Fintech PPC agency
Paid search and paid social for financial products, run by someone who does the verification, the category setup and the disclosure review before the campaign is built — not after it is rejected.
Start the Acquisition Audit — $2,500 See how we work
Fixed fee · two weeks · credited in full to your first month
Who this is for
Most paid media agencies have never had an account disabled. That is not a criticism of their work — it is a description of the categories they run in. If your product touches money, the platform is a regulator before it is a channel.
ARR bands are the US and UK gate. In Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana the entry point is the Acquisition Audit, sold standalone. Prices are published.
What actually goes wrong
Financial services verification is a gate in front of the auction, not a review after it. In the markets where it applies, an unverified advertiser cannot show financial services ads at all — so the campaign that was signed off in January is still dark in March, and nobody on the team can say why.
It is worse than a delay, because the usual diagnostic instincts do not fire. Spend is zero, impressions are zero, and the account looks healthy.
Meta's special ad category for financial products removes targeting you may have built the plan around, and the restrictions are not negotiable. Choosing it late does not just narrow the audience — it resets what the campaign has learned.
Teams find this out after the media plan has been costed against targeting that was never available to them.
Google's financial products policy puts requirements on the landing page, not only the ad — and they have to be visible without a click or a hover. A disclosure in an accordion is a disclosure that is not there.
So the ad is disapproved for something that is nowhere in the ad, and the fix sits with a team that does not own the ad account. In the US there is a legal side to the same problem: UDAAP for fintech marketers explains how the CFPB judges a consumer finance ad by its overall net impression.
The part other agencies find out the hard way
Compliance as a slogan is already crowded. What is almost never published is the mechanics — which regulator, which identifier, which field has to match, and which markets are not in the programme at all. Here is ours, with dates.
Google requires financial services advertiser verification in a specific list of countries, and a separate verification for each targeted location. The list is the thing most teams get wrong, in both directions — they assume it is global, or they assume their market is exempt.
| Market | In Google's financial services verification programme? | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Yes | FCA authorisation, or a Financial Services Register listing as an Exempt Professional Firm or Recognised Investment Exchange. Your FRN is required. |
| United States | No | The US is not on Google's country list for financial services verification. Advertiser identity verification and the financial products policy still apply in full. |
| 24 EEA countries | Yes — from 23 July 2026 | Rolling enforcement, handled through Google's external partner G2. This is what a US or UK advertiser walks into the moment they widen into Europe. |
| Kenya · Nigeria South Africa · Ghana | No | None of the four appear on Google's list. Your local regulator still governs the promotion — the platform simply is not the one checking. |
Which markets Google verifies, and where a regulator pre-clears the ad itself, are in our fintech ad approval map.
The UK failure almost nobody writes about. Google requires that the business information you submit exactly matches the details held on the FCA register — including every domain you advertise. Verification bounces for a mismatched trading name or an unregistered landing-page domain while the authorisation itself is perfectly valid. It reads as a rejection of your firm. It is a data-entry difference, and it is the single most common reason a legitimate UK fintech sits unverified.
If you advertise credit on Meta, the ad set runs in the special ad category for financial products and services, named FINANCIAL_PRODUCTS_SERVICES in Meta's Marketing API since 14 January 2025, when it replaced the CREDIT input. That removes gender targeting, fixes the age range to 18 through 65+, takes away postcode-level selection, and disables exclusion targeting on behaviours, demographics and interests. Lookalike audiences are unavailable, and so are saved audiences, custom audience expansion and detailed targeting exclusion. If your plan was written against a lookalike strategy, the plan needs rewriting, not adapting. We would rather tell you that before the budget is committed.
Google's financial products and services policy asks for disclosures on the destination, visible without a click or a hover. For a personal loan that means the minimum and maximum repayment period, the maximum APR, and a representative example carrying every applicable fee. Across financial products generally it means the physical address of the business and all associated fees. Loans repayable in under 61 days are not allowed, and in the US a personal loan advertised at 36% APR or above is prohibited outright.
None of that is hard to satisfy. It is hard to satisfy late, because by then the disclosure is competing for the space above the fold with the message that made the ad work. The answer is to design the page with the disclosure block in it, not to bolt one on after a disapproval. The full pass — the four separate reviews a fintech page has to clear before it goes live — is in our guide to landing page compliance for fintech. What the ad itself has to carry, rule by rule in the US and the UK, is in our guide to financial services advertising regulations for paid search, and every check across all six markets is in the fintech ad compliance checklist.
Every regulated account has a second approval queue that has nothing to do with the platform: your own compliance or legal reviewer. Agencies that treat that queue as someone else's problem lose two weeks per creative cycle to it, then describe the account as slow.
We work the other way round. Claims are substantiated before the copy is drafted, so review is checking a citation rather than relitigating a sentence. Variants go to review in batches, not one at a time. And the reviewer gets a document that says which claim rests on which source — which is the difference between a sign-off in a day and a meeting in a fortnight.
The work
Before any campaign is built: confirm which verification applies in each target market, get the submission right the first time, and classify the ad sets into the correct special ad category. Where verification does not apply, we say so rather than billing for it. The requirements, market by market, are in our guide to Google Ads financial services verification.
Campaign and ad group architecture built around a 90 to 180 day cycle — match types, negative keyword strategy, and a search terms discipline that stops budget leaking into queries that will never become pipeline.
