Prediction Markets Are Winning The User Acquisition Game With Meme Pages and Influencers 🇺🇸
We're also covering Monzo's US exit 🇬🇧, Revolut fined $13M for misleading ads 🇮🇹, MySub's zero-spend growth story 🇳🇬, Bachatt growing to 3M users in under a year 🇮🇳 & more
🇺🇸 Kalshi and Polymarket Are Betting Their Growth on Influencers, and It Is Working
US-based prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket have turned influencer marketing into their primary growth engine
Kalshi’s partner roster includes NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, personal finance influencer Eric Pan, and anonymous meme page @sarcasm_only, which recently shared a Kalshi-sponsored post about the Academy Awards to 17 million followers. These platforms signing deals with celebrities, finance creators, and viral meme pages to pull retail traders onto their platforms.
Art Malkov (pictured above), the former chief marketing officer of Polymarket who now co-runs Lever.io, a Web3 creator marketplace connecting blockchain projects with influencers, says the channel is not optional for platforms in this space. “I don’t think prediction markets would do well without influencers because prediction markets really have a lot to do with emotion,” Malkov told the Financial Times.
Both platforms are also running targeted campaigns to attract female users. According to Kalshi’s head of communications Elisabeth Diana, female account holders now make up 26% of its user base, up from 13% just ten months ago, according to The Atlantic. Sports, meanwhile, account for 85% of Kalshi’s volume.
Growth metric: $2.3 billion traded weekly on Kalshi alone
Kalshi now records more than $2.3 billion in weekly trading volume, higher than Polymarket’s $1.2 billion last December.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider, Financial Times, The Atlantic and The Defiant
🌐 40% of Global Consumers Are Ready to Embrace AI-Assisted Shopping: What Does This Mean for Merchants?
SPONSORED - Worldpay’s recently published Agentic Commerce Report reveals how intelligent agents are reshaping how consumers discover, compare and manage what they buy – and what merchants can do to prepare for the industry’s biggest shift since e-commerce.
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Download the Agentic Commerce Report for free to discover how Worldpay can help your business stay ahead of the curve and prepare for the next era of agentic commerce.
🇺🇸 Monzo Quits the US While Every Other European Neobank Rushes In
UK-based digital bank Monzo is shutting down its US operations to focus on its home market and Europe instead. The move is an about-face from October, when Monzo was reportedly considering a US banking licence application, which is its second attempt after abandoning its first in 2021 following regulatory challenges.
The economics made the case against it. Getting a US banking charter carries significant upfront costs, but given how competitive the US market is, Monzo’s edge in the UK might not replicate in a market with established neobanks such as Ally, Chime and SoFi as well as new foreign challengers such as Nubank and Revolut.
Monzo, led by CEO Diana Layfield (pictured above), is instead pointing to its December 2025 European Central Bank authorisation as the bigger near-term opportunity. With pre-tax profits of £60.4 million ($80.2 million US) and 15 million UK customers, European expansion is a lower-risk, higher-return compared to the US.
Growth metric: 15 million UK customers
Monzo now serves more than 15 million customers in the UK ahead of its planned European expansion.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & Bloomberg
🇮🇳 Bachatt Hit 3 Million Users in Under a Year by Building for India’s Informal Economy
India-based savings platform Bachatt has acquired 3 million users since launching in May 2025, by providing mutual funds accounts for merchants and self-employed workers with irregular incomes.
India has an estimated 300 million merchants and self-employed workers who earn irregular, unpredictable incomes. Existing savings products such as recurring deposits and fixed monthly contribution schemes were built around steady, predictable earnings, a structure that leaves much of this segment underserved. Bachatt was designed to fill that gap. Users can start with as little as ₹100 (US$1.08), pause contributions at any time, withdraw funds instantly, and save on weekends when cash is most available.
Founder and CEO Anugrah Jain (center) said the company wants to build five to six financial solutions, specially curated and tailored for the segment, adding AI-led wealth advisory and instant credit to services. The company is targeting 30 million users over the next 12 to 24 months.
In February 2026 alone, the platform processed more than 2 million mutual fund transactions.
Growth metric: 3 million users in under a year
Bachatt managed to garner 3 millions users under a year by serving the informal sector of India.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & TechStory
🇮🇹 Revolut’s $13.26 Million Fine Is a Warning for Every Fintech Running Zero Commission Ads
UK-based neobank Revolut has been fined €11.5 million ($13.26 Million USD) by Italy’s competition watchdog for running advertisements suggesting customers could trade with zero commission, without adequately disclosing the additional costs that applied.
Revolut Securities Europe UAB and Revolut Group Holdings Ltd were each fined €5 million ($5.77 million USD), with an additional €1.5 million ($1.73 million USD) penalty for failing to clearly explain account migration terms to Italian customers. Revolut said it “strongly disagrees” with the findings and will appeal, in a report by the Financial Times. Revolut, led by Nik Storonsky (pictured above), was valued at $75 billion as of end 2025.
