Growth systems for products
people must trust first.
Investing platforms, digital assets and wealthtech grow differently: every ad passes compliance, every customer needs convincing, and undisciplined spend gets punished. This is the work I have done for the last four years, inside the rules.
Why fintech growth
is different.
Playbooks from ecommerce and SaaS break the moment they meet a regulator and a customer who is being asked to deposit money. Three constraints change everything.
Trust is the product
Nobody impulse-buys an investment account. Education, credibility and social proof do the heavy lifting; paid media only amplifies what trust has already earned.
Compliance gates every word
Every claim, every creative, every landing page passes review. Teams that fight this lose months; teams that design for it ship compliant campaigns the first time.
CAC punishes shortcuts
Funding costs money and switching costs are high, so mistakes compound. Without honest attribution and cohort economics, budgets scale losses instead of growth.
Four moves, in order.
The sequence that cut CAC by more than 30% and grew funded accounts 2.5× at Baraka. Order matters: each step funds the next.
Measure truthfully
Rebuild attribution on an MMP so channel decisions run on real efficiency, not platform-reported numbers. At Baraka this ran on Adjust, with full cohort and LTV visibility.
Educate to convert
Investor education as an acquisition channel: content that answers real questions compliantly, converting the cautious majority that ads alone never reach.
Own your channels
Referral, influencer and partnership programs built as products with owners and roadmaps. At Baraka they reached roughly 35% of all acquisition.
Retain to compound
Onboarding, activation nudges and lifecycle work that raise what each customer is worth. Day-7 retention up 20%, which quietly lowers the CAC you can afford.
Referred customers are worth about 25% more
Referral programs are not promo codes; they are products. Built and tuned properly at Baraka, referred customers arrived pre-trusted, activated faster and were worth roughly 25% more over their lifetime than paid cohorts. In a category where trust is the bottleneck, that is the moat.
Five times the content, compliant by default
An AI content operation with the compliance manual built in: retrieval over brand and regulatory documentation means generated copy comes out DFSA-aware from the first draft. Output rose more than five times and topic-to-publish fell from days to under an hour, without adding headcount.
Two regulated platforms, in detail.
Re-Architecting Acquisition Around CAC, Cohorts and LTV
Full growth ownership at a DFSA-regulated investing platform, reporting to the CEO: attribution rebuilt, referral economics scaled, retention lifted, UAE local stocks taken to market.
Scaling Regulated Regional Growth
Growth for a CBB-regulated crypto exchange across six markets: education-led organic strategy, a lossless rain.bh to rain.com migration, and paid plus unpaid engines built end to end.
“In regulated products, the durable advantages are attribution honesty, owned channels and retention. Media buying is the commodity layer.”
Asked by every fintech founder.
Can you work with our compliance team?
That is the home turf. Most of my career has run inside DFSA and CBB-style environments where legal reviews every word. Campaigns get designed to pass review the first time, and your compliance team gets a marketing counterpart who speaks their language.
Which channels work when ads are restricted?
Education-led organic, referral programs, partnerships and influencer work built for compliant delivery. At Rain, organic traffic doubled in a category where paid options were heavily constrained; at Baraka, owned channels reached roughly 35% of acquisition.
How fast can CAC actually move?
Measurement gets fixed in the first month; that alone usually finds waste. Meaningful CAC movement shows up over one to two quarters as the mix shifts toward owned channels and retention raises what you can afford to pay. Anyone promising it in two weeks is selling something.
Do you run the team or advise from the side?
Either, but the results on this page came from running things: owning the budget, leading in-house teams and agencies, and reporting to the CEO. Advisory works best after an audit defines exactly what needs to change.
Growing a regulated product?
Tell me what you are building, which regulator you answer to, and where growth is stuck. That is enough for a useful first conversation.