India Tops Global Market in Number of Finance App installs

Fintech apps are experiencing a high demand of 132 percent increase in downloads globally, and a 26 percent YoY growth during 2019 to 2020 in India, according a recent research report.

More than 80 percent of Finance app installs in India were for financial services, as the market continues to be dominated by wallet apps and other services. Investment apps also took a fair pair of the pie due to an increase in installs, according to The State of Finance App Marketing report from AppsFlyer, a global marketing measurement firm.

Globally, the uptick in Fintech adoption was led by the developing nations- India, Brazil, and Indonesia, which emerged as the mega markets contributing to almost half of the global number of downloads. These countries, along with India, have a massive number of people that are either unbanked or under-banked. The average number of downloads in developing markets was observed as 70 percent higher than the average in developed markets.

Aditya Maheshwari, Head of Customer Success, AppsFlyer India said, “2020 has been a game-changer in India’s FinTech (app) adoption. Marketing-demand for Fintech apps continues to rise despite the pandemic. As India’s overall install trend demonstrated, Q2 2020 was impacted by the pandemic with a 51 percent decrease in comparison to Q1 2020, followed by a 3.3x surge until Q1 2021 as apps returned to aggressively market their products and services. This just further galvanizes India’s leadership in the global Fintech app space.”

The global surge in demand for Fintech apps led marketers to invest nearly $3 billion to acquire new users in 2020. India alone commanded over $146 million of the total worldwide budgets.

Few of the key India insights include:

• Increase in the registration rate: Overall 41 percent of Fintech app installers in India registered within the first 30 days post-install, driven by lending apps which was the highest at 44 percent.
• Reliance on marketing: Fintech apps in APAC mainly rely on marketing to drive demand, particularly in India and Southeast Asian markets with overall investment rates in these markets reaching 65 percent.
• Rising media costs lead to rise in spends in India: India saw a 42 percent drop in the average app install ad spend per app between Q1 2020 to Q3 2020 due to the first wave of Covid-19. Due to the festive season, consumers spent more on e-commerce apps hence, the install ad spend in FinTech apps saw a decline in Q3. After the drop, budgets got revived and increased by 2x between Q3 2020 to Q1 2021, owing to the rise in the cost of media.
• Fraud still a concern: In India, the share of fraudulent installs remained mostly the same despite a drop in Q2 2020. Particularly for loan apps the fraud rate was high in Q1 2021 at 67 percent whereas overall it touched 40 percent in the same quarter.

The State of Finance App Marketing 2021 is an anonymous aggregate of proprietary APAC data collected from 2.7 billion finance app installs. Of this, 600 million non-organic installs and data from 1230 apps were analyzed.