Alex Grach, General Manager EMEA at AppsFlyer, on the primacy battle, the fraud problem nobody is connecting to the right conversation and why knowing what's broken isn't the same as fixing it.
You work with finance brands right across EMEA – traditional banks, neobanks, embedded finance players. From where you sit, who's actually winning the customer relationship in Western Europe right now?
It depends what you mean by winning. If winning means acquiring customers, neobanks have largely won that battle already. In the UK they overtook traditional banks in new user acquisition in 2024, and in France it's now two to one in favour of neobanks and digital wallets. But if winning means owning the financial relationship that actually moves revenue, such as salary, mortgage, savings, the decisions that define someone's financial life, traditional banks are still largely holding that ground. They're losing the daily interaction and gaining almost nothing new, which is a slow bleed rather than a crisis for now.
The player most underestimated in this conversation is neither of those. Embedded finance, Carrefour Banque in France, telecoms building financial ecosystems, platforms that already have a customer relationship and are layering financial products on top, these businesses have a structural advantage that traditional banks and neobanks cannot replicate. Their customer acquisition cost is effectively zero. And in a market where acquiring a fintech customer can cost over a thousand dollars, that is not a marginal advantage but a different business model entirely.
My view is that the company most likely to own the European banking customer in ten years may not have a banking licence today. That conversation is not happening loudly enough in the industry.
Revolut, Monzo, Trade Republic have all reached profitability, a genuine milestone. But there's a persistent critique that neobanks have millions of accounts and very little of their customers' actual financial lives. How does a fintech cross that line?
Profitability is real, but I think it's being read as validation of a model that still has a fundamental unresolved problem.
Revolut has 70 million users. The number that matters how many, have their salary going in, is a fraction of that. And the gap between those two numbers is not primarily a product gap. Revolut has lending, savings, crypto, insurance and business accounts. The product suite is there the gap is one of timing and identification.
But there's another number that puts this in perspective. Average Day 30 retention in European consumer banking apps is somewhere between 4 and 5 percent. That means out of every hundred people who download a banking app, fewer than five are still actively using it a month later. Most neobanks are sitting on an enormous installed base where the vast majority of users have already disengaged. That's not just a retention problem. Primacy is won or lost in specific moments: salary redirect, first mortgage, first major investment. Those moments happen once, and if a competitor captures them, they're very hard to undo. Most neobanks know this in theory. What they often can't do in practice is identify which of their existing users is approaching one of those moments right now and reach them before someone else does.
This is a data and activation gap. And it's actually more solvable than building an entirely new product suite, but only if you have a clear enough view of your existing customer base to act on it.
There's a growing school of thought that the most valuable customer in finance isn't the next one you acquire but the one you already have but aren't fully serving. Do you buy that?
I do, and the market is already acting on it faster than most organisations realise. EMEA finance re-engagements grew 131% last year. New installs grew 7%. That gap tells you where the industry's collective attention is moving, even if individual budget conversations haven't caught up.
But I want to push back slightly on the framing, because I think the interesting question isn't whether dormant customers are valuable. They clearly are. The interesting question is why, given that most finance executives understand this, so little actually changes.
And the answer I keep coming back to is incentive structures. Acquisition has a natural owner, usually a performance marketing team with a budget, an agency relationship, and a clear metric to optimise toward. Re-engagement doesn't have the same organisational gravity. It falls between marketing, CRM, and product, nobody fully owns the outcome, and when budgets get squeezed it's the first thing to get deprioritised.
What I see in the businesses that are actually moving the needle is less about strategy and more about ownership. Who is accountable when a customer goes dormant? In most banks and fintechs, the honest answer is nobody in particular. Marketing brought them in, product built the experience, CRM sends the emails, and when the customer disappears everyone points somewhere else. You can't fix that with a better retargeting campaign.
Whoever owns the customer relationship owns the growth. Right now, in most financial institutions, nobody does. And that gap has a price tag. Re-engaging a lapsed customer costs a fraction of acquiring a new one, and in a market where fintech acquisition costs have crossed a thousand dollars in some segments, that's not a marginal efficiency gain. The businesses that close that ownership gap aren't just capturing dormant value. They're spending less to grow than their competitors are. That tends to compound.
