Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The metric that keeps CMOs awake at night, CFOs grumbling about marketing spend, and CEOs demanding “more growth, faster!” Few metrics in the banking and fintech arena are as hard to reliably quantify as this one.
Luckily, a new study from Fintel Connect, 2025 Cost Per Acquisition Benchmarking Guide for Financial Services,provides some much-needed reality checks. Let’s get real about why your acquisition costs might be too high – and how to fix them before your CEO starts asking uncomfortable questions.
Here’s what the benchmarking data makes painfully clear: Your CAC isn’t about how much you’re willing to spend. It’s about how smart you are about five key factors:
Are you overpaying for new customers? Fintel Connect gives banks and fintechs some solid, reliable customer acquisition cost benchmarks for the U.S.:
Banking Cost Per Acquisition
Source: Fintel Connect
Speaking of unpredictability, there are three wildcards impacting banks’ and fintechs’ CAC:
Affiliate marketing is the under-appreciated workhorse of acquisition because it’s: 1) performance-based – you only pay for actual results; 2) scalable – you control volume by tweaking partner incentives; and 3) predictable – unlike bidding wars in search ads.
But success depends on 1) partnering with quality affiliates, not coupon sites scraping leads; 2) sharing real conversion data, not just shallow clicks; and 3) structuring commissions to reward funded, high-lifetime value accounts, not window shoppers.
Fintel Connect suggests some short-term tactics to get customer acquisition costs in line:
On a longer-term horizon, banks and fintechs need to:
CAC isn’t a mystical, unchangeable number. It’s a reflection of how well you align your products, channels, partners, and conversion strategies to actual customer behavior.
The brands that win in 2025 and beyond won’t have to be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones who stop throwing money at the wall and start treating customer acquisition cost like the strategic weapon it should be. You can find Fintel Connect’s report here.
Ron Shevlin is chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors. Tune in to Ron’s What’s Going On In Banking podcast and follow him on LinkedIn and X.