Bangalore: AppsFlyer, the global marketing measurement leader, today released its 2021 edition of The State of Finance App Marketing. Overall, FinTech apps are in high demand, experiencing a 132% leap globally in downloads, and a 26% YoY growth (2020 vs. 2019) in India alone. The pandemic significantly impacted the FinTech industry in India, which saw a decline of 31% owing to the first lockdown but experienced a resurgence and rapid growth of 35% in Q4 2020. More than 80% of Finance app installs in India were for financial services, as the market continues to be dominated by wallet apps and other services. Investment apps also took a fair pair of the pie due to an increase in installs.
Globally, the uptick in FinTech adoption was led by the developing nations- India, Brazil, and Indonesia, which emerged as the mega markets contributing to almost half of the global number of downloads. These countries along with India, have a massive number of people that are either unbanked or underbanked. The average number of downloads in developing markets was observed as 70% higher than the average in developed markets.
Aditya Maheshwari, Head of Customer Success, AppsFlyer India, “2020 has been a game-changer in India’s FinTech (app) adoption. Our State of the Finance App Marketing report reveals that the marketing demand for Fintech apps continues to rise despite the pandemic. As India’s overall install trend demonstrated, Q2 2020 was impacted by the pandemic with a 51% decrease in comparison to Q1 2020, followed by a 3.3x surge until Q1 2021 as apps returned to aggressively market their products and services. This just further galvanizes India’s leadership in the global fintech app space.”
The global surge in demand for FinTech apps led marketers to invest nearly $3 billion to acquire new users in 2020. India alone commanded over $146 million of the total worldwide budgets.
Key India insights:
- Increase in the registration rate: Overall 41% of FinTech app installers in India registered within the first 30 days post-install, driven by lending apps which were the highest at 44%.
- Reliance on marketing: FinTech apps in APAC mainly rely on marketing to drive demand, particularly in India and Southeast Asian markets with overall investment rates in these markets reaching 65%.
- Rising media costs lead to rising in spend in India: India saw a 42% drop in the average app install ad spend per app between Q1 2020 to Q3 2020 due to the first wave of COVID-19.
- Due to the festive season, consumers spent more on e-commerce apps hence, the install ad spend in FinTech apps saw a decline in Q3. After the drop, budgets got revived and increased by 2x between Q3 2020 to Q1 2021, owing to the rise in the cost of media.
- Fraud still a concern: In India, the share of fraudulent installs remained mostly the same despite a drop in Q2 2020. Particularly for loan apps, the fraud rate was high in Q1 2021 at 67% whereas overall it touched 40% in the same quarter.
Conclusion
The report provides three key areas that FinTech app marketers need to focus on.
- A judicious mix of different marketing activities to optimize spend, follow the rising Click Per Install trend, and efficient allocation of budget for user acquisition to meet new demand, as well as explore affordable remarketing campaigns to achieve top-of-mind brand recall.
- Based on the insight that 50%- 60% of users who register during the first 30 days post-install do so on the first day, marketers need to closely monitor their registration funnel’s performance and optimize to shorten the time from install to registration.
- Despite the considerable drop in app install fraud rates, fraudsters are still ahead of the game. Therefore, it is vital for marketers to be equipped with the latest fraud prevention tools.
The State of Finance App Marketing 2021 from AppsFlyer is an anonymous aggregate of proprietary APAC data collected from 2.7 billion finance app installs. Of this, 600 million non-organic installs and data from 1230 apps were analyzed.
The State of Finance App Marketing is available here.
