Fintech & Payments marketing
Growth marketing inside financial promotion rules
A fintech markets like a software company and is regulated like a financial one. It sells to end users and to the banks and platforms it depends on at the same time, and it has to manufacture in three years the trust an incumbent inherited over a century.
What usually goes wrong
Where fintech marketing tends to fail
A fintech is judged by two entirely different rooms. In one, a consumer decides in ninety seconds whether to give you their salary. In the other, a bank’s risk committee decides over four months whether to let you near their licence.
Both read the same website. Both are influenced by the same advertising. And the rules that govern what may be said were written for the incumbent in the second room, not for the growth team in the first.
- Creative is withdrawn and nobody can name the rule.
- An ad is disapproved, an app listing is rejected, a referral mechanic is switched off. The cause is usually one of three things: the advertiser has not completed the financial services verification the platform requires in that country, the copy states a rate, return or approval outcome in a way the rule treats as a promotion, or the landing page implies a protection the entity does not hold. None of these are appealable in any useful sense. They are avoidable at the brief stage and expensive at the launch stage.
- The launch date belongs to a regulator, not to marketing.
- A licence application, a variation of permission, a sponsor bank’s onboarding or a scheme approval sits between the product being ready and the product being lawful, and none of those processes publish a date. Campaigns booked against an optimistic assumption end up either running before the product can accept customers or being cancelled at cost. Planning that treats the approval as an unknown with a range, and that has a pre-approval programme which does not require the product to exist, wastes far less money.
- Installs go up and funded accounts stay flat.
- App install campaigns optimise towards the event they are given, and an install is trivially easy to produce. Identity verification, funding a balance and completing a first transaction are the events that correlate with revenue, and they sit behind a process that loses people at every step. Until those events are passed back to the platforms and to the reporting, the acquisition system is being trained to find people who download things.
- The website is written for users and read by partners.
- A sponsor bank, an acquirer, a platform partner and an enterprise buyer all research you before any conversation, and what they find is a consumer landing page with no company detail, no named leadership, no security posture and no indication of which entity is regulated where. Serving both audiences from one undifferentiated site makes the growth pages look unserious to a risk function and the corporate pages look cold to a user. A clear split with a genuine partner path is usually the single highest-value structural change available.
- The safety question is answered in the footer.
- Every prospective customer wants to know who holds their money and what happens if the company fails, and most fintech sites answer it in small print or not at all. Being specific — which licensed institution holds the funds, whether the arrangement is safeguarding or deposit protection, what that does and does not cover, and where the company is authorised — converts better than reassurance language and is far less likely to be challenged by a regulator than a vague claim of being protected.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Is my money safe
The question that decides a signup. Volume rises sharply whenever a peer fails, and almost nobody publishes a straight answer.
- is [app] safe to use
- is my money protected with an e money account
- what happens if a fintech goes bust
- is [app] a real bank
- who holds the money in a digital wallet
Choosing an account or provider
Comparison behaviour, heavily intermediated by review sites and aggregators. Fee clarity wins these more than features do.
- best business bank account for freelancers
- [app] vs [bank] fees
- cheapest way to send money to [country]
- business account with no monthly fee
- multi currency account for small business
Integration and partner evaluation
Searched by a developer or a product lead at a partner. This is the second audience, and it never visits the consumer homepage.
- embedded payments api documentation
- banking as a service provider comparison
- how to become a payment facilitator
- open banking data aggregator integration
- card issuing api sandbox
Regulatory and status checks
Made by partners, journalists, larger customers and occasionally regulators. What they find has to match the public register exactly.
- is [company] fca authorised
- [company] money services business registration
- [company] safeguarding arrangements
- emi licence vs banking licence difference
- [company] leadership team
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- Consumers and small businesses decide on a mix of fees they can actually find, whether the thing they want to do is supported, and whether the money looks safe. The third is the one that stops a signup and the one most companies address least clearly.
- App store ratings and recent reviews function as the shortlist. A run of one-star reviews about a frozen account or a failed verification does more damage than any campaign repairs, and prospective users read them before they read anything you wrote.
- Business buyers of payments and embedded finance start from integration reality: whether the API does what they need, how long implementation takes, what the settlement and reconciliation model is, and which systems it already connects to. Documentation is read before marketing pages.
- Partner banks and platforms evaluate the company rather than the product. Ownership, funding position, compliance staffing, financial crime controls, complaints handling and how the company behaved during its last incident all matter more than the roadmap.
- Switching costs are asymmetric and shape the whole decision. Moving a payroll, a card, a direct debit set or a payments integration is genuinely painful, which makes the first choice sticky and makes migration support a real acquisition argument rather than a feature.
- Regulatory status is checked directly by anyone with money at stake. Registers are public, prospective partners look you up, and a mismatch between what the site implies and what the register says ends conversations rather than starting them.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
One brand that answers a user and a risk committee
The message has to work for somebody deciding in ninety seconds and for somebody assessing whether to attach their licence to yours. That is a structural writing problem rather than a tone problem: a shared set of factual claims about who is regulated where and who holds the money, expressed one way on a signup path and another way on a partner path, with nothing said in one place that would embarrass you in the other.
Coverage of the searches your partners make
Integration questions, settlement models, licensing comparisons and implementation timelines are searched by developers, product leads and risk staff at exactly the organisations you want to be embedded in. Almost every competitor writes only for the end user, which leaves that ground open, and the pages double as material a champion inside a partner can circulate internally.
