Canadian Fintech Affiliate: Subprime is sexy again💋
Ratehub tests subprime lending, Spring Financial launches an app, my interview with Abid Salahi, Co-founder of FinlyWealth.com and more
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:
What’s trending: Ratehub enters the personal loan market, CFPB launches a credit card comparison tool, Spring Financial launches Bloom, Hardbacon assets acquired
Interview with Abid Salahi, Co-founder of FinlyWealth.com
Best conferences to attend in February (*cough* it’s in Dubai)
Jobs: Roles at PartnerStack, Creative Clicks, YepAds and 20+ others.
Opinions expressed are my own*
Today’s reading time is 5 minutes.
🤑 What’s Trending
Here’s the biggest news impacting financial affiliates in February 👇
Ratehub enters the personal loan market. With their new CEO coming from SoFi, the digital lending powerhouse in the US, this seems like the obvious next step for the company.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. They’ve built a business on serving prime consumers through their vertically integrated mortgage and insurance brokerages.
With the new rate cap in effect, the timing is challenging for the category.
It isn’t easy to see a vision where they successfully expand content to a subprime audience that’s monetized exclusively through partner referrals.
I expect this is them testing the waters to gather data on traffic and conversions using partners (Fig and Spring) to use as a base case for building a strategy to originate loans in-house.
If they follow their mortgage model, they would offer the lowest APR through their in-house loan and then activate partners to service applicants who don’t qualify. This would put them in direct competition with Fig (owned by Fairstone Bank.)
Spring Financial launches Bloom, an AI budgeting app. Since Mint shut down, many budgeting apps have launched in Canada. Personally, I don’t like the model when the primary offering is a budget (Wilbur has a cool twist, though).
Acquisition costs are high, and there can be a lot of friction connecting bank accounts, which leads to high churn. Users also expect it to be free.
What makes this different is that Spring’s primary business is unsecured loans. I think it’s a smart play if they’re using this as a value add for their borrowers to differentiate themselves and help borrowers qualify for better loans and potentially move upstream into prime loans and mortgages.
CFPB launches a credit card comparison tool in the US. Alana Levine, CRO of Fintel Connect shared a post on Linkedin about the effect it may have on publishers in the space. Here are my initial thoughts on the UX
I selected Excellent CS, New York and Earn Rewards and the top 3 results were local credit unions offering low-interest cards and no information on earn rates or welcome bonuses.
Data is sorted by APR % when I selected ‘Rewards’ as the feature I care about 💩
Data was last updated on Jun. 30, 2024 🚩
For more info, I need to click and read the review for the card where there’s no date or author for the review.
President Elon might axe the whole department anyway I guess…
As it turns out, the Canadian Gov has a similar tool for comparing bank accounts which I found better but ultimately invisible in the search results.
Hardbacon assets acquired by Plutera Capital. This looks like a great fit on paper. Hardbacon’s assets are strongest in Quebec, so being acquired by a Quebec company with experience is performance marketing makes sense.
🎙️ Interviews
Abid Salahi - Co-founder of FinlyWealth.com
Tell me about yourself. How long have you been working in affiliate marketing?
My name is Abid, and I’m a software engineer living in Vancouver. I started FinlyWealth with my business partner Kevin, who has a background in data science. We’ve been working in affiliate marketing for less than two years now.
We originally built an app that allows users to connect their bank accounts to analyze their spending habits and make personalized credit card recommendations. This came out of frustration from our own user experience looking for the best credit cards for our spending habits.
After building the app, we realized that much of the information could be displayed publicly on a site, so we pivoted to what’s now FinlyWealth.
What’s been the hardest part of affiliate marketing so far?
Finding partnerships has been the hardest part. We have tech backgrounds so building the product was straightforward. Finding brands and getting partners to accept us into their programs was new for us and very difficult.
You’re running finance and shopping offers. How do the programs differ, what’s your advice for a pub in either vertical?
Shopping sites work fairly differently than finance ones since in finance the commission event is often determined by either product approval or an approval and a minimum funding or something along those lines (so usually 1-2 months timeline max, often faster), whereas in shopping it varies very heavily based on industry.
Travel is usually considered approved weeks after the customer has completed their travel, meaning if your customer booked some hotel through you for 6 months from now, you get paid 7-8 months from now (or longer) for that transaction.
Regular retail shopping works similarly, with a long added pending phase for verification and avoiding bouncebacks or customer refunds, but again, it varies a lot.
My advice is to be transparent about timelines with your audience and give them as much clarity as possible into how the process works. This helps manage expectations from the user if there’s an issue or they don’t receive their cash back rebate. Publishers often get blamed by the customers for their missing cashback, but in reality, we rely on the networks and advertisers to send us correct data.
I also believe in being honest when doing product reviews for financial products. Would you sign up and use the product? Do you find it competitive enough? Adding a personal touch is helpful.
Why did you decide to build out the bank account linking feature and do you see strong user adoption?
The bank connection feature is actually what we started with initially, that was our entire product (early months). It's the ultimate way of finding the best credit cards because we are able to match your exact spending habits using past year's transactions from your existing credit cards and then apply those transactions to every single credit card in Canada.
It's a way to test every credit card with your transactions and see how the rewards stack. The adoption is pretty decent for what it is, although not many people are comfortable connecting their bank/credit cards since we don't have open banking and of course with Canada being far from it, we also came up with the usual "input your spending estimate" method. Bank connections are also not 100% reliable without open banking so there are often random connection failures.
What’s your traffic mix and how are you planning on growing traffic over then next 12 months through the next round of Google updates?
We try not to rely on Google traffic growth as much and let it come naturally as we build good content. We also have a strong referral program for our users.
My advice here is to diversify away from one specific channel.
Is there a difference between all the networks aside from offers? What do you look for?
Different networks differ mostly in offers, however, some networks allow you to have a direct relationship with the advertiser and have less of a middleman managing both ends attitude.
I prefer having direct relationships with advertisers as things can move more efficiently. Both models work fine as long as there's clear and consistent communication between all parties involved without long delays.
What do you look for in a good affiliate manager?
A good affiliate manager should be on top of things at all time, understand key metrics involved in growth and conversions, and especially in finance to ensure compliance.
What’s next for FinlyWealth?
More credit card partnerships and a focus on expanding the cashback program for travel and shopping.
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🍸Conferences
Upcoming conferences worth checking out:
Affiliate World Dubai - February 26-27, 2025 | Dubai, UAE
Often touted as the best international show for affiliate marketers.
Automotive Finance Canada - February 11th, 2025 | International AutoShow Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building
Hosted by the CLA, if you want to speak with car dealers and auto lenders about leads, this is the show to go to.
💼 Affiliate Marketing Jobs
With the industry reeling and many people looking for work, I launched a job board specifically for affiliate marketing roles in Canada.
See roles from PartnerStack, Creative Clicks, YepAds and 20+ others.
Check it out 👉 affiliate-marketing-jobs.com