Fintech Marketing Agency Founder Says Clipping Is Replacing Influencer Marketing 🇺🇸
We're also covering Cashea reaching half of Venezuela's adult population 🇻🇪, Chime venturing into investing 🇺🇸, Mibanco launching a Whatsapp-based bank 🇵🇪 & Samsung's Apple card killer 🇰🇷
🇺🇸 Fintech Marketing Agency Founder Says Clipping Is Replacing Influencer Marketing
Crypto and fintech brands are pulling budgets out of paid influencer endorsements and moving them into “clipping,” according to Rhys McKay (pictured above), founder of short-form video agency Lumina Clippers.
McKay, who previously ran a crypto marketing firm that he says spent $30 million on influencer campaigns, told Forbes the returns have collapsed, citing a 2025 example where a globally known influencer, paid $30,000 to promote a crypto exchange, delivered a single sign-up. The problem is saturation. “Influencers have already promoted 100 plus brands in some cases, where if you’re the 101st brand in queue, the audience is already saturated,” he told Forbes.
Instead of paying one influencer a large fee, brands pay thousands of freelancers to cut long-form footage into short clips and flood TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. McKay’s network runs to 62,000 vetted clippers, paid per thousand views and capped so no single clip drains a budget. Traditional paid social runs roughly $20 to $80 per thousand views, while clipping runs $1 to $5, and the clips keep accumulating views long after the spend stops. The model has spread beyond crypto to brands including Adobe, Netflix, Polymarket, and Kalshi.
Growth metric: $1 to $5 per thousand views
Clipping delivers reach at roughly $1 to $5 per thousand views, compared to $20 to $80 for traditional paid social.
Sources: Forbes & Fintech Growth Insider
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🇻🇪 BNPL Startup Cashea Now Serves Half of Venezuela's Adult Population
Venezuela-based buy now pay later (BNPL) startup Cashea has built one of the highest consumer penetration rates of any fintech in the world, serving more than 10 million accounts, equivalent to over half of Venezuela’s adult population. It closed a $60 million Series B in June, bringing the total amount it raised to $100 million.
High inflation pushed Venezuelans toward digital transactions and Cashea, which has built a network of 40,000 merchants nationwide, is capturing that demand: “If there is anything that happened through hyperinflation it is that it forced Venezuelans to flock to digital services”, co-founder and CEO Pedro Vallenilla (pictured above) told Bloomberg.
Founded in 2022, Cashea addressed a gap that economic crisis and government lending limits had created, namely that millions of Venezuelans had lost access to credit. Its app lets shoppers make an initial payment and repay the balance in interest-free biweekly installments, online or by scanning a QR code in stores. It has processed more than 110 million transactions across its network so far.
Growth metric: 10 million accounts, half the adult population
Cashea serves more over half of Venezuela’s adult population, having processed more than 110 million transactions since 2022.
Sources: Bloomberg & Fintech Growth Insider
🇺🇸 Chime’s Investing Launch Completes Its Playbook of Expanding Banking Into a Full Financial Suite
US-based neobank Chime has launched investing services inside its app, adding the one product that was missing from a lineup that already spans checking accounts, debit cards, and high-yield savings.
CEO Chris Britt (pictured above) framed investing as the final piece of the puzzle. “Investing is one of the last legs of the stool in terms of financial progress,” he told American Banker, adding that bringing it into an app millions already trust makes it easier to turn saving into investing.
Chime’s new product lets users buy stocks and ETFs commission-free or invest in managed portfolios run by Atomic Invest, with management fees waived for its top-tier Prime members and tiered for others. The launch positions the subprime neobank against digital wealth platforms like Robinhood and Wealthfront. As of December 2025, Chime had reached 8.6 million active members.
Growth metric: 8.6 million Chime customers now have access to investing features
Chime has layered stock, ETF, and managed portfolio investing onto its existing banking products
Sources: American Banker & Tradingview
🇵🇪 Mibanco Reached First-Time Customers by Banking Them on WhatsApp
Peru-based microfinance bank Mibanco built a fully functional bank inside WhatsApp, and nearly 80% of the people using it had never held a bank account before.
The platform, built with Amazon Web Services, replaces the traditional banking app with an AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp. It interprets requests in natural language, recommends products, and executes transactions in the chat itself. Customers can open savings accounts, take loans, pay bills, and make transfers in around two minutes, without downloading anything.
The channel choice was deliberate. WhatsApp is Peru’s second most visited social platform, already used daily by small businesses to sell and coordinate orders. “It made sense to bring financial services into that same environment,” Arturo Guillermo Johnson Pastor (pictured above), Transformation Division Manager at Mibanco said to Business Empresarial
The platform has already registered more than 357,000 interactions, with Mibanco expecting to reach one million interactions by year end.
Growth metric: 80% of users are first-time account holders
The platform has reached a segment traditional banking apps never could, activating customers who had stayed outside the financial system entirely.
Source: Business Empresarial
🇰🇷 Samsung Took Apple's Card Playbook, and It's Already in 70% of American Households
Electronics giant Samsung just launched its first US credit card, betting its biggest edge over Apple is the 70% of American households that already own a Samsung device.
Samsung’s Sih Lee (pictured above), head of its North America fintech business, told Reuters that 70% of American households own a Samsung device and nearly 30% own at least three. That installed base lets Samsung distribute a financial product without paying to acquire an audience first, mirroring how Apple scaled the Apple Card through the iPhone. And while Apple offers 2% Daily Cash when customers pay with Apple Pay, Samsung is offering 3% cash back on purchases made using Samsung Wallet.
"So while we don't have everything all lined up today, we do have intention to collaborate and explore all avenues of different products and different capabilities that we can actually make available as it makes sense to our customers," said Lee to Reuters. The Galaxy Card, built with Barclays and running on Visa’s network, comes in virtual and physical formats and integrates with Samsung’s digital wallet.
Growth metric: 70% of US households own a Samsung device
That penetration hands the Galaxy Card a ready-made distribution channel most fintechs would spend years and millions to build.
Source: Reuters & Fintech Growth Insider
🇮🇳 Fintech Ad of The Week: POP Is Betting Rewards, Not Payments, Will Win India's UPI War
India-based fintech POP, a Razorpay-backed platform built around UPI payments and its POPcoins rewards currency, has launched its first-ever brand campaign and while it’s rely heavily on AI, it’s shows how creativity matters more than big budgets in 2026.
POP’s core bet is that in a market where every payment app works identically, rewards are the only real differentiator. On POP, users earn POPcoins on every UPI transaction rather than through occasional cashback, alongside a wider ecosystem spanning POPCard and POPShop.
Source: Fintech Growth Insider
Who Am I?
Hi, my name is Julien Brault.
From 2017 to 2024, I was the CEO of Hardbacon, a fintech I co-founded, which reached 400,000 unique visitors at its peak.
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