Why take a partner-first approach to your affiliate marketing if you’re a financial services firm

Here’s why your current affiliate marketing model can backfire in the long term. 

Partner relationships offer more than mere link placements

Your initial goal was to get placements in top publications, like NerdWallet and Bankrate, so you could build credibility in a competitive market. 

But once you’ve ticked that box, where do you go from there?

We see many affiliate partnerships remain stuck because there’s no actual relationship in place. Once your marketing team or agency negotiates the deal and places a link, more often than not we see that’s where the relationship building stops.

Affiliate marketing is much more than a campaign or link placement. 

Your publishers are the direct line of sight to your customers. They want to serve their audiences well—so bringing them the best products can equally incent them. While they’ll use hard factors like customer intent (click-through rates), conversion rates, and earnings per click metrics, they also value transparency and collaboration—that’s where the real magic happens.

So, if you’re not asking partners for their feedback, from audience insights to your product’s competitiveness, you’re leaving money on the table. 

And if you’re not sharing your own customer acquisition data or long-term business goals with your publishers, they can’t help you optimize campaigns, develop new products, or tap into new markets. 

Not investing the energy in establishing a rapport with your publishers and sharing insights is a lost opportunity to optimize campaign performance and reach your program’s full potential.

Hyper focusing on top publishers means you’ll overlook significant growth opportunities with smaller publishers

Both your marketing team and agency will naturally want to focus on bigger publishers with a proven pipeline generation. This is a classic example of the 80/20 rule at work, where 20% of your program partners will account for 80% of your results.  

We know the reality in affiliate marketing is actually more like the 95/5 rule, where you rely on a few heavy-hitters to carry your entire program and generate the majority of net new customers. 

But this approach ignores the untapped potential in smaller, niche publishers among your longtail affiliates. You never know where you’re going to find a diamond in the rough that can be an excellent partner. For example, a niche publisher could be more open to exploring new strategies or testing new products with you, so you can reach an underserved audience that other brands may be ignoring.  

Not diversifying your mix of publishers also makes your program vulnerable to sudden changes.

Learn how to optimize your partner program in this guide

Results aren’t always sustainable, especially during unexpected business or market shifts

The flaws of a partner program built on a handful of partners and a link-placement approach become clear as soon as you hit a bump in the road. 

What happens when you experience an unexpected budget cut? You suddenly need to have a real conversation with your partners. But here’s the risk—when you inform top partners they need to deliver the same amount of volume at less cost, they may respond it’s not possible with a lower CPA or budget. 

And the lack of a diversified mix of publishers means you have no one else to turn to when you need more flexibility to match your new budget. 

Even economic disruptions can put a transactional approach to the test. During Covid-19, we saw many financial firms and agencies fail to respond proactively to the sudden market changes. 

The approval rates for banking products such as loans and credit cards dropped from 60% to 10% because of more restrictive criteria. This meant a bank’s same marketing activities were bringing in only a fifth of the volume compared to pre-Covid levels. Many times, banks wanted to turn the affiliate channel completely off.

Shutting down your affiliate channel comes with clear short-term losses. But it also affects your long-term strategy. Publishers may no longer trust or prioritize companies or agencies that quickly cut ties at the first sign of difficulty, without asking a publisher if they have solutions or ideas to move forward. This can make it difficult to gain that trust again when market conditions return stable. 

It takes effort to keep your programs fresh

Many programs run on autopilot because they’re seeing the same results year after year. So when you start a conversation about revitalizing your affiliate marketing, your marketing team or agency may not have new ideas to optimize campaigns and strategies that seem to be working fine. Why?

Because investing in relationships, building trust, and leveraging partner insights to optimize programs takes time and effort. Going that extra mile is much more labor intensive than just getting placements. And your partnership model doesn’t foresee investing more resources to fix a program that isn’t broken. 

Also, if you’re working with an agency, the scale at which some agencies operate doesn’t enable them to specialize in financial services or take the time to gather insights from publishers to better guide your campaigns or bring you new initiatives. 