European finance operates in one of the most complex regulatory environments in the world, with PSD3, DORA and MiCA still bedding in, and GenAI is enabling fraud at a scale that would have been unimaginable three years ago. How do you build a growth engine that holds up under all of that?
The first thing I'd say is that most organisations are still treating these as separate problems, and that's a mistake that's costing them in ways they can't fully see.
Finance businesses typically have a fraud team and a measurement team that operate completely independently. But they're both trying to answer the same underlying question: are the users we're paying for real, and is the activity we're seeing genuine? When those functions don't talk to each other, you end up in a situation where a company is spending on fraud protection and simultaneously making growth decisions on data that fraud has already corrupted. Forty percent of Android installs in finance are fraudulent. Thirty percent of in-app conversion events are fraudulent. If your optimisation algorithm is learning from that data, it's learning from fiction. We see this across the finance businesses we work with across EMEA. The ones that connected their fraud intelligence to their growth decisions, treating them as the same function rather than separate teams, consistently made better capital allocation choices. Not because they had bigger budgets, but because they were working from accurate data while their competitors weren't.
But here's what I think is underappreciated about the regulatory side. PSD3 and MiCA are essentially forcing a quality-of-growth conversation that most boards were actively avoiding. Know your user, keep your transaction data clean and demonstrate that your growth is real and auditable. These aren't just compliance requirements; they're the conditions under which sustainable growth is possible in the first place. The businesses that built for that proactively,now have growth data that is auditable, defensible, and trustworthy.
So my answer to how you build a resilient growth engine is: stop separating the fraud problem from the measurement problem and stop treating regulation as something that happens to your growth strategy. The constraint and the strategy are the same thing.
There's an argument that measurement and attribution are fundamentally marketing operations concerns, important but not something that should occupy a CEO or CFO. Why would you push back on that?
The reason attribution gets treated as a marketing ops concern is precisely the reason it shouldn't be.
The people presenting marketing performance data almost always have a vested interest in how it looks. Agencies report on the channels they manage. Internal teams report on the budgets they own. So, the numbers that reach the CFO have already been filtered through several layers of motivated reasoning, and most CFOs either don't know that, or know it abstractly without fully reckoning with what it means for the decisions they've made.
Which means any CFO who has signed off on a significant marketing budget has probably already made several large capital allocation decisions based on numbers that were wrong. They just don't know which ones.
The analogy I find most useful is credit risk. You wouldn't let a lending business model credit risk on self-reported borrower data. The conflict of interest is too obvious, of course the borrower presents the best possible picture. But that's exactly what happens when you let channels self-report their own performance. Google attributes conversions to Google. Meta attributes them to Meta. This is exactly why independent measurement exists as a category. Not as a marketing tool, but as a financial control. The same logic that gives you an external auditor for your accounts applies to your marketing data. You need someone with no stake in the outcome, sitting across the entire channel mix, telling you what is actually working. The finance businesses that have put that infrastructure in place are making growth decisions on a completely different quality of information than the ones that haven't.
You're heading to Money20/20 Amsterdam, a room full of senior finance executives. What's the conversation you're most looking forward to having, and what will separate the businesses still growing in three years from the ones that aren't?
The conversation I want to have is not about whether any of this is understood. It largely is. Most senior executives in finance know their data isn't clean enough, know their teams aren't structured for this problem, know they're leaving revenue on the table with existing customers. The interesting conversation is about why knowing doesn't translate into acting.
The bottleneck is almost never technology. It’s that the accountability structures most banks and fintechs inherited weren’t built for this problem. Marketing owns acquisition. Product owns engagement. Finance owns revenue. And somewhere in the gap between those three, the customer relationship falls apart and nobody is quite sure whose problem it is to fix.
The businesses I expect to be growing strongly in three years have probably already done something structurally different. Not a bigger budget or a better tech stack, but a different accountability model around the customer outcome. Someone who owns the number that actually matters: not installs, not active users, but the depth and value of the customer relationship over time.That's the conversation worth having in Amsterdam. Not whether the problem is real, but what it actually takes to stop diagnosing it and start fixing it.
