What Gets Your Fintech Ignored by Comparison Sites | Zak Ali, General Manager, US at Finder

So it's really hard for me not to admire what Credit Karma is doing.

I think they're quite immune to a lot of what's going on right now because they have such an owned audience.

Whereas I think many of us in this space just stopped the free traffic faucet was just going to go on forever and Nothing would ever change.

And, you know, you can see how we're all kind of paying for it now in terms of like having to adapt, having to build more owned audiences.

I think I had seen a study.

I think this study actually came from one of Credit Karma's decks that like 50% of millennials have Credit Karma in the US, which is just like an absurd number because everyone has their app and who hasn't heard of them and who doesn't use them to check their credit score? So I really admire what they've done with the owned audience, the foresight to want to actually have people in their own ecosystem Instead of relying so heavily on paid or organic traffic and SEO and whatnot, they actually just have direct traffic.

I think in that same deck, it's like direct app traffic is their biggest

traffic

source.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I'm not super deep in the affiliate space, so I'm not super familiar.

What have they done to build that own audience? What is it that they've done that maybe others in the space haven't done to do that?

So their relationship with their user is less transactional.

They've built a product that can get you to come back in and again and again, right? They show your credit score.

You can connect your accounts to see what whole net worth is, track your spending habits.

They built all the infrastructure around the affiliate to keep the user coming back in so that when that user is finally ready to take out a credit card or car insurance or mortgage, they're already in the app and they're in an app with a brand that they trust.

Yeah.

So is that something that you're trying to develop? How are you now trying to build that owned media side of things?

So at Finder, we're offering something called Finder Rewards, which we actually take a percentage of the commission we build, we're making from the partner, and we're actually giving that back to the user so that they're getting paid, which is a pretty novel concept.

No one's really done that in strictly a financial sense.

There's Rakuten and there's Groupon and all that, and they do it on the whole landscape of all products, but finders really dialed in on the financial products and we're offering pretty chunky rules.

You know, some of them are 300, 400.

I think the lowest we've had was $50, but that was like one, most of them are above a hundred dollars.

So it's a pretty, you know, users are getting money out of it.

That, that kind of feeds into our ethos of trying to help people win at money and building our membership so that we can market to them on email and, and sort of give them a reason to want to come back to finder.