Affiliate Marketing in Fintech: Compliance, Strategies, Growth, and More

Fintech is one of the fastest-growing sectors under the financial services umbrella, and with that growth comes competition. If you’re like the other 92% of fintech leaders that are prioritizing customer-centric strategies, affiliate marketing fits into your marketing mix and priorities almost seamlessly. 

Think of it this way: by partnering with trusted voices in the finance space, you can reach a highly engaged audience without all the upfront investment. 

So, how do you do that? This guide will walk you through ideas and strategies to grow revenue for your fintech business with affiliate marketing. Let's get started.

What is affiliate marketing for fintech?

So, what exactly is affiliate marketing in fintech? In short, it’s a performance-based marketing strategy where your fintech company partners with individuals or other companies (affiliates) to promote your products or services. These affiliates, often financial bloggers, market analysts, or influencers, earn a commission for each customer or lead they generate for you.

When compared to other marketing channels, it often makes sense from a financial perspective. Affiliate marketing has an appealing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and ‘time-to-results’ period.

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Keep in mind that fintechs span a wide array of industries, including payment processing, digital banking, lending, insurance, investing, cryptocurrency, and more. Performance metrics can vary across different fintech business types.

Why affiliate marketing works for fintech companies

The financial services industry has always been built on trust. Before the digital age, people relied on recommendations from their local bank manager or a trusted financial advisor. Today, that trust and attention has shifted online. Consumers now look to financial influencers, market analysts, and online communities for advice. This is where fintech affiliate marketing truly shines!

The Budgetnista does this with her blog and online presence. This trust factor in the financial space pairs well with amazing fintech companies that can access her trusted followers.

Here are three additional reasons why your fintech company should lean into affiliate marketing.

It helps reach a rapidly growing audience.

In addition to this ‘trust shift’, personal financial software and other fintech industries are expected to grow by nearly $6 billion by 2034. This projection suggests the category will keep expanding, making it a marketing channel worth investing in.  The growth will also lead to more affiliate opportunities, as publishers and creators look for trusted fintech products to recommend.

It strengthens your reputation. 

According to industry research, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from individuals over brands. Your affiliate partnerships become extremely valuable in a world where advertising costs continue to rise. 

Here’s an example. A potential customer sees your Reddit ad as a FX trading company and is extremely skeptical. However, when they see that same company reviewed by a top FX Youtuber and affiliate, that potential customer becomes much less skeptical. 

It lowers marketing acquisition costs. 

On average, CAC for a fintech company can be close to $1,450. The fintech sector has seen affiliate marketing drive CAC reductions of 30–50% compared to paid search or other lead generation campaigns, in many cases. 

How to use affiliate marketing for fintech brands

Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly versatile tool for reaching a variety of goals within your business. Here are a few tasks that affiliate marketing can assist with. 

Hitting aggressive quarterly growth goals

The next quarter always comes faster than anticipated. If you need to hit ambitious quarterly growth goals, affiliate marketing can be your secret weapon. 

Target high-value affiliates

Begin by finding a few motivated affiliates with moderate to large followings. This gives you the reach needed to achieve the anticipated impact. You can quickly ramp up your marketing efforts and drive significant traffic and conversions in a short period while paying for results, instead of clicks or views.

Prioritize legal approval early

Before launching your affiliate marketing campaigns, ensure that all terms and agreements and promotional materials are approved by the legal team. Treat this process like you would any other marketing campaign approval process. 

Promote time-sensitive offers

Pair the above with either a special quarterly promotion for customers or higher commission rates for these affiliates, to really get everyone motivated during a critical selling period.

Expanding into new regions

If you’re considering expansion into a new country or region, affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to establish a local presence. 

Why? Local affiliate partners will already understand the local culture, language, and consumer behavior. This helps you avoid common mistakes that can eat up an entire quarter. 

Segment by city

One of the easiest ways to segment for fintech companies is by city. Connect this to a database with ZIP or postal code information for household income data to find highly relevant affiliates for each local region. Then, when you’re ready to expand, you can group affiliates by region to ensure they promote campaigns relevant to their local markets. 

Leverage localized reporting

Make sure you take the time to set up localized reporting that allows you to analyze performance metrics tailored to each region. 

Pro Tip: Use an affiliate tracking software like LeadDyno to group affiliates by your specific criteria, creating regional affiliate segments that you can easily report on. 

Time zone campaign scheduling

Align your affiliate communication campaigns with regional audiences by using time zone scheduling. This ensures that your promotions reach your audience at optimal times, maximizing engagement and conversion rates.

Track transactions globally with multi-currency support

With regional expansion comes global currency considerations. To make sure you capitalize effectively with regional expansion, you should implement multi-currency support for both customers and affiliate payouts.

And don’t forget about multi-language support. This is just as important as multi-currency support.

Launching financial products more successfully 

If you’re launching a new product or service, your affiliate partners can be your biggest brand advocates by helping to create original content, in-depth reviews, and more. This helps generate initial buzz that’s organic and built on trust, rather than spending money on PPC or other marketing routes that can be expensive. 

Provide exclusive sneak peeks and resources

To build excitement, we recommend offering your affiliates an exclusive first look. If your affiliate agreement has a strong NDA component, send over demo videos, product descriptions, or access to a special information session. Pair this with clear marketing materials like key messaging, high-quality images, and other resources that set your affiliates up for success.

