Canadian Fintech Affiliate: Finance Affiliate Club breakdown🛬
Sharing a behind the scenes look at planning an affiliate event, Capital One's program is back in Canada, and catch me at the CLA conference in November
Morning!
Welcome to the Canadian Fintech Affiliate newsletter, a monthly roundup of industry news, offer updates and conferences worth attending for Canadian affiliate marketers.
In today’s email:
Offer updates: Capital One is back in Canada, PC enters the HISA arena and Fig offering a chance to win 10k when you apply for a loan.
Insights: Breaking down the first Finance Affiliate Club event in Canada. What it was like to plan, what people were talking about and when we’re hosting the next one.
Best conferences in Toronto, Atlanta and Vegas
Opinions expressed are my own*
Today’s reading time is 5 minutes.
🤑 Offer updates
Capital One reactivates its affiliate program in Canada.
PC Money Account launches a 4.25% HISA account. Good move from PC going after EQ and Neo but with a much stronger brand. Let’s see how long the interest rate lasts.
Fig goes live with a sweepstakes offer for loan applicants. Interesting play, I’ve never seen this before in lending. They’re covnersion rate on applications will increase but I’m not sure it will lead to more loan originations. I like that they’re testing some thing new.
Also, Monish Sharma, CRO @ Fig, wrote a children’s book about personal finance, check it out on amazon. I bought one and now my daughter won’t stop saying ‘Tring Tring’ 😂
What happened at the first Finance Affiliate Club event in Canada
Finder hosted the first FAC event a few weeks ago here in Toronto. Having the pleasure of being married during covid (twice), I knew it was going to take a lot of planning to pull it off, and it did.
Being an invite only event we needed to curate the invite list, source a venue, put together a panel of experts (and write the questions), organize catering + drinks, liquor license and all the small stuff like audio equipment rentals, create the slideshow and order banners.
Would I do it again?
F**k ya!
Probably would have done it sooner.
The timing
Being the first event we wanted it to be at a time when publishers and advertisers were likely to be in Toronto. With Dealmaker happening on Sept 27th and Elevate on the 30th it made sense to host right before.
Apparently this was a bit controversial but I think it actually makes all these events stronger and a bigger draw for pubs and brands to come in from out of town.
If you’ve ever been to a conference like Affiliate Summit, Affiliate World, Leadscon or the like then you’ve likely been invited to a private event happening during the show. To be honest, these private events are the reason I go to a show. It’s usually not to walk the floor.
The intimate conversations you have with big affiliates and advertisers are what the reason to make the trip.
If we want to rebuild the affiliate scene in Toronto, we need more of these events. Just look at this post from Cristiano Fama👇
The panel
Organizing the panel, for me, was the biggest challenge putting the whole event together. I had never done that before, I had never even been invited to speak on a panel before.
I was introduced to Mathew Growden through our coworking space and he was kind enough to share ideas on what makes a good panel, how to keep it interesting and some suggestions for moderators. Lucky for us, he was available to moderate the panel.
I wanted the panel to offer a diverse perspective on partnerships, so I knew we’d have a publisher, network and advertiser reps as panelists. From there everything started coming together.
I was asked a few times why I wasn't on the panel and truthfully I wanted to be but I wanted the event to feel unbiased (as funny as that sounds) and really geared towards growing the affilate space in Canada.
Straight up, I underestimated the draw of the panel. I knew it would be interesting and what was shared was going to be valuable but I didn’t realize that people would come to the event specifically for the panel.
Shoutout to Mathew Growden, Nicky Senyard, Rakesh Mistry and Erin Kerr for being transparent and really pulling back the curtain on their affiliate marketing strategies
So what were people talking about?!
Ready?… Affiliate marketing! Which was the whole point!
Seriously though, I had some awesome conversations with existing partners and new ones as well. There was a good mix of experienced affiliate marketers and others who are looking to get started in affiliate marketing, both on the publisher and brand sides.
We tried our best to keep the atmosphere light and informal. We wanted people to feel relaxed and have these open conversations about the challenges they’re facing as well as the successes they’ve had with the channel.
Publishers
Lots of talk about the Google algo updates and organic traffic challenges in general. If you think your the only one dealing with them, your not. Big and small organic affiliates are feeling the heat from Google and are looking to diversify their traffic channels.
The challenge of managing compliance expectations of the big FIs was also talked about. For small publishers, it’s a lot to manage and it’s expensive from an operational stand point. If the offers don’t convert, it’s a loss. Finding a way to manage compliance more effectively is key.
Personally, there are a few advertisers I’d like to pause because their compliance is far too time consuming for the revenue they generate.
Advertisers
After the panel I was talking with Stephane from TD and he was sharing how the challenges Rakesh had voiced on the panel were problems he’s also had to work through.
Imagine that, two mortal enemies from TD and RBC experiencing the same challenges.
When he told me that, I knew this event had achieved what we had set out to do. Connect people in the industry no matter the brand the represent.
Another interesting topic was the effect of deminishing ROAS on paid channels have contributed to the growth of the affiliate channel. With the industry being focused on organic algo updates lately, the changes in targeting on paid platforms like Meta have been overlooked. Several advertisers told me that their ROAS on paid spend has decreased dramatically and they’ve shifted budgets to affiliate partners to offload the risk and work with them to scale traffic.
This was something that didn’t get discussed on the panel. Affiliates can be an extension of your marketing team. They can drive traffic, manage creatives and compliance while offsetting the risk to a 3rd party. All while working on a performance basis.
What’s not to like?
When’s the next one?
I must have been asked that question 5 times.. which felt so good! We’ll definitely be planning another FAC event soon. One change we might make is charging for the event, that and ice cold beer ;)
Let me know your thoughts by voting in the poll below.
Also, if you attended and haven’t replied to our survey yet, please do so here → FAC Survey.
We want to make the next event better than the last so please let us know how we did. It’s anonymous so feel free to be candid (but respectful).
🍸Conferences
Upcoming conferences worth checking out:
Canadian Lenders Summit - November 6th, 2024 | Queens Quay
I’ll be there, come say hi 👋
We might be hosting a happy hour if there’s interest, stay tuned for more details
FinCon - Atlanta, October 23-26, 2024
Anyone talking money and personal finance will be at this event.
Money20/20 - October 27-30 2024 | Las Vegas, NV
The heavy hitters of finance will be at this event. If you want to speak to the CMO of a major FI, this could be the conference for you. At $3,799 per pass, you better close to make it worth it.