Growth metric: $1.23 billion in global non-compliance fines in H1 2025
Globally, financial regulators imposed $1.23 billion in non-compliance fines in the first half of 2025 alone, a 417% increase year-on-year.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & Financial Times
🇳🇬 Nigeria’s MySub Reached 360,000 Users Without Spending a Dollar on Ads
Nigerian-founded fintech MySub scaled to 360,000 users and $6,700 in monthly recurring revenue without raising external funding or running a single paid campaign.
Founder Raphael Obodugo (pictured above) noticed that West Africans were already splitting costs for Netflix, rent, and school fees through WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. MySub lets users create shared subscription groups for any digital service, for example Netflix, Adobe Creative Cloud, Masterclass, and then automatically splits the cost, charges each member their share plus a 15% service fee, and handles all payments. A group of five sharing a $10 Netflix subscription, for example, each pays $2.25 a month instead of $10.
Rather than buying ads, Obodugo took the product directly into student groups, online communities, and young professional networks where shared spending was already happening. People tried it, liked it, and told others. “When a product genuinely solves a problem, people talk about it,” he said.
Growth metric: 360,000 users, zero ad spend
MySub reached 360,000 users entirely through community embedding and word-of-mouth, without raising external funding or running paid acquisition campaigns.
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider, TTY Brand Africa & Tech Cabal
🌐 Fintech CEOs Who Post Video Are Winning the Attention Game
Video is where attention has moved and most fintech CEOs are leaving it on the table.
Running a company is a full-time job, and producing video consistently never makes the priority list.
Fintech Growth Circle fixes that.
You join a 15-minute weekly call with Julien Brault, come empty-handed, and we handle everything: the ideas, the editing, the production. You get three short vertical videos, captioned and optimized for mobile, ready for your team to post.
Every clip also gets distributed to both Julien Brault’s and Fintech Growth Insider’s social channels.
Consistent video presence without adding headcount or clearing your calendar.
Spots are limited and applications are reviewed manually.
🇺🇸 Blend’s AI Agent Is Targeting the Most Painful Part of Getting a Mortgage
US-based mortgage software company Blend has launched an AI agent called Autopilot, designed to eliminate the manual back-office work that makes mortgage applications slow.
Autopilot reads borrower documents, checks them for accuracy, updates loan files, and sends follow-up requests automatically. Human staff and existing systems still make the final decisions, but the target is the roughly $11,000 in human labour costs and hundreds of hours that lenders currently spend processing a single mortgage application, according to Blend CEO Nima Ghamsari (pictured above), he said to Fortune in an interview.
Roughly 20% of Blend’s customers adopted Autopilot within its first month of launch in March 2026. Blend builds white-label software that powers digital loan applications at major US banks and credit unions. The company went public in 2021 at a market cap north of $4 billion before rising interest rates crushed mortgage volumes and sent its share price down more than 90%.
Growth metric: 20% customer adoption in month one
Roughly 20% of Blend’s existing customers adopted Autopilot within the first month of its March 2026 launch
Sources: Fintech Growth Insider & Fortune
🇦🇪 Fintech Ad of The Week: Policybazaar Is Using Dubai Influencers to Make Insurance Feel Local
India-based insurance marketplace Policybazaar is running a multi-influencers campaign across the UAE, tapping Dubai-based influencers to promote its comparison platform to the Emirates’ diverse, largely expatriate population.
One of the ads features Ahmad Salah, better known online as Ahmad Al Kaashekh, a Dubai-based actor, stand-up comedian, and content creator with 441,000 Instagram followers. Originally from Kerala, India, Ahmad grew up in Dubai and speaks fluent Arabic, making him a natural fit for a market where both South Asian and Arab communities make up a large share of the population. Policybazaar is not running just one ad with one creator, it is working with multiple Dubai-based influencers simultaneously, each speaking to a different slice of the UAE audience in their own voice and style.
Source: Fintech Growth Insider
Upcoming Fintech Events
🇺🇸 Financial Brand Forum will take place from April 13 to 15, 2026, in Las Vegas, United States, with tickets priced between $1,990 and $2,895, with speakers such as Will Guidara (World-Renowned Entrepreneur, Eleven Madison Park), Chris Voss (Former Lead Hostage Negotiator, FBI), and Mike Cessario (Founder & CEO, Liquid Death).
🇫🇷 Paris Blockchain Week will take place from April 14 to 16, 2026, in Paris, France, with tickets priced between €1,699 and €4,999, with speakers such as Yoni Assia (CEO, eToro), Raja Chakravorti (Chief Business Officer, Stellar Development Foundation), and Ben Zhou (Co-founder and CEO, Bybit).
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.
A Google update ultimately sealed the company’s fate, and I started this newsletter to keep myself busy in the aftermath.
I then launched an another fintech affiliate site called MooseMoney, but I still find the time to publish this newsletter.
Why share this?
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