Practice · Fintech & payments
Compliance is not the obstacle. It's the first constraint.
Financial services is the category where the ads have to clear verification, the copy has to clear legal, and the tracking has to not leak anything. Plan for that and it is workable. Discover it in week three and the launch slips a month.
- Accounts run
- 11
- Longest relationship
- 63 months
- Segments
- Payments · trading · crypto
- Tracking
- Server-side, hashed
Verification comes before everything
Google requires financial-services verification in a growing list of countries, and it takes weeks. Meta has its own restrictions by product type and market. Neither is difficult, but both are sequential – you cannot compress them, and no amount of budget makes them faster.
So the first thing we do on a fintech account is map which verifications are needed for which markets and start them, in parallel with everything else. It is the single most common cause of a delayed launch in this category and it is entirely avoidable.
Optimising for approved customers, not applications
In lending, brokerage and banking, a large share of applicants never pass underwriting. If your campaigns optimise towards application submitted, they will find you the audience most likely to apply – which is frequently the audience least likely to be approved.
The correction is to feed the approval event, and ideally the first transaction, back to the platforms as offline conversions. Volume drops, cost per application rises, and cost per approved customer falls. That last number is the only one that pays anyone's salary.
Tracking without leaking
Fintech conversion data is exactly the data you must not send to an ad platform. The workable answer is server-side: events fired from your backend, identifiers hashed, and an explicit allowlist of fields so nothing sensitive can leave by accident. Both Enhanced Conversions and the Conversions API are built for hashed identifiers, so this is a configuration discipline rather than a compromise.
We document what is sent, field by field, so your compliance team can review it rather than take our word for it.
Creative that survives review
Most rejections in this category are predictable: implied guaranteed returns, urgency language around money, comparative claims without substantiation, anything that reads as advice. Knowing which phrasings trigger which review saves multiple cycles per launch, and cycles are the expensive part.
Questions people actually ask
- Can you get ads approved in financial services?
- Usually, with the right verification in place before launch. Google requires financial-services verification in a growing list of countries and it takes weeks, not days. The most common reason a fintech launch slips is that nobody started verification early enough.
- What about crypto?
- Depends entirely on the product and the market. Exchanges and wallets face country-by-country restrictions and separate certification requirements on both Google and Meta. We have worked in the category and we will tell you honestly what is reachable before you sign anything.
- How do you track conversions without leaking personal data?
- Server-side, with hashing and strict field control, so no account numbers, balances or identifiers ever reach an ad platform. Enhanced Conversions and the Conversions API both work on hashed identifiers by design, which makes this a configuration problem rather than a trade-off.
- The approval funnel rejects most applicants. Does that break bidding?
- It breaks bidding that optimises towards applications. The fix is to feed approval and first-transaction events back as offline conversions, so the platform learns which traffic passes underwriting instead of which traffic fills in forms.
- How long is the ramp?
- Longer than other categories. Verification, compliance review of ad copy, and landing pages that legal has actually signed off usually add three to four weeks before the first impression. We plan for it rather than discovering it.
- Do you write the compliant ad copy?
- We write it and your compliance team approves it. What we bring is knowing which claims trigger a rejection before you submit, which saves several review cycles on every launch.
Free
Get the fintech account audit
Start with the audit.
We go through your accounts, tracking and funnel, then send back what we would change and in what order. About five working days, no charge, no call required to get it.