Non-bank lender Pepper Money hasn’t gone hunting for a flashy external CMO – it’s backed the marketer who has been building the brand from the inside for more than a decade.

Pepper’s leadership bio confirms that Sarah Pikardt was appointed Chief Marketing Officer in 2025, after joining the business back in 2011. She now leads the marketing function and strategic development of the brand in Australia and New Zealand, with a focus on improving customer experience.

Before Pepper, Pikardt worked with a consultancy group focused on improving organisations’ strategic bottom-line performance, which is a neat foundation for a CMO role in a lending business where every brand decision ultimately shows up in credit flows and P&L.

To understand the weight of the job, it’s worth remembering where Pepper sits in the market. The lender positions itself as “Australia’s leading non-bank lender”, helping customers who don’t always fit the big-bank box across home, car, personal and commercial loans. It’s been repeatedly recognised as a specialist and non-bank lender of the year and recently celebrated an eighth consecutive run of MFAA “Specialty Lender of the Year” wins across multiple states.

Pikardt has been the public face of several recent brand pushes, including the “Really Helpful Loan Options” positioning and a national radio campaign voiced by Pepper staff, where she explicitly links brand investment to trust with customers and brokers.

Why this matters for loyalty and brokers

From a loyaltyandcustomers.com lens, this isn’t just a title change – it formalises the importance of marketing and CX inside a business that lives and dies on repeat business and broker advocacy.

Pepper’s whole proposition is built around flexibility for “real life” customers: near-prime, self-employed, non-standard income and people who might not sail through a big-bank scorecard. In that world, loyalty looks a bit different:

• you’re winning hearts and minds with human stories rather than glossy rate ads,

• you’re trying to be the “first-choice non-bank” a broker thinks of when a tricky deal lands on their desk, and

• you’re using brand to reduce perceived risk for borrowers who already feel a bit nervous.

My read is that having Pikardt formally in the CMO chair signals Pepper’s intent to keep brand, broker relationships and customer experience tightly stitched together. Expect to see more campaigns that lean into authenticity (real staff, real customers), and more work that quietly turns good service into long-term broker and customer loyalty, not just a spike in enquiries.

For your readers, this appointment is a neat reminder that in specialist lending, the most powerful loyalty lever is often trust built over time – and that’s exactly the territory Sarah Pikardt now owns as CMO.