Casey Akerblom on Making Bluevine the Default Choice for Small Business Banking
Casey Akerblom started his career evaluating other people’s growth stories as an investor. Then he decided he’d rather build them. After nearly a decade scaling performance marketing at Zillow and a bracing detour through online car sales, he now leads marketing as SVP at Bluevine, the largest small business banking platform in the US, with more than a million customers served, $2 billion in deposits, and $17 billion in loans delivered.
In this Beyond the Brief Conversation, Casey explains why winning only at the bottom of the funnel gets expensive, how surveying real small business owners powers content that AI platforms reward, and why a trustworthy financial brand doesn’t have to be a dull one.
From the rocket ship to the anchor
Q: You came to marketing from investing. How did that path shape you?
Casey: At Hall Capital Partners, fund managers would pitch us their portfolios: “Here’s why this company is growing like crazy; here’s their secret sauce.” You got the inner workings of a lot of companies from the outside in. I kept thinking this company is fascinating and wanted to be part of that growth instead of just looking in. That drove me into marketing. I joined Zillow right around the time Sheryl Sandberg said, “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat.” I was the third person on the performance marketing team and spent the greater part of a decade there. It was a crash course in scaling highly efficient teams, and in the power of a brand and how it multiplies effectiveness across marketing.
Q: And then you saw the opposite dynamic.
Casey: At Vroom, you could buy and sell cars online. During Covid, that was a fantastic business to be in. But chasing that growth, they lost sight of how important the customer experience is. Imagine you step into the shiny SUV that was just delivered, and the driver has left his Coke bottle in the cup holder. It might not seem like a big deal, but I just paid $50,000 for this car, and now it feels lived-in. It was a sharp contrast between the power of the brand at Zillow and the moment when the brand becomes a headwind. It also shows how a company’s brand is built and formed by all of the touchpoints the customer has with your company, not just your latest marketing campaign.
Becoming the default choice
Q: What was the marketing challenge when you arrived at Bluevine?
Casey: We had an exceptional platform and mission-driven leadership, but not really a brand. So much marketing had been at the bottom of the funnel, paid search at that last final moment. You can win in that space, but it’s going to be really expensive. Our CEO and CFO were asking, why is our acquisition so expensive? Because the only place we were playing was Google’s monopolistic pricing. We need customers to default to saying, “The first thing I should look into is Bluevine.” That’s what we’ve been working on for the last two-plus years.
Q: How does empathy for the small business owner show up in the work?
Casey: Small business owners are wearing 20 different hats. So we create value monetarily, like solid APY in an operating account, and by giving them time back. Sub-accounts with user-level permissions, invoicing built in, a line of credit that lands directly in your checking account. We want them pleasantly surprised that what seems like it should be a simple task actually is simple. Those small examples can be so much more powerful than leading with key value props, because there’s a sea of sameness in the basic value props. The devil’s in the details.
Content with information gain
Q: Tell us about the BOSS Report and your digital PR engine.
Casey: We build a different digital PR report every month, and the underlying data comes from surveying the full heterogeneous small business owner space, not just Bluevine customers. There’s so much AI slop and repetition out there. Another glossary page on ACH fees? The AI platforms already know the answer. You have to create information gain. One stat we found: roughly two-thirds of small business owners delayed paying themselves last year because they had other payments to make. When customers see themselves in the stats, they relate more to your brand. And when our data showed Indianapolis growing something like 250%, the Indianapolis media loved it. Suddenly you’re part of that conversation.
Q: How do you measure whether you’re winning in AI search?
Casey: Our AI share of voice is leading the category, and I attribute a lot of that to creating genuinely helpful content. When ChatGPT started making brand citations clickable, our AI referrals increased ~300% in a week because the visibility was already there. We use Profound as our AI visibility platform, but you have to dig into the data. Track one niche prompt, and you can make yourself look phenomenal. People ask long-tail questions now, so we build content like why Bluevine is the best banking platform for general contractors, and that’s not the same page we have for restaurateurs.
Trustworthy, not boring
Q: What’s next for the brand?
Casey: We’re launching our first true brand-first campaign. We convinced senior leadership we can take more liberty in being creative, because the safe, dull approach gets expensive. Peter Field’s work on the cost of dull advertising spoke to me, especially in financial services. You’ve got to be trustworthy, but trustworthy does not mean you need to be boring.
Q: Finally, if Hollywood made a biopic about you, what’s the theme, and who plays you?
Casey: Something about the financial side of marketing, the numbers behind the message. So much of work life boils down to being a problem solver. Get down to what moves the needle, whether that’s marketing work, empathy, or understanding the numbers, and be someone people want to work with. As for who plays me, someone with a touch of comedic edge. I don’t take myself too seriously. Matthew McConaughey, or maybe Paul Rudd.
Casey Akerblom is SVP of Marketing at Bluevine, the largest small business banking platform in the US, serving more than a million small business owners with checking, lending, and payments. Connect with Casey on LinkedIn and learn more at Bluevine.com.