Let’s say you want to promote a new checking account product through your affiliate program. But your affiliates aren’t keen on it. Your marketing team or agency might not press the matter or ask for alternative solutions. They’ll probably think it’s not possible to promote that product right now and to try at a later date. 

When your agency or marketing teams don’t investigate different possibilities, you won’t uncover solutions that already exist to drive consistent growth in your customer acquisition numbers.

Get the latest industry and publisher insights with 50+ affiliate marketing statisitcs for 2025

We know from experience as an affiliate management agency that a win-win-win opportunity is within everyone’s reach:

• Publishers can support firms by recommending the best products to their audience.
• Companies can generate high-quality leads while building their financial brand’s credibility via reliable sources.
• Customers can easily find the financial products that fit their needs through trustworthy outlets. 

Only a publisher-first approach to affiliate marketing can achieve this. 

Here’s how a partner-first affiliate marketing model can take your program to the next level. 

Want to learn more about our philosophy and how Fintel Connect is improving affiliate marketing for financial institutions? Read our founding story. 

A partner-first model will use publishers’ direct audience insights to breathe new life into your program

In our experience, publishers can be more than a repository for links when both you and your publishers exchange both quantitative and qualitative data. 

A partner-first model will establish connections with publishers who deeply understand the audiences that financial institutions are trying to reach. Their insights include buyer intent, product trends, and your competition, all of which can help you optimize your messaging and campaigns to communicate your financial product’s value proposition more effectively. 

But remember they’re doing business just like you, which means the same metrics that motivate you will go a long way to motivate them. So understand which metrics they need and how to win against your competitors. 

We’ve found that publishers are sophisticated with their marketing. The more data they have to work with, even anecdotally, the more they can figure out which of their marketing efforts to double down on or suggest where to tweak placements or campaigns.

For example, publishers are keen to see the full customer lifecycle. We know that monthly feedback and acquisition numbers via spreadsheets don’t give publishers qualitative insights into their campaigns. They want to see conversion rates, declines, and funnel drop offs so they can learn how to optimize their performance. 

As a financial services marketing agency, a partner-first model means being an open book and not gatekeeping communication between publishers and clients, so information can flow freely. 

We enable this using headless data. So, banks worried about sharing too much information can rest assured that we’re giving contextual insights to their partners, not specifics on which customer deposited X amount weeks after the conversion came through. 

We urge our clients to share as much data as they can with us and the publishers. In one case, it meant that when one of our banking clients shared more than just monthly acquisition numbers, a publisher suggested changing certain steps in their account application funnel because they knew it helped with another of their clients. This small change improved the bank’s conversion rates. 

Sharing your campaign data helps to achieve not only more cost-effective acquisition but develop products that customers actually want.

For instance, one publisher recommended a banking client marginally change the APY of their high-yield savings account product to help increase its competitiveness in the market, leading to a greater number of applications. Yes, it was an incremental increased cost to the bank, but it resulted in exponential growth in performance. These types of changes are micro in nature but mighty in performance.

A partner-first model brings more growth opportunities because it taps into insights from both top publications and niche publishers

When you see all your publishers as an extension of your marketing team, you can tap into qualitative and quantitative insights for a more comprehensive view on the market. 

By diversifying your publishers, you can gain extensive product feedback, buyer intent, and the state of the financial services market that you won’t get from your marketing teams or an agency.

What’s more, a niche partner could be more willing to experiment promoting new products, helping you reach a new qualified audience or offering unique consumer experience feedback to enhance product development to launch in a new market. 

At Fintel Connect, we’ve built strong relationships with a variety of publishers, from major players to more niche partners in the financial sector. This gives us a more holistic view of the affiliate ecosystem for financial services and the ability to connect you to new-to-you partners who have opportunities and insights you could otherwise miss out on if you limit your channel to the top publications. 

For example, we changed a campaign’s landing page based on a publisher’s feedback. We first experimented between directing potential customers to a product splash page or straight to the application page and tracked conversions through our affiliate tracking software. 

