Having reached the benchmark of 45 million registered users and 3.55 million locations available for use nationwide, PayPay is a breath of fresh-and-cashless air in Japan, offering a comfortable and fun payment experience to its users and merchants who use the service multiple times a day. Read on to find out about the Vanguard of marketing at PayPay – the team of diligent marketers driving campaigns and marketing strategies critical to this achievement. In the hope of climbing to further heights, they continue to push forward at greater speed and vigor as we speak.
Masaki Utsunomiya
Senior Manager, Financial Marketing Department
After working as a real estate sales rep, magazine editor, and a stint at the pay-per-click advertiser Overture, he moved to Yahoo! JAPAN and worked there for 12 years. At Yahoo! JAPAN, he was primarily involved in launching new businesses, product planning, and sales promotion in the realm of media and advertising. He joined PayPay in September 2019. After working in campaign planning, he is now in charge of strategizing, planning, and organization management at the Financial Marketing Department.
Tell us about the Financial Marketing Team!
The Financial Marketing Department aims to make PayPay the ideal and easy-to-use app for users who want to move money around. To that end, we create marketing strategies, design and operate promotions, and produce other such things related to user experience and user communications in our financial businesses.
We promote overall marketing activities such as planning and implementing user approaches, customer journey mapping, and promotion design, to ensure that PayPay does not simply remain a “payment feature” but will also take off as a finance platform.
What are the rewarding and tough aspects of working in the Financial Marketing Department?
Since the Financial Marketing Department is a newly established organization dealing with new businesses, we can’t learn from past successes. So, we’re doing so many things from scratch.
Both as a team and in our operations, there’s much we lack in terms of rules and established methods, so we are certainly struggling with making decisions as we go along and coming up with new things. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of fun to be able to work on exciting initiatives to deliver new services to users, building on top of PayPay’s vast base of customers, merchants, and unique economic environment. I actually enjoy even the demanding side of the job.
And most of all, the feeling of making the world a better place and changing society for the better makes me proud of what I’m doing, and is what makes working in the Financial Marketing Department so rewarding.
Please tell us about the work culture in the Financial Marketing Department!
Our department includes many members seconded from various PayPay-brand financial companies (PayPay Bank, PayPay Card, PayPay Securities, and PayPay Insurance), so the strengths of each group company’s culture and experience of colleagues coming from different backgrounds are mixed in a good way. We’re able to work while engaging in friendly competition.
And this is not limited to the Financial Marketing Team. The entire Marketing Division is a group of people who are professionals with a strong sense of ownership, working as one team.
I heard that you are actively hiring. Tell us your thoughts and what you value in hiring!
When you hear “financial business,” you may get the impression that it’s a highly specialized area, but we are actually responsible for marketing and user communications.
I came here with no experience, knowing next to nothing about financial businesses or services. Those with marketing experience in the financial industry can make the most of their expertise, while those with no such experience can also be successful if they have knowledge of marketing strategy development and execution for new service launches.
In addition, although this applies to marketing in general, I believe that imagination, communication skills, and the grit to never give up are important. We’re looking forward to working with people who can imagine, discuss as necessary, and develop better marketing initiatives together with us.
A Message to future team members
Simply put, let’s create a “PayPay Chapter 2: Finance” together!
Current job openings
Special Thanks: Masaki Utsunomiya /Planning: Sura Kim / Edited by: PayPay Inside-Out Editorial Team Translator: Justin / Translation Editor: Language Communication Team
*Employees’ affiliations are as of the time of the interview.