Create customized campaign incentives

You can further motivate affiliates with custom commissions and other incentives tied to launch-specific goals. Make the rewards attractive and aligned with the expected impact, especially if you’re looking to capitalize on immediate results.

Supporting customers through legacy platform migration 

If you're encouraging customers to move from an old platform to a new one, affiliates can help smooth the transition. 

By using engaging and in-depth tutorials, affiliates can highlight the benefits of the new system and offer special incentives, through tracked affiliate codes and links, to users who make the switch. This provides valuable third-party validation and support, making the migration process much easier for your customers.

If you’re a fintech company in the payments space, this is of obvious interest, as your teams try to sell customers on the switch from old to new. 

Working around regulatory restrictions

The fintech industry is heavily regulated and compliance is always a top priority. 

Major ad platforms like Google and Meta either ban or heavily restrict crypto advertising and some other fintech businesses, sometimes requiring extensive certifications. Additionally, FX trading platforms must comply with ESMA's mandatory risk warnings showing the percentage of retail accounts that lose money (typically 67–82%), while the FCA prohibits trading bonuses and incentives altogether.

This regulatory environment makes affiliate marketing attractive and important for fintech companies, because affiliates can create educational content and organic endorsements that exist outside these direct advertising restrictions. 

The empowering thing to do is to provide clear guidelines and approved marketing materials that align with your brand standards. Then you ideally don’t need to worry about compliance issues causing other complications later. 

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Other important considerations for fintech businesses

Here are some other important areas to consider for your fintech affiliate marketing program. 

Financial services earning potential

Affiliates are often enthusiastic about promoting financial services. Why? Because fintech products often have high customer lifetime value, which translates to attractive commission opportunities. 

Whether it’s a percentage of a loan, a flat fee for a new account, or a share of trading fees, the potential for significant earnings makes the fintech niche very appealing to a wide variety of affiliate partners.

Popular commission structures for fintech affiliates

Choosing the right commission structure is key to motivating your affiliates. Here are a few popular models in the fintech industry:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
• Tiered Commissions
• Cost Per Million Impressions (CPM)

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

This is the most common model. You pay a fixed fee for every new customer who signs up and completes a specific action, like funding a Prop account, getting approved for a loan, or filing a digital insurance application.

Tiered Commissions

You can offer higher commission rates to affiliates who drive more volume. This incentivizes your top performers and encourages all partners to strive for better results.

Cost Per Million Impressions (CPM)

This model rewards affiliates based on the number of impressions their delivered content receives, typically per thousand impressions. CPM is an excellent option for businesses aiming to increase brand awareness and visibility.

Brand mentions monitoring 

As your affiliate program grows, keeping track of how your brand is being represented online becomes paramount. You may not always have the ability to manually review each piece of affiliate content before it is published. This is where monitoring brand mentions comes into play. 

One free way to do this is through Google Alerts. It’s a free tool that will help you identify brand mentions, making it easier to keep tabs on affiliate content. There are also paid tools out there you can look into as well. 

Examples of successful fintech affiliate programs

Let's take a look at some fintech companies that are absolutely crushing it with their affiliate programs! These examples will show you just how powerful this channel can be.

The 5ers

The 5ers is a forex trading program designed for ambitious traders looking to manage funded accounts. Affiliates can attract an audience of forex enthusiasts by promoting The 5ers' unique funding model. Their landing page does an excellent job with listing the types of affiliates they partner with best.

Trade The Pool

Trade The Pool offers a unique funding program for stock traders. A key offering and value proposition on their landing page is advanced dashboards, a primary feature from LeadDyno that helps set them apart from competitors. 

Credit Suite

Credit Suite helps businesses build credit and access financing. Their affiliate program is a core part of their growth strategy. They partner with financial consultants, business coaches, and B2B service providers who recommend Credit Suite to their clients. They’re a great example of how fintech affiliate marketing works well when time and attention is invested in marketing the program properly. 

Seasonax

Seasonax provides a tool for identifying seasonal trading patterns. Their affiliate program targets financial market analysts, trading educators, and financial media outlets. Their affiliate strategy uses expert voices and opinions in the space to reach highly-qualified traders that may want to switch.

Aktien.guide

This German platform helps investors find and analyze stocks based on proven strategies. Their affiliate program is geared towards financial bloggers and investment educators in the German-speaking market. It’s a great example of targeting a specific linguistic and regional market with affiliate marketing.

A Few Other Examples:

• Coinbase
• AVA Trade
• HFM Markets

How to grow your fintech affiliate program, easily

If you want to take your affiliate program to the next level without manual work, LeadDyno makes it simple. 

You can set up your program in minutes with easy onboarding for your new affiliates. The software provides each partner with a unique referral link and a personalized dashboard where they can track their clicks, referrals, and commissions in real-time. 

Plus, LeadDyno automates the triggering of commission payments, so you can pay your affiliates on time, every time, with just a few clicks.

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Final thoughts

By building partnerships with trusted voices in the financial community, you can expand your reach, build brand credibility, and drive impressive revenue. From navigating compliance to managing commissions, the key is to have the right tools in place to begin working with affiliates successfully.

If you're ready to unlock the full potential of affiliate marketing for your fintech brand, let LeadDyno help you get there. 

‍Book a demo with LeadDyno today and see how we can help you scale your fintech affiliate marketing program today.