By Alexandre Pham, Vice President, EMEA at Adjust
2021 saw another transformative year for the fast-moving world of app marketing, as the accelerated shift towards mobile continued. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the mobile fintech sector; Adjust’s recent Mobile App Trends report found that last year, more users than ever before flocked to apps for their financial needs.
In the report, we explored the recent performance of fintech apps, revealing that banking app revenue reached $6.8 billion last year; an incredible 88% increase on 2020. What’s more, over half of purchases (52%) were made with a digital wallet in 2021, and use of cash declined 42% compared to 2019.
Our data revealed a 19% increase in finance app downloads compared to 2020. As the mobile fintech industry continues to grow, there are huge opportunities in the fintech space for mobile app developers and advertisers alike.
Consistent and 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 sub-vertical. 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 capitalization 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.
With more users than ever before turning 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 2020 with an average of 2.5 partners per app and finishing 2021 with an average of 4.5.
Boosting 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.
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.
Prioritising 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%.
What’s 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 upcoming trends within the sector, we expect to see growth in Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services, digital wallets enabling access to cryptocurrencies, as well as cloud baking from traditional banks.
The recent changes to data privacy have had a significant impact for mobile app marketers in the fintech space, so focusing on getting the opt-in is crucial. Although numbers are comparatively low, pushing this rate up by even a couple of percentage points will prove invaluable when it comes to building out conversion value models and predictive strategies for the aggregated SKAdNetwork data set.