Paid social that survives verification and review
Social platforms carry most consumer fintech acquisition and apply financial services policies that differ by country, require advertiser verification, and restrict rate, return and approval language in creative and on the landing page alike. Building to that standard from the first version means campaigns run for months rather than being rebuilt after each rejection, and it keeps the account itself out of trouble.
Optimising to a funded account, not an install
The events that matter are identity verification passed, account funded and first transaction completed, and each sits behind a drop-off nobody is measuring. Passing those back into the ad platforms and the reporting is what stops the system finding people who download an app and never open it again, and it is usually worth more than any change to creative.
Third-party coverage as a substitute for decades
A company with no history has to borrow credibility from sources the reader already trusts. Genuine coverage in outlets a partner’s risk team recognises, original data about the market you operate in, and named executives with a public record do work that no owned channel can replicate, and they are read by partners and users at different moments for different reasons.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- A plain statement of which legal entity is regulated, by whom, in which markets, and under what permission
- An explanation of who holds customer money and what protection applies, written for a person rather than for a lawyer
- A separate partner path with integration detail, settlement model and implementation timelines, not buried in the consumer site
- Public API documentation that is crawlable, current and linked from the marketing site
- Named leadership with real backgrounds, because a risk committee checks the people before the product
- A security and status page covering controls, incident history and how customers are told when something breaks
- Fees presented in full, including the ones that apply at the edges, since hidden charges are what the app store reviews are about
- A support and complaints route that is easy to find, because how a company handles failure is what larger partners assess
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
The definition of a financial promotion is broader than most growth teams expect. Depending on the market it can reach app store titles and screenshots, paid social creative, influencer and affiliate content, referral mechanics, push notifications and email as well as the website, and in several jurisdictions a promotion must be approved by an authorised person before it is issued and retained on file afterwards.
Terminology carries legal weight that marketing language does not respect. Words such as bank, deposit, protected, insured, guaranteed and even account are restricted in various markets to entities holding specific permissions, and using them without that permission is a supervisory matter rather than a wording preference. Where a partner institution provides the underlying service, the disclosure of that relationship is usually prescribed.
Marketing cannot lawfully run ahead of the permission. Promoting a product before the licence, variation or scheme approval is in place is a common and serious error in this sector, and it also damages the partner relationships that made the product possible. Pre-launch activity is built so that it markets the company and the problem rather than an offering that cannot yet be sold.
Requirements differ sharply between Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, including which regulator applies, how promotions must be approved and recorded, what may be said about protection of funds, and the rules governing incentives and referral rewards. Material cleared in one market is reviewed again before it is used in another.
These paragraphs describe the kinds of constraint we design around; they are not legal or regulatory advice. Confirming what your entity may say, in which market, and under whose approval remains with your compliance function and your counsel, and we will not accept that responsibility on your behalf.
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Applications approved through identity and onboarding checks, and the drop-off at each step
- Accounts funded, and the activation rate to a first completed transaction
- Cost per funded account by channel, held against contribution rather than against install cost
- Partner pipeline created, and integrations moved to live production
- Retained monthly active customers, since a funded account that goes quiet is not revenue
- Promotion approvals cleared first time, tracked as a cycle time the marketing team controls
- Share of acquisition dependent on any single platform, monitored as a concentration risk
- App store rating and the themes appearing in recent reviews, read as a product signal rather than a vanity number
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
Our ads keep getting rejected. Is that a creative problem?
Usually not. The three common causes are missing advertiser verification for financial services in that country, restricted language about rates, returns or approval on the creative or the landing page, and an implication of licensed or protected status that the entity does not hold there.
The productive approach is to treat the platform policy and the promotion rule as part of the brief rather than as a review at the end. A campaign built to that standard runs for months, which is worth far more than a rejected campaign that would have performed slightly better.
We are waiting on a licence. Is there anything worth doing now?
Yes, provided none of it promotes a product you cannot yet offer. Building the partner-facing material, the documentation, the founding team’s public record, the market data nobody else has published and the search coverage on the problem you solve are all lawful and all take months to mature anyway.
What does not work is booking a launch campaign against a date the regulator has not given you. Plan the spend as a range with a trigger rather than as a calendar entry, and keep the pre-approval programme independent of the approval itself.
How do we build trust without a track record?
By being specific where incumbents are vague. Name the entity that is regulated and by whom, say who holds customer money and what protection applies and does not, publish the leadership team with real histories, and show what happened during your last outage rather than claiming there will not be one.
That is more persuasive than reassurance language and considerably safer. Vague claims of being protected or secure are exactly the sort of statement a regulator will challenge, while a precise description of the arrangement is both defensible and rarer.
Should our consumer and partner audiences share a website?
A domain, yes. A front door, no. A person deciding whether to move their salary and a bank deciding whether to sponsor you want opposite things, and a single undifferentiated site makes one look flimsy and the other look cold.
A clear split works: shared brand and shared factual claims, separate navigation, separate content depth and separate measurement. It also concentrates the material that carries regulatory risk in fewer places, which makes review faster.
We have plenty of installs and very few funded accounts. Where is that going wrong?
Almost always in two places at once. The campaigns are optimising to an install because that is the only event being passed back, and the onboarding is losing people at identity verification and funding without anybody measuring where.
Fix the measurement first. Once verification passed, account funded and first transaction are visible and fed back to the platforms, the acquisition system starts finding a different kind of person, and the onboarding drop-off becomes a specific problem rather than a general disappointment.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal