Key Takeaways

• • Leverage strategic partnerships to accelerate growth in competitive markets. Team up with established brands that already have loyal customers to gain low-cost, high-quality users without building your own audience from scratch.

• • Build an omnichannel marketing engine grounded in data and incrementality. Diversify your acquisition channels (digital, direct mail, affiliates, etc.) and rigorously measure the cost and incremental lift of each to optimize your marketing mix.

• • Prioritize customer lifetime value through repeat engagement. Don’t treat customers as one-and-done—focus on retention, upsells, and repeat usage to maximize long-term value and profitability.

• • Embed compliance into every function and leverage AI as a watchdog. Ensure every team member takes ownership of regulatory compliance from day one, and use advanced tools to monitor algorithms for unintended bias or risk.

• • Forge fintech–bank collaborations to scale innovation and trust. Combine fintech agility with institutional scale, instead of trying to reinvent everything in-house.

Leverage Strategic Brand Partnerships to Accelerate Growth

Early in his career, Matt Tomko learned how a small fintech can punch above its weight by partnering with bigger brands. He recounted launching the startup Concerto in a market dominated by megabanks – a major challenge without a substantial marketing budget. The solution? Co-branding with organizations that already had a devoted customer base. By aligning with recognizable partners, Concerto could acquire users more cheaply and build a high-performing portfolio quickly. Tomko describes this tactic as an “early stage hack” that allowed a newcomer to gain traction in a space where customer acquisition normally has a long, costly payback period.

“We really leaned into partnering with established brands that have recognition in a loyal customer base, and by marketing to that captive base in a really unique sort of way, we were able to acquire customers less expensively and that resulted in assets that performed better – higher loyalty, better performance overall.”

For instance, Concerto teamed up with the MLB’s Philadelphia Phillies to launch a co-branded rewards Mastercard, giving the startup access to a passionate fan base without massive advertising spend. More broadly, co-branded credit card programs are on the rise because they let brands tap into each other’s strengths: one brings the audience and the other provides the financial product. The result is a win-win – the fintech gains trust and users from the partner’s community, and the partner deepens customer loyalty with a new offering.

Building on Tomko’s point, partnership marketing is often just the beginning. The next challenge is to take the learnings from that initial, high-quality user base and find “lookalike” audiences at scale across the open web. This often requires programmatic advertising solutions that can analyze user behavior to pinpoint new, high-intent customers with precision, moving beyond a single partner’s ecosystem.

Build an Omnichannel Marketing Engine Grounded in Data

When Tomko transitioned to Happy Money, he found a very different scenario: an established lending product and new funding deals that demanded rapid growth. To meet this demand, his team moved beyond the few digital channels they had been using and reopened the full marketing playbook, from affiliates to direct mail. The key, Tomko notes, is rebuilding an omnichannel acquisition strategy in a smart way. That means instrumenting every channel with analytics, understanding the cost per acquisition (CPA) in each, and measuring how channels interact so you spend on the ones that truly add incremental growth. Even “old school” tactics are evaluated with fresh eyes and data-driven rigor. made in UGC has to stand up to rigorous compliance standards. If an influencer makes a claim that your legal and compliance doesn’t approve, it can tank the collaboration.

“We’re going back into a lot of channels that we haven’t been in for a long time… mail and email… [We’re trying] to understand the individual cost of acquisition… how [channels] interplay, and as we’re rebuilding that omnichannel marketing, are we measuring the incrementality of each channel against each other?”

Tomko calls direct mail “the old dinosaur that continues to produce,” and he leverages tools like Mintel Comperemedia to compare creatives and optimize targeting in that channel. In fact, many fintech companies are rediscovering direct mail as a viable acquisition channel. Recent research shows fintech lenders have dominated personal loan mail offers in the past few years – accounting for 70–85% of direct mail volume since 2018. But it’s critical to mix mailers into a multi-channel effort, complementing digital ads to capture consumers wherever they are. By diversifying into multiple channels (search, social, affiliates, email, mail, etc.) and continuously testing their performance, fintech marketers can uncover pockets of ROI that competitors overlook. The winners are those who rigorously measure, compare, and optimize each slice of the marketing mix for maximum efficiency.

This highlights a crucial challenge that many fintech marketers face. Executing this level of optimization manually across multiple channels is nearly impossible. This is why many leading fintechs now rely on unified growth platforms that use AI to automate budget allocation and bidding, shifting spend towards the channels that provide true, measurable incremental lift.

Prioritize Customer Lifetime Value Through Repeat Engagement

Tomko also urges fintech leaders to rethink the “one and done” mindset. At Happy Money, the mission is to help consumers achieve their financial goals – and they recognize that customers may need ongoing support and multiple loans over time. Rather than assuming a person who takes a loan will never need another, Tomko emphasizes developing lifetime value models and programs to retain and re-engage customers. By offering second loans or additional products to qualified borrowers, a fintech can both improve the customer’s financial health and extend the revenue relationship beyond a single transaction

“Historically Happy Money had a very utopian view – if you get our [Payoff LoanTM] product once, you’re going to be out of debt and in a better place. I think the reality is, if you look at customer behavior… sometimes customers need to consolidate multiple times to maintain their personal balance sheets. So looking at lifetime value, how can we do second loans and things like that, I think is going to be important as we grow.”

