Finance
You may be paying for applications you are not allowed to approve.
Acquisition for regulated firms, where every advert is itself a regulated document.
-22%
Lower cost per funded account
The challenge
Two stages stand between your media spend and your revenue, and marketing controls neither of them.
The first is underwriting. A significant share of the applications you pay for will be rejected, and rejection rates vary considerably by source. That makes a blended cost per application fundamentally misleading: the campaigns delivering the cheapest applications often deliver the most rejections. Worse still, the audience most drawn to fast-and-easy messaging tends to lean towards exactly the applicants your credit team is there to turn down. Optimising for application volume can erode contribution margin while every marketing metric looks better.
The second is that your advert is more than an advert. In most markets a financial promotion is a regulated communication: approved before release by someone accountable for it, stored with version history for a set retention period, and carrying the risk warnings and representative examples local rules require. Liability often extends to your affiliates and introducers too. Details vary by jurisdiction, and selling in several means complying with several rulebooks at once. What stays the same is the nature of the problem — and the cost of an unapproved advert going live.
Key factors
What we plan for
Measure against funded accounts
At the outset we secure access to decision-level outcomes and feed them back into the bidding platforms, so optimisation targets funded accounts and active customers rather than submitted applications. We also build a bridge report showing cost per application, cost per approved application and cost per funded account by campaign and risk band, so the differences are visible instead of averaged out.
Assume adverse selection until proven otherwise
We examine rejection rates and early arrears by acquisition source, not just conversion rate. When a source shows a clearly worse risk profile, the answer is a bid or budget change, not new creative. This is the side of financial services acquisition most media agencies never see, because the data sits with the risk team rather than marketing.
Approve every combination, not just the ad
Responsive search assets, Performance Max asset generation, dynamic text and automated headlines all assemble ads that no compliance officer has reviewed. Promotion rules in most markets demand approved copy and specific risk wording, which conflicts with formats that build headlines on the fly. In a regulated account that is a real exposure, not a technicality. We either pre-approve the full set of combinations, pin assets, or switch the feature off — and we make that decision openly with your compliance team rather than leaving defaults on and hoping for the best.
Create a pre-approved content library
The way to move quickly within a review process is to stop treating every campaign as a fresh approval. We build an approved library of copy blocks, risk wording, representative examples and imagery, with a market-specific layer wherever you operate under more than one regime — wording approved in one market rarely passes unchanged in another, and finding that out at launch is costly. Building a campaign then means recombining approved elements, and approvals shift from every launch to a periodic library review.
Services
Services we deliver here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping managed for margin, not platform-reported ROAS.
Affiliate Marketing
Partner programmes restructured around incremental sales rather than last-click credit.
Performance Marketing
Budget allocated across channels by measured contribution, not by what each platform claims.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to a payback period, with media purchased to match.
Lead Generation
Optimised for pipeline and closed revenue, not form submissions.
Campaign Management
Profit-focused campaign planning, pacing and reviews run as a steady routine.
Common questions
Our compliance review slows everything down. Can you speed it up?
Not by pushing your compliance team, which is the usual — and unhelpful — advice. The improvement comes from changing what needs reviewing. With a pre-approved content library, most campaigns are built from approved components and only genuinely new claims go through review. That usually shifts the bottleneck from every launch to an occasional library update.
Can you still use Performance Max and responsive search ads?
Sometimes, with conditions. These formats create ad combinations automatically, and each one is arguably a promotion no one approved. Depending on your risk tolerance, we pin assets to lock the output, pre-approve every permutation, or advise against the format. It is a compliance choice with a performance cost, and it should be made deliberately rather than inherited from a default.
We operate under another firm’s authorisation instead of our own. Does that change anything?
Yes — it changes who can approve what, and it is worth clarifying early. When you operate under another firm’s licence or permissions, that firm’s scope and sign-off process usually carry more weight than expected: what can be claimed, who approves it and how long records must be retained. We work within whatever arrangement is in place. We simply need it documented at the outset rather than discovered when an asset gets stuck.
Begin with an audit.
The audit has a clear scope and a clear output, and it stands on its own — no obligation to continue. If it shows your current setup is working well, that is a perfectly valid result and we will tell you so.