In 2021, the global trend toward mobile continued, marking yet another transformative year for the fast-moving world of app marketing, particularly in fintech.

Adjust’s Mobile App Trends report highlighted that banking app revenue reached $6.8 billion last year — an 88% increase on 2020 — and that over half of purchases (52%) were made with a digital wallet in 2021. And Adjust’s own data shows downloads of global finance apps increased 19% in 2021 compared to 2020.

India, the third largest fintech market in the world,  and Southeast Asia, too, are witnessing skyrocketing growth in fintech app installs. The Adjust and MAAS  Decrypting the fintech gold rush in the new normal report finds that installs in the INSEA region increased 41% in 2021, with.

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Indians registering  the highest minutes in-app per session at 17 minutes and 38 seconds. Further predictions indicate India’s fintech market growth to be between USD150 to USD 160 billion by 2025.

As the fintech market continues its upward trajectory, there are huge opportunities in the space for mobile app developers and advertisers alike.

Embracing user privacy

iOS 14.5 and Apple’s AppTracking Transparency (ATT) framework 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%,  Adjust’s  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%, changes to data privacy have reinforced the need for marketers in fintech to extract value from their own first- party data. Therefore, app marketers in the fintech realm should implement robust opt-in strategies that build trust and communicate the benefits of targeted advertising to users.

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In doing so, we can expect to see continued acceleration in ATT opt-in rates for the fintech vertical as more users understand the value of receiving personalised advertisements.

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%.

Maintaining 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%.

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Globally, the share of paid installs relative to organic installs in the fintech vertical grew from the beginning of 2020 until midway through 2021. Starting at 0.11 and growing to 0.15, 2021 ended with a ratio of 0.14.

Banking’s ratio dropped consistently, however — starting at 0.12 and finishing at 0.07 — showing that  increased need and interest in banking apps drove users to seek the apps out themselves.

With more users than ever before flocking 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 to 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.

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Increasing 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.

We discovered that this high level of engagement is also reflected in the length of sessions by users in each subvertical, with the most significant growth seen among crypto apps. Session lengths in crypto and stock trading are consistently longer than those in banking and payment, which aligns with the business models of each category.

While a payment app might only be needed for a number of seconds for a task to be fulfilled, users buying and selling stocks or cryptocurrencies likely need to spend much longer to complete actions.

According to our report, in-app revenue for fintech apps is also increasing steadily, showing consistent growth from January 2020 through to December 2021.

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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.

What 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 sub-verticals, it is clear that the global fintech app ecosystem is thriving, and we can expect to see this growth from this space continue.

For mobile app marketers in the fintech space, focusing on getting the opt-in is crucial. Pushing this rate up by even a couple of percentage points can prove invaluable when it comes to building out conversion value models and predictive strategies for the aggregated SKAdNetwork data set.

Focusing on finding  high-value users is key, along with building retention strategies that keep them sticking around. The best way to achieve this perfect balance is to improve the accuracy of your campaigns and to create a user experience that is perfectly optimized to your specific audience segments. Drilling down into your data to determine the key touch points along the user journey is how you’ll achieve this — great data makes for great insights.

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