Fintech marketing agency · Nairobi
We run search and paid acquisition for regulated Kenyan fintechs: digital lenders, payment service providers, the digital arms of banks and microfinance banks, investment and wealth platforms, insurers and Saccos. These are the companies where a landing page has to clear legal before it clears the brief, and an ad account can be switched off for a disclosure nobody checked.
Most agencies that say they do fintech marketing mean they have had a fintech client. The distinction matters, because the thing that makes fintech acquisition hard is not the audience or the creative. It is that two gatekeepers sit between your budget and your market — the ad platforms and your own compliance function — and a plan that ignores either one produces work that never ships.
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Nairobi · CBK · CMA · IRA · SASRA · ODPC
We are a specialist practice, not a general agency with a fintech page. That means we are a good fit for a narrow set of companies and a poor fit for everyone else, and it is cheaper for both of us to establish which you are now.
Three failure modes account for most of the wasted budget we see in this category. None of them is a creative problem, and none of them is fixed by a better agency doing the same work faster.
Google and Meta each set their own gates for financial ads, and in Kenya the product decides more than the market. Google only allows personal-loan ads for loans repayable in 61 days or more, Meta bans loans of 90 days or less, and forex ads need a CMA licence plus Google certification (on Meta they are banned outright).
A media plan built without checking which of your products clear those gates is a plan with a hole in it. The budget is approved, the campaigns are built, and then nothing serves.
Platform review does not stop at the ad. The destination is reviewed as part of the same decision, and Google expects a physical address, every fee and proof of any licence you claim to be visible on the page without clicking. A page that buries the APR or the CBK line can take down an ad that was itself compliant.
This is the failure that surprises people, because the ad copy was checked carefully and the page was treated as a design job.
Fintech sales cycles run long. A 30-day attribution window on a 118-day cycle attributes almost nothing to the channel that started the conversation, so the channel gets cut.
We have seen budget moved away from the only thing that was working, on the strength of a report that could not have shown it working.
Strip out the parts that are the same in every category, and what is left is a short list. This is the work we think is specific to fintech, and it is the work we do.
Product by product, before any budget is committed. Which of your products each platform will let you advertise at all, what your category classification will be, which regulator line and warnings the creative has to carry, and which approvals have to exist before launch (a trustee’s written sign-off for a money market fund ad, for example). This is a two-day job at the start and a three-month problem if it is skipped.
Your compliance function and the platform's reviewer want different things, and a page written for one often fails the other. The craft is finding copy that satisfies both without becoming unreadable — which usually means designing the disclosure into the layout rather than appending it.
Regulated categories have expensive clicks, because the buyers are worth a lot and the competition is well funded. Every high-intent term you rank for organically is a term you stop paying for. That arbitrage is the whole argument for running search and paid together.
Attribution set to your actual median cycle, conversions defined at the stage that predicts revenue rather than the stage that is easy to fire, and the CRM connected properly so the report survives contact with your sales team.
We run search and paid acquisition as a single programme rather than two engagements that meet at a monthly report. Paid finds the messages that land, quickly and at known cost. Organic takes over the terms once we know which ones convert. Each has its own page.
Technical SEO, content and search strategy for regulated products — including the compliance layer that a generalist SEO audit does not look at, and the structured data that answer engines actually read.
FINTECH SEO AGENCY →Paid search and paid social for accounts that can be switched off — verification, category setup, disclosure review, and landing pages built to clear the same review the ad does.
FINTECH PPC AGENCY →Engagements can be single-channel. The smallest retainer is deliberately one channel run properly, because one channel run properly beats two run thinly.
Most marketing strategies in this category fail at the same place: they are written as if the only constraint is budget. Then the first piece of work reaches compliance, comes back with changes, goes back again, and a plan built on four pieces a month starts shipping two.
A fintech marketing strategy that works has the review loop designed into it rather than bolted on. In practice that means three things.
