Vice President, Marketing

Company Description

Novo is a venture-backed fintech that simplifies banking for small businesses. Since our Fall 2018 beta launch, we've expanded offerings from free checking accounts and debit cards to lending products, business tools (invoices, bookkeeping, and more), and integrations.

Today, Novo is a powerfully simple banking platform that serves over 250,000 small businesses. In addition to providing smart tools built for entrepreneurs to better run and grow their businesses, Novo has processed billions in transactions in partnership with a number of established banking partners.

Our vision is to be the go-to platform serving small businesses – from launch to everyday – so business owners can focus on growing, while Novo provides seamless money movement, money storage, and access to capital. We'd like to look back 5–10 years from now and know that we helped new generations of small businesses succeed because of the work we did at Novo.

Novo raised $170 million in venture capital and is backed by leading investors, including Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Notable Capital (formerly GGV). Learn more at https://www.novo.co.

Role Description

Novo is seeking a highly experienced and motivated marketing leader to own and scale our brand, growth, and demand engine. This role is critical to how Novo reaches, acquires, and retains small business owners, supporting our rapidly expanding customer base and business operations. The ideal candidate is a hands-on leader who can set marketing strategy, build and grow high-performing teams across brand and performance, harness AI to scale both creative output and growth efficiency, and partner closely with Product, Data, and Finance to drive sustainable, measurable growth within a dynamic, regulated fintech environment.

Responsibilities

Marketing Strategy & Leadership

• Develop and execute the overall marketing strategy aligned with Novo's mission, growth targets, and unit economics.

• Own the full funnel — awareness, acquisition, activation, and retention — across paid, owned, and earned channels.

• Serve as a key strategic partner to the executive team, translating market and customer insight into growth strategy.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing marketing organization spanning brand, performance/growth, lifecycle, content, and product marketing.

Brand & Positioning

• Define and steward Novo's brand, narrative, and positioning in a crowded small business banking market.

• Build a differentiated voice and creative system that resonates with entrepreneurs and small business owners.

• Oversee brand campaigns, content, and communications that build trust and awareness at scale.

Growth & Demand Generation

• Own customer acquisition across performance marketing channels (paid search, social, partnerships, affiliate, and more), optimizing for efficient, scalable growth.

• Drive lifecycle and retention marketing to deepen engagement, activation, and share-of-wallet across the customer base.

• Favor rigorous, cohort-based analysis over surface-level correlation when evaluating channel performance and allocating spend.

• Own and manage the marketing budget and CAC/LTV targets, optimizing spend while ensuring efficient growth.

AI-Powered Marketing

• Define how AI scales Novo's marketing engine — across creative production, personalization, campaign optimization, content, lifecycle, and audience targeting.

• Champion responsible adoption of AI tools across the team to raise creative velocity, testing throughput, and analytical depth, while maintaining brand quality and consistency.

• Partner with Data, Product, Risk, Compliance, and Legal to ensure AI-driven marketing, targeting, and messaging meet the privacy, fairness, transparency, and regulatory bar required in financial services.

• Stay abreast of the rapidly evolving AI and martech landscape and apply informed judgment to make deliberate build-vs-buy decisions on tools, models, and vendors.

Product Marketing & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Product to shape positioning, messaging, and go-to-market for new products and features.

• Collaborate with Data and Finance to set targets, measure impact, and forecast growth.

• Work with Compliance, Risk, and Legal to ensure marketing claims, disclosures, and campaigns meet the regulatory requirements inherent to a fintech company.

• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, from individual contributors to the executive team and board.

Measurement & Analytics

• Own the marketing metrics that matter, including CAC, LTV, payback, conversion, retention, and channel ROI.

• Build the instrumentation, attribution, and reporting needed to measure performance and continuously improve.

• Hold the organization accountable to outcomes, running a disciplined cycle of experimentation and learning.

Strategic Planning & Budgeting

• Contribute to strategic planning for future growth and the broader company roadmap.

• Develop and manage the marketing budget across people, media, tools, and agencies, optimizing for impact while ensuring teams have the resources needed to deliver.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12–18+ years of progressive experience in marketing, with at least 3–5 years in a senior marketing leadership role (preferably in fintech, financial services, or high-growth consumer/SMB technology).

• Demonstrable track record of building and scaling brand and performance marketing functions that drive efficient, measurable growth.

• Strong command of both brand-building and data-driven growth marketing, with deep fluency in funnel metrics, attribution, and CAC/LTV economics.

• Experience defining AI-driven marketing strategy and/or using AI tools to scale creative, personalization, and analytics, with sound judgment about where AI adds real value and where it introduces risk.

• Proven ability to lead and motivate cross-functional teams, manage complex initiatives, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience partnering with Product, Data, Compliance, and external agencies/partners to deliver campaigns within regulatory constraints.

• Strong analytical and creative judgment with a proactive, experiment-driven approach to growth.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving startup environment.

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree (MBA) preferred.