Focusing on existing customers is not just good for users, it’s good business. Retention has a powerful compound effect. Research by Bain & Company famously showed that increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Many banks introduce a low-barrier product (like a free credit score tool or savings app) and later upsell loans, credit cards, or investment accounts once trust is established. The strategic point is clear: Don’t let the customer journey end at onboarding. Keep providing value through education, new features, loyalty perks, or tailored offers so that customers stay with you and contribute to your growth for the long haul.

Tomko’s focus on LTV is a critical strategic shift. On a technical level, this means moving beyond simple acquisition metrics. The most sophisticated marketing teams today use growth engines capable of optimizing campaigns directly for long-term LTV or return on ad spend (ROAS). This ensures that ad spend is aligned with the core business goal: acquiring the most profitable users, not just the cheapest ones.

Embed Compliance into Every Function and Leverage AI as a Watchdog

Having started his career in credit risk and collections, Tomko learned early that if you don’t bake regulatory thinking into product, marketing, and operations from day one, you’ll eventually hit costly pitfalls. This is especially vital for smaller organizations that may not have multiple lines of defense. Tomko suggests hiring experienced people and cultivating a mindset where each department asks, “Is this compliant?” as automatically as they’d ask, “Does this make money?” 

Today, that vigilance must extend to new frontiers like AI and machine learning. As fintechs embrace AI models for underwriting, marketing, and more, they face a challenge: these systems can be “black boxes” whose decisions are hard to explain. Tomko notes that innovation is moving faster than ever, so companies need to deploy monitoring tools to ensure algorithms aren’t inadvertently creating biases or unfair outcomes. In fact, he believes AI itself can be turned into a tool for compliance – an automated watchdog that scans for anomalous patterns.

“Direct mail was a quarterly initiative for us because it’s one of the most measurable forms of advertising. We could run holdout tests and measure incremental lift effectively. Traditional TV still works. Radio, especially on a local and regional level, can be incredibly effective. The newer audio platforms out there, like streaming audio, also work well when targeted correctly.”

Unlike digital ads that rely on immediate click-through rates, traditional channels create a sustained presence in consumers’ minds. Combining traditional advertising with digital tracking tools like unique call tracking numbers or QR codes helps marketers measure impact more effectively.

Another advantage of traditional media is its ability to reach demographics that are less engaged online. Older consumers, for example, may be more likely to respond to direct mail than social media ads. By balancing digital and traditional media, marketers can create multi-channel campaigns that reinforce messaging and improve overall effectiveness.

Forge Fintech–Bank Collaborations to Scale Innovation and Trust

As a final insight, Tomko points out a trend that’s reshaping the industry: fintechs and traditional financial institutions working together. Large banks and credit unions excel at stability, compliance, and scale, but they often struggle to innovate quickly, especially with new digital experiences. Fintechs are the opposite: agile, tech-savvy, and willing to break the mold, yet they lack the massive customer bases and regulatory clout of incumbents. Rather than viewing each other as adversaries, Tomko suggests partnerships or even acquisitions can create value for both sides. A bank can plug in a fintech’s cutting-edge platform to delight its customers, and the fintech can gain broader distribution and credibility by aligning with a trusted institution. We’re already seeing this dynamic play out in the market, and Tomko expects it to accelerate as the pace of change increases.

“At the end of the day, I think large banks and credit unions should probably look to partner with fintechs. Whether that be in a traditional partnership or an acquisition, they should look to what’s being developed on the fintech side – not necessarily try to build it themselves – and ultimately understand ways they can leverage tools developed in the smaller, nimble organizations to enhance their customer experience.”

We’ve seen numerous fintech–bank alliances recently. For example, Revolut, a UK-based fintech, partnered with Cross River Bank in the U.S. to launch consumer personal loans, marrying Revolut’s digital app and user base with Cross River’s lending license and infrastructure. Happy Money also has a long history of partnering with credit unions – delivering high-performing personal loan assets and balance sheet diversification at scale – and recently announced a private credit partnership to expand marketing reach and serve an even broader range of consumers seeking relief from high-interest credit card debt. For fintech marketers, working with a bank can also mean access to new channels and audiences, similar to brand partnerships – for instance, a community bank might promote a fintech app to its local customers, or a large bank might white-label a fintech’s product under its own brand. The trust that consumers have in established institutions can transfer to the fintech product through these collaborations.

Turning Insight into Action

Matt Tomko’s playbook comes down to a blend of strategic boldness and prudent oversight. Whether it’s leveraging partnerships, crunching the data on every channel, nurturing customers for the long haul, or embedding compliance into your DNA, the common thread is disciplined growth. The key for fintech professionals is to ask, “How can we apply these principles in our organization?” Small, strategic moves today can set up huge advantages tomorrow.

Fuel Your Next Stage of Growth

You don’t have to navigate these challenges alone. At LifeStreet, we help growth teams scale responsibly. With our Nero platform, brands get precise targeting, transparent bidding, and the ability to optimize for lifetime value. If you’re building a fintech lead gen strategy grounded in these principles, we’d love to collaborate. Get in touch today to learn more.