Agree the claims once, not per asset. Most compliance friction is the same handful of claims being re-litigated on every new page. Settling what may and may not be said — in writing, with your counsel, once — converts a recurring negotiation into a reference document. It is the single highest-return hour available in this category.
Build the disclosure into the template. If required language is a design element rather than an afterthought, it stops being the thing that sends a page back. It also stops being the thing that gets buried, which matters more than it used to now that assistants surface small print that human readers skip.
Sequence by what is reviewable. Some work needs legal sign-off and some does not. Technical SEO, internal linking, site architecture, tracking and account structure carry no compliance exposure at all and can run in parallel while the copy is in review. Planning them as one queue guarantees idle weeks.
The thing most plans get wrong. Compliance is treated as a cost that slows marketing down. In a category where your competitors have the same constraint, being fast through review is a competitive advantage, not an overhead. The agency that ships eight reviewed pages a quarter beats the one that drafts twenty and ships five. The full sequence, from approvals and platform gates to channel order and a 90-day plan, is in our guide to fintech marketing strategy.
B2B fintech has the longest gap we work with between the marketing action and the revenue it produced. A payments platform selling to mid-market finance teams is looking at a cycle measured in months, several stakeholders, a security review and often a procurement process that has nothing to do with marketing.
That gap creates a specific and expensive failure: the channel that started the deal is not the channel credited with it, so it loses its budget to something that closes faster and contributes less.
The fix is not a better attribution tool. It is agreeing, before anything is spent, what you will judge the programme on and over what period.
| We report on | Why |
|---|---|
| CAC payback period | The only efficiency measure that accounts for how long your money is out. |
| Marketing-sourced pipeline | Counted at the stage your sales team agrees is real, not at form fill. |
| SQL conversion rate by source | Which channels produce buyers, as distinct from which produce volume. |
| Accounts approved and live | In a category where accounts get disabled, uptime is a marketing metric. |
| Pages shipped, keywords entering the top 20 | Leading indicators, so you are not blind for the first quarter. |
On a long sales cycle, payback is measured in quarters, not weeks. Anyone promising you a payback period shorter than your own sales cycle is promising a number that cannot be true yet.
What we refuse to report is on how we work, in full, with the reasoning.
Fintech is where we are sharpest, but the constraint we specialise in is not unique to it. A financial services engagement for a Kenyan bank’s digital team, an insurer, a Sacco or a wealth platform runs into the same three gates: platform rules, disclosure requirements, and an internal review function that has a veto.
The regulator changes with the product and the problem does not. A digital lender answers to the CBK, whose rules expect every ad to say the lender is regulated by the CBK and to show the full cost of credit. A money market fund answers to the CMA: the trustee approves the ad in writing and the CMA is notified before it runs, and three standard warnings go on every creative. An insurer answers to the IRA, a Sacco to SASRA, and all of them to the ODPC for how customer data is used in marketing. Different rulebooks, identical shape: something must be checked before it can be said.
What each Kenyan regulator requires of a financial promotion is researched from primary sources and dated: see the fintech ad compliance checklist and who approves a fintech ad. It is a starting point, not legal advice.
Prior results are from roles, not Momentum client engagements, and the companies are anonymised because we do not have permission to name them. The numbers are unchanged.
Earlier roles, USD
Results from earlier roles, reported in US dollars as they were at the time. Not Momentum client engagements.
US fintech, $5k/mo budget. A fragmented account with broken conversion tracking, restructured into tightly themed search and Performance Max groups, with conversion and call tracking implemented. Verified lead volume rose 60%.
US marketing agency. Service pages were not ranking for high-intent terms and were bleeding visitors. Rebuilt around search intent with clearer calls to action and internal linking. Keyword coverage improved 50%.
US investor platform. Two posts and one case study a week, no paid support. Qualified investor engagement rose 35% and organic sessions 40%, and the case studies closed deals directly because sales could send them to prospects.
