As the industry continues to grow, there are huge
opportunities in the FinTech space for mobile app developers and advertisers
alike.
Embracing user privacy
It’s been more than a year since the rollout of iOS 14.5 and
Apple’s AppTracking Transparency (ATT) framework. This marked a critical shift
in focus towards protecting consumer privacy. Although early predictions for
industry-wide ATT opt-in rates were as low as 5%, our recent data shows a much
higher rate of 25% — a number that is increasing consistently.
While the opt-in rate for FinTech apps sits below the
industry-wide average, at 11%, these changes to data privacy have reinforced
the need for marketers in FinTech to extract value from their own first-party
data. Given this, we can expect to see continued acceleration in ATT opt-in
rates for the FinTech vertical, as more users understand the value of opting in
and receiving personalised advertisements.
Therefore, app marketers in the FinTech realm should
implement robust opt-in strategies that communicate the benefits of targeted
advertising to users. It’s this exact proposition, which has already been
communicated for years, that’s led to hyper-casual games consent rates reaching
as high as 40%.
Maintaining accelerated install growth
Adjust’s report finds that installs of FinTech apps grew by
35% between 2020 and 2021. Looking at the breakdown of these installations per
subvertical. Payment apps make up approximately 57% of the installs share,
followed by banking at 34%, stock trading at 7%, and crypto at 2%.
A rise in post-pandemic interest in investing apps continued
in 2021, while interest in cryptocurrencies led crypto apps to overtake stock
trading apps to become the majority of asset management app downloads. Bitcoin
and overall crypto market capitalisation reached new all-time highs in April
and November. As expected, we found that coverage of “meme coins” such as
Dogecoin and Shiba Inu and the popularity of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain
led to a surge of new users into the FinTech space.
Globally, the share of paid installs relative to organic
installs in the FinTech vertical grew from the beginning of 2020 until midway
through 2021. Starting at 0.11 and growing to 0.15, 2021 ended with a ratio of
0.14. The most exponential growth can be seen in the crypto vertical, which
started in 2020 at 0.11 and finished in 2021 at 0.23, indicating that the big
increase in paid campaigns for cryptocurrency apps also, logically, resulted in
a boost in the number of paid installs. Banking’s ratio dropped consistently,
starting at 0.12 and finishing at 0.07, showing that the increased need and
interest in banking apps caused users to seek the apps out themselves.
With more users than ever before flocking to FinTech apps,
we know that marketers and developers are looking to expand their channel mixes
to capture the largest number of potential new customers. We found that this
was reflected in our trends data, as the number of partners each FinTech app is
working with has also increased alongside the competition. What’s more, the
average number of partners for the vertical as a whole grew from 3-4 in 2021.
Crypto saw the greatest increase — starting in 2020 with an average of 2.5
partners per app and finishing in 2021 with an average of 4.5.
Increasing sessions and understanding user behaviour
With an increase of 53% globally, the growth of FinTech app
sessions recorded is even more significant. Our findings highlight a boost in
engagement within the vertical, as existing and newly acquired users record
more sessions than ever before. While global sessions follow a continued upward
trend throughout the year, the highest point can be seen in April, which was 92%
higher than the 2020 average, and 27% up on the rest of 2021.
The breakdown of sessions across the FinTech subvertical
differs significantly from what we saw for installs. Banking takes first place
at 46%, followed by payment at 31%. Stock trading and crypto take more of the
sessions share than the installs share, at 17% and 6%, respectively. This
suggests that the users who download apps in these categories are clocking more
sessions than those using banking and payment apps.
We discovered that this high level of engagement is also
reflected in the length of sessions by users in each subvertical, with the most
significant growth seen among crypto apps. Session lengths in crypto and stock
trading are consistently longer than those in banking and payment, which aligns
with the business models of each category. While a payment app might only be
needed for a number of seconds for a task to be fulfilled, users buying and
selling stocks or cryptocurrencies likely need to spend much longer to complete
actions.
According to Adjust’s report, in-app revenue for FinTech
apps is also increasing steadily, showing consistent growth from January 2020
through to December 2021. While subscriptions, third parties (sellers and
beneficiaries), and advertising are the key ways that FinTechs monetise, we
recognise that subscription models have become increasingly prominent. This
helps to drive the increase in in-app revenue, as many FinTechs have progressed
from the growth stage into the profitability stage.
What next for mobile FinTech?
In 2021, we saw the shift toward mobile accelerate, with
more users than ever before turning to apps for their financial needs. With
installs and sessions in the vertical increasing across all regions and
subverticals, it is clear that the global FinTech app ecosystem is thriving,
and continued growth can be expected from this space for the remainder of the
year.
As for what’s coming next for the future of mobile FinTech,
we expect to see growth in Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services, digital wallets
enabling access to cryptocurrencies, as well as cloud banking from traditional
banks. For mobile app marketers in the FinTech space, focusing on getting the
opt-in is crucial. Although numbers are comparatively low, pushing this rate up
by even a couple of percentage points can prove invaluable when it comes to
building out conversion value models and predictive strategies for the
aggregated SKAdNetwork data set. Focusing on finding these high-value users is
key, along with building retention strategies that keep them sticking around.
The best way to achieve this perfect balance is to improve the accuracy of your
campaigns and to create a user experience that is perfectly optimised to your
specific audience segments. Drilling down into your data to determine the key
touch points along the user journey is how you’ll achieve this—great data makes
for great insights.
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