Finance
You are buying applications you may not be permitted to accept.
Acquisition for regulated firms, where the advertisement is itself a regulated document.
-22%
Reduction in cost per funded account
The problem
Two things sit between your media spend and your revenue, and marketing owns neither.
The first is underwriting. A meaningful share of the applications you pay for will be declined, and the decline rate varies substantially by acquisition source. That makes blended cost per application structurally misleading: the campaigns producing the cheapest applications are frequently producing the most declines. Worse, the audience most responsive to speed-and-ease messaging often skews towards the applicants your credit team exists to reject. Optimising to application volume can reduce contribution margin while every marketing metric improves.
The second is that your advertisement is not merely an advertisement. In most markets a financial promotion is a regulated communication: signed off before publication by someone who carries the accountability for it, held with a version history for a defined retention period, and carrying whatever risk warnings and mandated examples the local regime prescribes. Liability usually runs down the chain to your affiliates and introducers as well. The particulars differ by jurisdiction, and if you sell into several you are working to several sets at once. What does not differ is the shape of the problem, or the cost of an advertisement going live that nobody approved.
Considerations
What we account for
Measure to the funded account
We negotiate access to decision-level outcomes at the start of the engagement and import them back into the bidding platforms, so optimisation targets funded accounts and activated customers rather than submitted applications. Alongside it we build a bridge report showing cost per application, cost per approved application and cost per funded account by campaign and by risk band, so the gap between them is visible rather than averaged away.
Assume adverse selection until proven otherwise
We look at decline rate and early arrears by acquisition source, not just conversion rate. Where a source shows a materially worse risk profile, the response is a bid or budget decision, not a creative one. This is the part of financial services acquisition that most media agencies never see, because it requires data that sits with the risk function rather than with marketing.
Approve the combination, not just the advertisement
Responsive search assets, Performance Max asset generation, dynamic text variations and automated headline generation all assemble advertisements that no compliance officer has ever seen. Promotions rules in most markets require approved copy and prescribed risk wording, which sits badly with ad formats that build headlines on the fly. In a regulated account that is a live exposure, not a technicality. We either pre-approve the full combination matrix, pin assets, or disable the feature — and we make that call explicitly with your compliance team rather than leaving the default on and hoping.
Build a pre-approved modular library
The way to move at reasonable speed inside a review cycle is to stop treating each campaign as a new approval. We build a signed-off library of copy blocks, risk wording, mandated examples and imagery, with a per-market layer wherever you sell into more than one regime — because wording that clears in one market rarely clears unchanged in the next, and discovering that at launch is expensive. Campaign assembly then becomes recombination within an approved set, and the approval round shifts from every launch to a periodic review of the library itself.
Services
What we run here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping, managed against margin rather than platform-reported ROAS.
Affiliate Marketing
Partner programmes rebuilt around incremental sales rather than last-click credit.
Performance Marketing
Cross-channel budget allocation decided by measured contribution, not platform self-reporting.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to payback period, then media bought to fit.
Lead Generation
Optimised to pipeline and closed revenue, not to form submissions.
Campaign Management
ROI-focused campaign planning, pacing and review run as an operating rhythm.
Frequently asked
Our compliance review is the bottleneck. Can you make it faster?
Not by pressuring your compliance team, which is the usual and unhelpful suggestion. The gain comes from changing what gets reviewed. A pre-approved modular library means most campaigns are assembled from signed-off components and only genuinely new claims enter a review cycle. That typically moves the constraint from every launch to a periodic library refresh.
Can you still run Performance Max and responsive search ads?
Sometimes, with conditions. The issue is that these formats generate advertisement combinations automatically, and each combination is arguably a promotion nobody approved. Depending on your risk appetite we pin assets to fix the output, pre-approve the full permutation set, or recommend against the format. It is a compliance decision with a performance cost attached, and it should be made deliberately rather than inherited from a default setting.
We market under another firm’s authorisation rather than holding our own. Does that change things?
Yes, it changes who can approve what, and it is worth establishing early. Where you operate under another firm’s licence or permissions, that firm’s scope and its own sign-off process usually govern more than people expect: what may be claimed, who signs it off, and how long records have to be kept. We work to whatever the arrangement actually is. We just need it documented at the start rather than discovered when an asset is stuck.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.