How do customers add new items?
Recently, listed fintech company Qifu Technology (NASDAQ:QFIN) announced its third-quarter results, in which the performance of customer acquisition attracted market attention.
According to the financial report figures, as of the third quarter of 2023, Qifu Technology has empowered 155 financial institutions, providing credit services to more than 49 million users. Among them, the scale of matching loans in the third quarter reached 123.1 billion, a year-on-year increase of about 11%.
It is worth mentioning that in terms of customer acquisition, the company regards embedded financial business (API customer acquisition) as one of its strategic priorities, and cooperates with scenario platforms to increase the scale of customer acquisition and reduce the cost of customer acquisition, as a supplement to the information flow channel.
The so-called embedded financial business means that the platform embeds scientific and technological capabilities as basic capabilities in the scene side, and only when the scenario triggers the need for loan information, it will not take the initiative to reach users, accurately identify the scene through technology, give customers the amount that they can bear, avoid excessive credit, and control bad debts at a low level.
According to public information, in the second half of 2020, Qifu Technology pioneered the technology of "embedded finance" in the industry for the first time.
In the second quarter of 2023, the company's sales and marketing expenses increased by 339% to 43.6 billion yuan. Consumer Finance understands that marketing expenses are mainly used to deepen the "embedded" customer acquisition ecology and improve the coverage ability of advantageous customer groups, indicating that Qifu Technology is also increasing its weight in reaching high-quality customer groups.
Since the second half of 2023, Qifu Technology has increased its cooperation with embedded finance, especially with the traffic of giant engines, to create innovative and customized customer strategies through joint modeling. Benefiting from the marketing and promotion on the Douyin platform, the number of new credit users and borrowers in the third quarter hit the highest level in a single quarter since 2022.
Relevant data show that in the third quarter, the number of new credit users and new borrowers reached 1.8 million and 900,000. Among them, the number of new credit users in embedded finance increased by about 46% month-on-month, and the proportion of new credit users increased to 33%.In the second quarter, embedded finance accounted for less than 20% of new credit users.
Another listed platform, Yiren Jinke (NYSE:YRD), also said in its latest financial report that its joint modeling with leading Internet platforms has achieved good results, boosting the first loan performance in the third quarter to increase by nearly 50% quarter-on-quarter. The number of new service users in the quarter reached 1.2 million+, an increase of 187%。
The consumer finance industry understands that the platform mainly acquires customers through RTA (Realtime API) and other means. RTA is a customer acquisition model in which advertisers and channels display target customers and reply to decision-making information in real time, and the platform optimizes customer information based on customer information.
In traditional customer acquisition, advertisers and channels lack user data and data dimensions, which cannot solve the problem of targeted delivery. In the RTA model, advertisers choose to cooperate deeply with channels to establish models to help channels understand their own customer portraits, change authorization data to accurate delivery, and realize the effect of real-time bidding and real-time feedback between advertisers and channels, reduce traffic loss, and improve the delivery effect.
For example, an Internet platform judges a user or a potential customer of an advertiser through a model established by both parties, and will ask whether to bid through a real-time interface, and the advertiser first judges whether it meets its own requirements through the model, and then returns the bidding decision result in real time to make a final decision on whether to place an order.
Of course, regardless of the technology, in terms of customer acquisition effect, whether the overall customer portrait of the platform matches is still the key. According to a consumer finance practitioner, they have cooperated with Kuaishou, but the quality of customers has declined;Comparatively speaking, customers on the Douyin platform have better credit business.
In terms of customer acquisition, Qifu Technology also said that the company reached a cooperation agreement with Bilibili in the first quarter of this year and became its first batch of financial technology marketing partners. However, the fit between the platform's user portrait and consumer finance remains to be tested.