Anne Hay traded newsroom deadlines for a fintech marketing desk. Two decades later she runs brand and consumer research at PayNearMe, still starting every campaign the way a journalist starts a story: with a question.
Ask most marketing chiefs how they start a campaign and you will hear about audiences, funnels, and budgets. Ask Anne Hay and you get something older and simpler. She starts with a question, then goes looking for the answer. It is the reflex of someone who trained as a journalist before she ever touched a marketing plan, and it has quietly become the engine of her whole career.
Hay is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at PayNearMe, a payments company that helps billers - lenders, mortgage servicers, municipalities, and iGaming operators - collect money without making their customers hate the experience. She has been there since 2018, long enough to shape how the company talks about itself and, more usefully, how it listens to the people who actually make the payments.
"Today's consumers are used to making quick, easy payments when shopping online or sending money to friends, and they now expect that same level of convenience for all their payment interactions."
Anne HayHay graduated from The College of New Jersey with a degree in journalism and an emphasis in public relations. Her first working years were spent as a reporter, learning the craft that would outlast every job title she has held since: how to find the story buried in a pile of ordinary facts, and how to tell it so a busy person keeps reading.
From the newsroom she moved into marketing and sales at an educational technology company. Then came the pivot that stuck. She crossed into financial technology, and payments in particular, and never really left. That was roughly sixteen years ago. Over that stretch she has marketed for businesses serving bill payment, eCommerce, online banking, and the fast-moving world of iGaming and online sports betting.
Figure 1 — A career that reads like a tour of B2B marketing, from newsroom to fintech.
What separates Hay from a marketer who simply runs ads is her appetite for evidence. Under her the PayNearMe marketing function became a research shop as much as a promotion machine. The company runs recurring consumer studies, and those studies keep turning up in the trade press because they say something specific instead of something flattering.
Take lending. PayNearMe's research found a widening gap between how people want to pay and what their lenders actually let them do. Hay's read on it is blunt and quotable, which is exactly the point.
"The gap between consumer payment preferences and the payment experience that lenders currently provide continues to widen."
Anne Hay, on loan repaymentHer prescription is not a new gadget. It is choice. Give a borrower real options in how and when they pay, she argues, and the stress that surrounds repayment starts to ease.
"It's clear that the personalization of payment experiences could alleviate the current stress and dissatisfaction associated with traditional loan repayment processes, and choice of payment options is key to personalization."
The clearest illustration of Hay's approach is iGaming. Online betting is supposed to be the frictionless frontier - young, mobile-first customers who live on their phones. Yet PayNearMe's research found that a meaningful share of players still hit walls at the one moment that matters most: moving money in and out.
Figure 2 — The friction is real even where you'd least expect it. Source: PayNearMe consumer research.
"Though iGaming and online sports bettors tend to be tech-savvy and familiar with mobile payments, too many are encountering deposit and withdrawal issues, which is contributing to operators' app abandonment problem."
Anne HayIt is a marketer's dream to have a statistic that makes an operator sit up straight, and Hay has learned to manufacture those moments honestly - by asking players what actually annoys them and then reporting the answer.
If you spend enough time reading Hay's commentary, three words keep surfacing. They are less a slogan than a filter she runs every idea through.
Frictionless, because every extra tap is a chance to lose someone. Flexible, because a single payment method fits almost nobody. Familiar, because the bar has already been set by the apps people use to split dinner or buy shoes. A bill, in Hay's telling, should feel no harder than any of that.
To show how she weighs the everyday payment against the industry's own experiences, the contrast looks something like this.
Figure 3 — The convenience gap Hay keeps pointing at. Illustrative, based on her public commentary.
Colleagues describe Hay as an outside-the-box thinker who can take a strategy and turn it into tactics that work even when the resources are thin. That resourcefulness is not an accident. Marketing on a reporter's instinct means you chase the one insight that lands rather than blanketing the world with noise, and it tends to make every dollar count.
Her recognition on the 2023 FINITE Influential 30 - a list that singles out leaders in B2B marketing - reads as the industry noticing what her data-first style produces. She leads a team of roughly fourteen, based in the Greater Philadelphia area, and the through-line of her work is proof over promises.
PayNearMe clients are largely recurring billers, and the job is to bring them a frictionless, flexible payment experience their customers already expect everywhere else.
The PayNearMe marketing brief, in Hay's framingThere is a neat symmetry to all of it. A journalist is trained to serve the reader by cutting the fluff and finding the fact that matters. A payments marketer, done Hay's way, serves the customer by cutting the friction and finding the option that fits. Same discipline, different beat.
The industry keeps changing around her - new rails, new regulators, new markets from lending to sports betting. What has not changed is the opening move. Before the campaign, before the brand, before the budget, there is a question. Where is the friction, and what would it take to remove it? Hay has spent a career answering it, one study at a time.