only in classic search, but also in LLM-driven search, as decision-makers increasingly rely on tools like ChatGPT for initial discovery and validation,” says Justin Zehmke, Content Marketing Team Lead at Wallester.
To match its rapid scaling, Wallester decided to complement earned media with paid coverage. For paid placements, the team chose PRNEWS.IO, because this tool enabled Wallester to select relevant outlets by geography and audience fit, avoid lengthy negotiation cycles, and get information in front of the market exactly when it was needed.
Results: Consistent, measurable media visibility
Paid placements gave Wallester what earned coverage alone could not: speed, repeatability, and control. This approach offers two strategic advantages.
First, the team could quickly establish a presence in target markets because PRNEWS.IO eliminates the complexity of manual outreach. This allowed Wallester to sync placements with product launches and business updates without having to wait for available slots in editorial content plans.
Second, this approach enabled the team to clearly measure effectiveness through specific signals:
- SEO uplift and link authority;
- Links to Wallester’s owned channels;
- Publisher view/read reports.
Together, these elements make PR performance more measurable, allowing the team to move toward ROI thinking and funnel-level impact assessment.
Most importantly, Wallester gained visibility in LLM-driven research. When product changes are documented in authoritative third-party sources, it increases the likelihood that the AI tools decision-makers use accurately reflect Wallester’s capabilities at the moment of vendor evaluation.
“We’re moving into an era beyond classic search results. LLMs are increasingly important in decision-making, and they don’t distinguish paid from earned — they see an authoritative site. If we publish, for example, on Reuters, the model doesn’t care that it’s paid. What matters is that we’re there. People ask ChatGPT: ‘Does Wallester have this functionality?’, and if we publish that update today, it can become a deciding factor for a potential client,” says Justin Zehmke, Content Marketing Team Lead at Wallester.
Process: A hybrid PR model managed by a lean team
Wallester’s PR strategy is built on a clear distinction between earned and paid media. They consider earned media the “first prize” due to its reputational weight and the relationships built with journalists. This added value remains even when a pitch does not turn into a publication.
Paid placements, on the other hand, are used to ensure communication keeps pace with the company’s growth. They are relevant when an update needs to be published quickly, or when the message is important for customers but is unlikely to qualify as an earned news hook. A typical example is product-led communication about launching a new feature:. it isn’t “newsworthy” enough for organic coverage, but it is critical for prospects who are comparing vendors today.
This hybrid approach to PR is executed with limited resources. As there’s only one PR manager at Wallester, it’s hard to scale manual negotiations with a large number of international outlets.
To make the process repeatable, the team uses PRNEWS.IO. Instead of building a media list each time, finding contacts, pitching, and negotiating terms with every outlet, they open the platform’s catalog and select publications by country and audience fit. They can see clear placement conditions and pricing for each outlet, which allows them to place content directly without having to restart the entire negotiation cycle every time.
Testimonial by Danielle Coimbra, PR Manager
“For us, PRNEWS.IO is about ease and speed, because through it we know we can publish on many platforms and easily distribute our news. We like this functionality. It is also a matter of ease of use, affordability, and reach, as PRNEWS.IO has a great network of publishers and has already done all the groundwork. Why should we do it again?”
Next steps: Expanding across Europe and strengthening niche visibility
Wallester plans to deepen its expansion across key European markets, with a particular focus on the UK, while also broadening its target audience to include freelancers and solopreneurs alongside its traditional B2B segment. The team is finalizing its annual PR strategy with a clear division between earned and paid activities, ensuring consistent visibility through regular placements. One of the key priorities is shifting from broad exposure to specialized, niche publications that reach the right decision-makers.
Using PRNEWS.IO enables Wallester to scale its presence across multiple countries without expanding the internal team, to strengthen its SEO foundation, and to maintain timely digital visibility during a period of active growth.