Because the publisher was doing a lot of the heavy-lifting in educating and nurturing their audiences on the product, we saw far more conversions directing audiences into the application page—and all thanks to the publisher’s (and client’s) willingness to experiment.

Treat your affiliate partnerships as a living, breathing engine to fuel continuous growth as you scale.

Discover exclusive publisher insights in our 2024 Financial Industry Affiliate Marketing Report 

A partner-first approach can help maintain long-term growth results even during unexpected market, economic or business shifts

There will always be unexpected events that disrupt your business and marketing plans. The best way to build a resilient affiliate marketing program is through strong relationships. 

Maybe you’re pivoting to a new type of product or responding to changes in financial regulations. Or maybe something as big as an economic crisis has hit. 

Taking a partner-first approach to these shifts means discussing what the best way forward is from your publishers’ perspective (and agency perspective if you work with one). As a result, you get expertise from multiple angles which can open new doors and strategies. 

For example, during the pandemic, we worked with publishers to identify which financial products were still gaining audience interest. While some products were not performing well, we heard from publishers that high-yield savings accounts had seen an uptick in engagement. We worked with clients to pivot their campaigns and take advantage of a hidden opportunity.

During disruptions, a partner-first approach allows you to pivot quickly by leveraging collective insights to navigate challenges and capitalize on emerging trends.

A partner-first approach is much more hands on, helping you to continuously test and find new opportunities for growth

Only regular communication with publishers will reveal the insights needed to stay competitive and take your program to the next level. While this approach takes effort, strong partnerships can make your marketing team’s job easier in the long run by having consistent and direct access to audience and product insights. 

By building rapport with these partners, it almost means they’ll be much more willing to share insider insights into their own priorities and what efficiency metrics they’re working towards. This enables you and your team to know how to adapt to get the most out of these partnerships.

A partner-first agency can aid in-house marketers by bringing their own expertise to your team while lessening the workload. Agencies that take their affiliate relationships seriously will bring an all-hands-on-deck approach to your affiliate marketing by helping with everything from messaging to reporting, all with insights from publishers. 

At Fintel Connect, we take our approach a step further, helping you to build different product lines, forecast your partner marketing spend, and manage your budget. We have found that an understanding of the seasonality and cyclicality of affiliate marketing has helped our clients predict their budgets, so there’s no surprise when an uptick in volume arrives. 

We also know it’s important to keep communication open to understand trends. For example, a few of our affiliates saw that checking account products weren’t receiving a lot of traction, yet high yield savings accounts were booming. So we worked with one bank to unbundle their savings product, chose strategic affiliates for them to work with, and helped increase customer acquisition. 

Partner-focused agencies will also be responsive to your business needs, even when you’re not a squeaky wheel. It shouldn’t take several follow-ups or a month of lead time to respond to questions or make changes, and answers should come from someone who is deeply familiar with your brand and the financial landscape. So if you want to implement different tracking or experiment with a new type of placement, you can get started right away.

Whether you decide to change to a partner-first agency and want to understand how to work with them, or bring this model in house, here are three steps you can take. 

1. Align on values 

To foster a mutually beneficial relationship, ensure you, your agency and your publishers are on the same page about how to run an affiliate program.

Everyone should be clear on what their roles and metrics of success are. Focus on business partnerships where there is respect between all parties, and everyone’s expertise and insights are a part of the conversation to set a solid foundation for success. 

2. Keep communication open and transparent

It can be uncomfortable to start sharing more information about your budget and goals with a new agency or even with longtime publishers. But being clear and honest means publishers can truly understand your goals and offer suggestions about how to get there.

When your KPIs are clear, your marketing team or agency can help steer your affiliate marketing decisions, from choosing the right products and implementing the right strategies to optimizing campaigns.

3. Be agile about implementing changes

Your company and your agency should act with agility when making changes to campaigns, products and strategy.

