Acquisition in regulated finance and insurance
High-consideration products, a long gap between enquiry and revenue, and a compliance regime that shapes the funnel from the first wireframe.
The situation
Financial and insurance products share a structural problem: the thing you can measure quickly is not the thing that makes money. An application is not a policy, a policy is not a retained customer, and the gap between them can run for months.
Layered on top is a regulatory regime that differs by market. What may be claimed about a product, what disclosures must appear, how consent is captured and how personal data may be handled all vary between Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia — and all of them constrain the landing page before conversion optimisation gets a say.
The common failure is to optimise the fast metric. Cost per application falls, applications rise, and approval rates quietly collapse because the traffic was never eligible in the first place.
What constrains it
- Eligibility is binary
- Age, residency, income or health criteria exclude a large share of any broad audience outright. Reaching them is pure waste, and no amount of creative fixes it.
- Claims are restricted
- The most persuasive framing is often the one that cannot be used. Creative has to win on clarity rather than on promise.
- Revenue arrives late
- Managing to closed revenue means steering on a signal that is weeks or months stale by the time it arrives.
- Markets do not transfer
- A funnel that performs in one jurisdiction can be non-compliant in the next. Each market is rebuilt, not translated.
How it gets worked
Find the earliest signal that predicts revenue
The work starts by identifying which observable event correlates with eventual revenue closely enough to optimise against — often a completed application rather than a started one, or an approved application rather than a submitted one.
That event then becomes the conversion the platforms optimise toward, which requires feeding qualification outcomes back from the internal systems rather than letting the platforms optimise toward form fills.
Move eligibility screening up the funnel
Eligibility questions placed early — after the offer is explained, before the long form — cost some volume and remove a category of traffic that was never going to convert.
This is deliberate friction with a measurable payoff: the rejected visitor costs nothing further, while an ineligible application consumes underwriting or sales attention.
Build compliance into the creative process
Reviewing finished creative for compliance produces slow cycles and weak work. Agreeing the claim boundaries first, then building inside them, produces faster approval and better advertising.
In practice that means a documented set of permitted claims and required disclosures per market, referenced during concepting rather than after it.
- Approval or acceptance rate moving in the opposite direction to volume — the clearest sign the funnel is filtering on cost rather than fit.
- One market's learnings being applied to another without re-checking the regulatory position.
- Platform-reported conversions diverging from the internal system as modelled conversions take a larger share.
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Describe what you are spending and what it has to return, and we will tell you whether we are the right people.
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