Despite or perhaps because of the lucrative potential, fintech firms face some of the toughest fights for customer attention, media praise and investor funds. Because of this, there is a lot that marketers and executives can learn from taking a closer look at some of the most dynamic fintech firms and analyzing the various performance factors of their websites.
Some data assembled by ICS-digital team revealed some interesting insights on 13 fintech leaders, comparing their investment to the resulting site performance with their overall website functionality.
One would assume that an immediately clear indicator of site performance is level of funding for the company. The top funded companies of the 13 are Credit Karma ($869M), Chime ($805M), Affirm ($800M); these are followed by Betterment ($275), Acorns ($257M), MoneyLion ($207M); the bottom 3 in terms of funding are Nova Credit ($65M), Lively ($42M), Kindur ($11M).
Now let’s look at the performance of companies compared to their funding.
The companies were ranked on the following factors:
- Brand Category Funding Domain Monthly Site Visits
- User Experience, Pages Per Visit and Visit Duration
- Site Speed and UX
- Off-site SEO
Overall, the top 5 unicorns were Credit Karma (who netted top 3 within all categories), Affirm and Acorns. As far as site visits were concerned, level of funding was quite reflective of number of site visits (with exceptions being Tala and Chime who performed poorly despite higher funding). With regard to user experience, Tala and Credit Karma rank the highest with an average of 5.45 and 4.72 pages per visit (respectively); average visit durations of 560 and 323 seconds. Further query into these statistics are required though as they do not indicate that profitable actions are taken despite positive number of visits and view time. Perhaps the length of time indicates that users are not easily accessing information they’re seeking. At the bottom of user experience are iCapital Network and Kindur which reflects level of investment.
Data on site speed and the amount going on each site reveals scope for improvement. Affirm, Tala and MoneyLion take over 20 seconds to become fully interactive on mobile based on the test by ICS. This is significantly longer than the sub-3 target advised by Google. For brands seeking to be more competitive in this category to earn rankings and convert traffic, improving site speed should be a goal. Whilst SEO can be a bit of a moving target, a fairly solid ranking factor is number of quality backlinks. Affirm, Credit Karma and Acorns top this list, with Kindur, Lively and, iCapital bringing in the rear. The level of investment is reflected in this performance, and perhaps companies could invest more in their content links to improve SEO.
In summary, the level of investment often indicates the performance of a website. For the brands that receive more niche funding, there is much to be gleaned from looking at the digital strategies of unicorns and wannabe unicorns. Comparing the site factors that have been analysed in this article can help reveal ways to establish a competitive advantage.
