Why is such a huge chunk of traffic arbitrage made up of grey niches — gambling, crypto, nutra, dating, adult? The answer is pretty obvious. There’s a ton of money in those verticals. Massive demand, big ticket sizes, and fat margins make it possible to hand more dollars to the partner who brought in the customer. But there’s one niche that doesn’t fall short on demand, ticket size, or margins. And yet it’s as white and fluffy as they come. That’s the finance vertical.
If it’s all so great, why hasn’t everyone switched to running traffic to business-account and card-issuing offers by now? Why does the finance vertical get so much less airtime than gambling, crypto, nutra, and the rest of that unholy bunch? Because there’s one major drawback — and it’s the reason you’re unlikely to ever decide to open an affiliate network in this vertical.
The Finance Vertical’s Biggest Pain: Onboarding Advertisers
Finding them is trivial. In a couple of minutes you can find the websites of every bank and microfinance lender (MFI), and three hundred seconds later you’ll have the contacts for their partnerships department. The legal side of onboarding can be slightly tedious, but at least it’s all above board, with signed contracts whose terms will actually be honored.
The main drawback — the reason finance is less popular in traffic arbitrage than it could be — is how technically backward the bank advertisers are. In Western markets, it’s pitch-black darkness straight out of the 1950s. In Russia and the CIS, where fintech is ahead of the rest of the planet, things are a bit better, but still awful.
There are three main problems:
- Almost no bank has a decent API for working with leads. In theory they exist, but they’re built not for handling leads but for receiving full-blown applications from agents. Remember the sweet girls at electronics stores offering you a loan? Those are the finance vertical’s real “affiliates.”
- Leads have to be sent to the bank’s own landing page to submit an application. Host the landing page yourself, and user trust drops sharply. And if an affiliate works with the bank’s landing page through an affiliate network, they need a tracking link. That piece of space-age technology still hasn’t been properly mastered by a single bank. Not even T-Bank (formerly Tinkoff).
- To create an application, the lead has to hand over a mountain of information about themselves. First name, last name, taxpayer ID, passport number, who issued it and when, a scan of the passport as an image file, registered address, a complete blood count, a photo of their cat, and the patronymic of their very first homeroom teacher.
So we end up with a situation where there’s no API, no tracking, no clear way to hand over leads — and even less of one to get their statuses back.
How do the affiliate networks currently walking this earth deal with all this? Every case is different. But in most scenarios, everything runs on brutal kludges with astronomical traffic losses.
As for the advertisers that are MFIs, things look a bit better there. These guys need customers a whole lot more, and they’re far less inert and bureaucratic. So most finance offers actually come from microfinance lenders — and working with them is almost as easy as working with gambling advertisers.
Why Affiliates Love the Finance Vertical and Hunt for Good Affiliate Networks in This Niche
It wouldn’t be fair to give so much attention to the drawback, huge as it is, while skipping right past the advantages. Lots of people love running traffic to finance. Which means demand for offers is high, and the volumes being poured are very respectable. Any network that has cracked the integration and stocked up on enough offers won’t be hurting for cash flow.
There are three advantages, and every one of them matters:
- A white vertical.
- High payouts.
- The ability to run brokerage traffic.
The first two are self-explanatory; the third deserves a closer look. When you run traffic to the finance vertical, you can send a single lead to a whole bunch of offers at once. In other niches that’s forbidden — the advertisers will find out and simply stop working with you.
An application for, say, a microloan can go to several lenders at the same time. Which is why affiliates adore building showcase sites (think loan comparison pages) and promoting them through SEO.
By the way, AlterCPA Pro has offer sets built for exactly this kind of traffic. Offers on the same topic with an identical application form — say, “Bank Credit Cards” or “Business Accounts at Russian Banks” — are grouped into a set. The affiliate picks the set they need, fills out a single form, and the application goes out to every offer in that set at once.
Conclusion
Opening an affiliate network in the finance vertical is a job for the very strong and the very self-assured. How do you pull it off? Completely unclear. Almost nobody manages. But if you get past the integration, every other problem shrinks to a minimum. A white vertical, regulated, with contracts, with plenty of affiliates and high payouts. Everything’s wonderful. Provided you manage to properly hook up the offers worth having.