Pages built with the disclosure block designed in, the address and fee statements where the policy expects them, and the conversion path intact around them. Written to clear legal on the first pass.
Structured testing that respects what the category actually allows — message and offer rather than audience slicing that is unavailable to you. On Meta this is where most of the remaining leverage lives once targeting is fixed. We set out exactly what the Meta special ad category removes, and what fintech advertising still has left.
GA4 and CRM tracking built so the numbers reconcile: conversion and call tracking, offline conversion import where the deal closes in a CRM, and an honest account of what consent mode and platform restrictions do to attribution in this category.
Paid tells you inside a week which message lands. Those winners become the pages we build organically on the SEO side, and organic then takes over terms you were renting. One team, one number. Run together, they make up one fintech marketing program.
Measurement
A 30-day return figure on a product with a four-month sales cycle is not a performance number. It is a number that cannot be true yet, reported against a window that guarantees it will mislead.
Median SaaS CAC payback sits around 16 months, and closer to 22 at $50K–$100K ACV. Anyone promising sub-12-month payback in fintech is promising better-than-median performance. Check your own numbers with the free ROAS calculator, and plan a budget, verification weeks included, with the Google Ads cost calculator. How we work →
Proof
Momentum AdWorks is a specialist practice, not a large agency. Everything below is real. Where the work was done in a prior role rather than for Momentum, it says so.
Zero ads rejected across a full-funnel Meta programme in financial services. Our own acquisition, run end to end. In this category that is not a nice-to-have — it is the difference between a campaign that runs and a quarter you lose.
One campaign on native Meta lead forms, at about $4.03 a lead; 189 across nine campaigns. Momentum's own acquisition. Read the case study.
A US fintech's Google Ads account on a $5k/month budget, with verified lead volume up 60%. Account restructure, conversion and call tracking, negative keywords, creative testing. Prior role, not a Momentum engagement. Read the case study.
On the first traffic test: 719 landing-page views at $0.03 each. 3,926 across the programme. Momentum's own campaigns.
What it costs
You should not have to sit through a discovery call to find out whether we are in your range. Two rules govern everything: prices are published, and we never charge a percentage of ad spend — that caps our revenue exactly when we succeed at cutting your waste.
$2,500, two weeks, fixed scope, credited in full to your first month. A paid account and compliance-risk review, a keyword and demand map, a tracking and attribution gap analysis, and a prioritised 90-day plan you can execute with us or without us.
$3,500–$12,000 per month. Three ARR-gated tiers, three-month initial term, then month to month. No annual lock-in. If a workstream is not producing after 90 days we cut it and re-scope rather than keeping you on it.
One guarantee, and it is narrow because it is the part we control: 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. Exclusions are published on How we work.
Questions
Very few, and the ones that do tend to be either large paid-media shops with a fintech client or two, or generalists with a vertical page. The distinction worth testing in a first call is simple: ask what they would do about financial services verification in your specific target markets. An agency that runs regulated accounts will answer with a country list and a regulator. One that does not will answer with a process.
It depends entirely on where you are targeting. Google requires it in a list of 42 countries, with a separate verification for each targeted location — the United Kingdom is on that list, and so are 24 EEA countries, phased in from 23 July 2026 and complete since 15 September 2026. The United States is not on it, and neither are Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa or Ghana. Advertiser identity verification and the financial products policy apply regardless. We check this per market at the start rather than assuming, because the list changes.
Ours starts at a $2,500 Acquisition Audit, credited to your first month, then $3,500 to $12,000 a month depending on ARR band and scope. Ad spend is separate and always paid by you directly to the platform — we never bill a percentage of it. Full scope and exclusions are on the pricing page.
That is the first conversation, and it moves to the front of the queue — appeal windows are short. What we can promise is a properly built appeal and an honest read on whether the underlying cause is fixable, which is often a policy violation on the landing page rather than anything in the account. What nobody can promise is reinstatement; anyone who does is guessing on your behalf. If you are drafting one now, start by reading the reason code before you appeal. On Google, first check which kind of Google Ads suspension you have: a billing suspension and an egregious one need different first moves.
Paid is fast for signal and slow for pipeline. You will know within a week or two which messages earn clicks, and within a month which earn qualified leads. Pipeline impact takes as long as your sales cycle takes — typically 90 to 180 days in B2B fintech. We report the leading indicators monthly on Foundation and every two weeks on Compound and Scale, so the wait is visible rather than silent.
As a scheduled reviewer with a defined queue, not an obstacle. Claims are substantiated before drafting, copy goes over in batches with the source for each claim attached, and we keep a record of what was approved so the next cycle starts from precedent. If you have a review SLA, we build the production calendar around it.
Yes, and in this category the platform mix matters more than usual because the restrictions differ. Meta's special ad category for financial products removes targeting that LinkedIn still allows. Microsoft and LinkedIn each run their own arrangements for financial services. We would rather run two channels properly than five badly.
No. You get a named person on the account, and that person does the work. We are small, which is exactly why we gate by ARR and by category — we would rather turn work away than run it through a freelancer bench.
Next
Two weeks, $2,500, credited against your first month if you continue. You get a paid account and compliance-risk review, a keyword and demand map, a tracking and attribution gap analysis, and a prioritised 90-day plan — yours to execute with us or without us.
Start the Acquisition Audit Tell us what is wrong with the account
We reply within one working day. If you are outside the range we will say so in a reply rather than in the thirtieth minute of a discovery meeting.