Brilliant Ads FinTech

Axos, Gusto, Betterment & Zendesk, & more.

Hey,

Fintech ads are their own sport. Different rules (hello compliance), different creative, different winners.

Each week: the best fintech ads running right now, and exactly what to steal from them.

THIS WEEK IN FINTECH ADS

Meta broke your reports and sent no email.

Since 6 August, device, hourly and frequency breakdowns come back empty on any account that never opted in. The call still returns a 200, so you get zeroes instead of errors.

Same fortnight, Marketing API v26.0 started erroring special ad category ad sets with no Advantage+ flag. That is most credit, lending and insurance in regulated markets.

One break hides your evidence. The other kills the campaign type regulated advertisers live on.

If your dayparting has looked unusually clean since Thursday, that is not your account improving.

AI wins the click. Humans win the money.

AI ads now land within 5 to 15% of human creative on CTR, at 60 to 90% less per asset.

Then conversion splits. AI converts 8% worse above $100 and 14% worse above $500.

Worse, the moment someone clocks an ad as AI, purchase intent drops 14% and premium perception drops 17%.

A funded account is the most trust-heavy purchase in the category. Use AI for volume at the top. Use people where the money actually moves.

Apple Pay checks out in 22 seconds.

It passed PayPal on US Shopify stores this quarter, taking 38% of mobile express checkouts, up from 24% eighteen months ago.

Manual card entry takes 4 minutes 11 seconds.

Fintech onboarding is the longest form most people ever meet. Every KYC field you add is now judged against that 22 seconds.

Do you want us to take a look at your ads?

We manage $100M+ a year in fintech ad spend. Want us to look at yours?

A man in a suit and a balaclava, holding a duffel bag stuffed with cash. "Say bye-bye to broken banking."

Then four ticks. No overdraft fees. No opening fees. No balance fees. No monthly maintenance fees.

Every bank in the world writes that fee list. Axos drew the man taking the money instead.

The picture says the word the copy is not allowed to print. It has been running since June, which on Facebook is geological.

Split straight down the middle. On the red side, a rusted filing cabinet spilling paper and a knocked-over cup of coffee. On the green side, a clean desk and a laptop.

One line across both. "Clutter is not a payroll system."

Most software advertises the after. Gusto put the before in the same frame and let you work out which desk is yours.

You have picked a side before you reach the button.

"Double dip on rewards when you join Betterment." A hand holding a two-flavour ice cream against a blue sky.

Underneath, the two rewards sit side by side. 4.00% APY on one, a $150 bonus on the other.

Two numbers in a box is the most ignorable object in fintech.

The cone turns "double" into a picture, so the offer lands before it is read. Same rate, same bonus. It just arrives as an image first.

Wealthsimple did not change the product. They changed when the reward arrives.

"Your customers want speed. Regulators want proof." Nine words. That is every week of a regulated CX team's life, written back to them.

AN AD WE MADE

We rebuilt the Mastercard logo into the ad.

The logo was already a Venn diagram.
​Two overlapping circles, sitting in plain sight for decades. We labelled the red one "things money can buy" and the yellow one "happiness". The overlap was already the brand.

No headline. No body copy. No product.
​Three labels and three arrows. The idea lands before the reading starts.

It quietly reverses their most famous line.
​Priceless has spent its whole life on the things money cannot buy. Look at the asset you already own before you brief a new one.

THIS WEEK FROM MULTIPLY

A challenger bank's first week of app installs cost £12.55. The average was hiding a 3x split.

Three days of spend, first paid activity for the app:

1. 167 installs at £12.55 blended CPI, against an £8.33 target
2. Android delivered 109 of them at around £9
3. iOS delivered 40 at around £28
4. iOS conversion reporting ran up to 72 hours behind

On day one the dashboard showed zero iOS installs at infinite cost. None of that was true.

Most launch post-mortems blame the creative for a week-one miss that was attribution lag and an operating system cost gap.

Set separate Android and iOS targets before you launch, and read nothing on iOS younger than three days. A single blended target will have you cutting the campaign that is working.

Want this run on your account?

Read by people at Revolut · Coinbase · Mastercard · Kraken · eToro

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​Brilliant Ads FinTech​

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