Credentials. Six years running SEO, content and paid acquisition for SaaS, fintech, healthcare and marketplace businesses. CXL certifications in Paid Media and B2B Demand Generation. Zero ads rejected in a financial-services Meta programme: read the case study.
What we do not have. No named case studies, because the work was done in roles under agreements we intend to keep. No client logos. No SOC 2 and no ISO 27001 — we say so on the privacy policy rather than letting the absence be discovered later. If a named reference is a requirement of your procurement process, we are not the right fit yet and we would rather say so now.
There is no price list. Every engagement is quoted to its scope in a written proposal, in Kenya shillings, after a 20-minute fit call. We never charge a percentage of ad spend: that caps our fee exactly when we succeed at cutting your waste.
| Engagement | How it is priced | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition Audit | Quoted to scope | Two weeks, one document, no retainer required. The usual first engagement. |
| One channel | Quoted monthly | One channel run properly. Technical SEO and site fixes, four content pieces a month, compliance review on everything, tracking built right. |
| Search and paid | Quoted monthly | SEO and paid as one motion. Eight pieces a month, restricted-category setup across Google, LinkedIn and Meta, landing pages built and tested, digital PR and link acquisition. |
| Full programme | Quoted monthly | Several products at depth, programmatic page programmes, full-funnel paid, and the compliance workflow built into your own review process. |
The proposal states the scope, the timeline and the fee in full. More on how we price.
Three things. It establishes which of your target markets require financial services advertiser verification before any budget is committed, rather than discovering it after the campaigns are built. It writes landing pages that satisfy both your compliance function and the platform's reviewer, which are different audiences with different objections. And it sets the measurement window to your real sales cycle instead of the platform default, so the channel that starts your deals is the channel that gets credited with them.
It depends on scope, so we quote it: after a 20-minute fit call you get a written proposal in Kenya shillings within two working days, and most engagements start with the two-week Acquisition Audit. We charge fixed fees and never a percentage of media spend. Your ad budget is separate and is paid to the platforms directly. We do not touch it and we do not mark it up.
Not from Google, as things stand: Kenya is not on Google’s list of countries that require financial services verification (checked October 2026), though standard advertiser verification still applies. The bigger gates in Kenya are product rules. Google allows personal-loan ads only for loans repayable in 61 days or more, Meta bans loans of 90 days or less, and forex ads need a CMA licence plus Google certification. Checking which of your products clear those gates is the first thing we do on any paid engagement.
Often, but be realistic about what is recoverable. A suspension for a fixable policy issue — a missing disclosure, a wrong category classification, an unverified advertiser — is usually addressable. A suspension tied to a product or claim the platform does not permit at all is not an appeals problem, and an agency that tells you otherwise is selling you an appeal it knows will fail. We will tell you which one you have before you engage us.
Either, on its own. Our smallest retainer is deliberately one channel run properly. We think they compound when run together (paid finds the messages that convert and organic then takes over those terms), but a single-channel engagement done well is better than a split one done thinly, and we will say so if that is what your budget supports.
Directly, and early. The most useful hour of any engagement is the one where we agree in writing what may and may not be claimed, so that the same questions are not re-argued on every asset. We write to survive review and we will work with your counsel — but we are not your counsel, and we do not give legal advice. That boundary is in the terms.
Because on a 90 to 180 day sales cycle, a 30-day return figure shows a fraction of what actually happened. Guaranteeing it would mean guaranteeing a number that does not exist yet. We guarantee compliance instead: if we cannot get your advertising account approved and compliant within 30 days of kickoff, you do not pay the management fee for that month. The exclusions are published with it.
Elijah Oling Wanga. Momentum AdWorks is a specialist practice in Nairobi, not a large agency. There is no account manager relaying your question to someone else and relaying an answer back. We work Kenyan business hours, Monday to Friday.
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Two weeks, one document, quoted to your scope. What is broken in your search and paid acquisition, what it is costing you, and what to do about it in what order. You can execute it with us or hand it to anyone else.
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Nairobi, Kenya · working Kenyan business hours