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"Enabling financial brands to expand marketing efforts & maximize revenue."
TLDR; Financial affiliate programs struggle to ensure affiliates are compliant with brand guidelines, leading to limited growth opportunities. Affil monitors affiliate content, enabling companies to expand marketing efforts and maximize revenue. What is financial affiliate marketing? When you see content by The Points Guy or Forbes that talks about credit cards, checking accounts, etc, they get a kickback from the financial brand for anyone who successfully applies for the product.
Founded by John Ta & Vivek Olumbe
Vivek & John first met at Penn and cofounded the first personal finance nonprofit at 8 different colleges, accumulating 2.5k+ users and $25k+ in funding. Vivek is a full stack developer who worked for several startups shipping new products; John was previously in banking, strategy, and growth roles.
After managing affiliate relationships in a prior role & being involved with credit cards for years (fun fact: he has 30 cards), John realized the financial affiliate marketing space was broken.
⚠️ The Problem
Financial institutions (e.g., Capital One) or consumer fintech companies (e.g., Acorns) want to grow their affiliate programs but are completely blocked by compliance barriers. However, it’s expensive and time-intensive to do manual affiliate compliance & management.
On the flip side, affiliates are also dissatisfied with these financial affiliate programs. The majority have to work with disorganized & outdated middlemen hired by financial brands who take a significant cut of payouts.
🛠️ The Solution
The Affil AI compliance software monitors affiliate content so that financial companies know exactly what’s being said about them so that they can expand their marketing efforts:
- Track thousands of affiliate pages
- Quickly identify compliance violations without needing human intervention
- Create support tickets for every issue, so affiliates & brands can keep track of errors
They are also improving the affiliate experience:
- Offer higher payouts for conversions (since they have a lower cost structure)
- Provide a beautiful user experience & working APIs
- Proactively identify compliance risks & offer automated suggestions to minimize risk
For example (see below), the AMEX Gold Card underwent significant changes on July 27, 2024, but outdated affiliate content still exists on the internet (that’s not good). They caught this issue that both AMEX and Bankrate missed.
The big vision is to become the affiliate network that powers all financial institutions out there.
🤝 Their Ask
- Leads: Know anyone at a consumer finance company or publishers/content creators that write about credit cards/use affiliate links? They’d love an intro!
- Banking: They are having particular struggles getting in contact with some of the key stakeholders at some of the major banks (think Chase, Wells Fargo, USAA…), so if you can make any warm intros to folks on the consumer banking side, John will buy you dinner!
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