Sometimes that may mean changing the way you track attribution. Other times, it may mean refining messaging for compliance or tweaking your product offering because a publisher tells you what features their audience cares about most.

This agility should extend to unforeseen changes that cause a big market shift, which may even require a re-think of your overall strategy. 

Switching to a publisher-first model can make sense when:

• Your marketing team isn’t surfacing new or interesting opportunities, and you’re getting the same results quarter after quarter.
• You feel your affiliate program and campaigns are growing stale because you’re not seeing any meaningful growth or innovation.
• You’re facing market changes or unexpected challenges and your current agency isn’t stepping up to the plate.
• You’re only working with top performing affiliates, which could mean you’re leaving money on the table by not experimenting with new publishers.

When you are ready to switch, the key to a smooth transition is buy-in from across your company. In our experience, your marketing teams, compliance teams and even CFO need to be on the same page with a mutual understanding of what a publisher-first approach means and what short- and long-term results from the affiliate channel will look like. A partner-first agency can help with your internal education and buy-in. 

But beware: If you are looking for quick wins from affiliates or an easy process where you simply pay publishers to get leads, you are not ready for the publisher-first approach. 

At Fintel Connect, we know that putting publishers first means you are getting as close to an unbiased opinion as possible on your products and affiliate campaigns. 

While publishers do make money from affiliate campaigns, they are primarily working to serve their audience, which they’ve built through expertise and trust. This means they’re invested in giving their audience the most useful products and recommendations, so it is in their best interest to communicate openly with companies they work with. 

So, when you want to increase acquisition, having publishers as allies means you can get a more neutral appraisal of your strategy. 

Here are two ways we have seen publishers help acquire new customers in established partner programs. 

1. How publishers improve the customer journey with industry benchmarks

Affiliates are data-driven and understand how to track audience journeys. They will have a good understanding of industry benchmarks for different product verticals that you can use to improve your customer funnel and increase conversions. 

While no two customer flows are the same across different financial firms, a publisher will understand typical funnel stages and what a typical drop-off is at different points in the customer journey. 

For example, a publisher can tell you that a percentage of customers will drop off at a certain point in a basic Know Your Customer (KYC) flow. If you see a steeper drop-off than the average at that point, your publisher may be able to identify information fields that other brands don’t require, which could be contributing to the churn in your marketing funnel. 

Publishers have also seen customer journeys across brands they’ve worked with and therefore have up-to-date industry data and insights from your verticals. They will be a valuable resource for you to understand how you compare to competitors and industry standards, which can be the insights you need to increase customer acquisition by improving your funnel success rate.

2. How publishers optimize campaign messaging through data and experimentation

Affiliates possess a deep understanding of their audience, campaign performance, and attribution.

For example, they’ll have the data to tell you a campaign delivered a 15% increase in approvals above baseline with no change in attrition following the campaign. Incorporating this data into your reporting helps you attribute marketing dollars, prove your strategy’s efficacy, or highlight where changes need to be made. 

Publishers can also be open to experimentation if you have ideas for new tactics. They’re hungry to get more data on what works and what doesn’t, and want to build a portfolio of proven strategies they know drive acquisition. 

Experimentation can also mean being open to changing commission models if publishers feel it can unlock new opportunities. We’ve seen affiliates deliver consistent (and surprisingly cost-effective) growth with cost per click (CPC) models instead of with cost per acquisition (CPA) when promoting savings and checking accounts. Read more about how different commission models can boost new deposit sign ups in checking and savings account marketing here. 

When you take a publisher-first approach, you’ll create partnerships invested in achieving quantifiable results from trying out a new message or approach.

See our case studies for examples of the results our partner-first model brings.

Don’t let your partners remain an underutilized resource in your affiliate marketing. A transactional model can get you quick results. But, in our experience in affiliate marketing, the greatest gains come from long-term relationships and aligned collaboration. 

If you are a financial services company or fintech in North America who feels like your affiliate program needs a refresh, or if you are frustrated with the results you are getting from traditional agencies, reach out to Fintel Connect today to see how we can help.