Pangea: Fintech Marketing Case Study

THE SETUP

The wrong number was driving the budget

Pangea Money Transfer let U.S. residents send money to Latin America and Asia. The customers lived in immigrant communities, and reaching them meant traditional media that cost a lot and returned very little.

The deeper problem was the KPI. Every program was measured on app downloads. Downloads had been the right metric while the company was raising capital. They were the wrong metric once revenue mattered, because an install is not a transfer and the budget had no line back to money moving.

So ROI stayed hard to demonstrate no matter how the media performed.

Meanwhile the audience had moved. Their media habits and their phone use had both changed since the original strategy was written.

We were brought in to fix the approach from the ground up.

Our work tripled new transacting users.

THE SOLUTION

The rebuild started with the audience. We looked at mobile and desktop usage, how exchange rate swings affected behavior, how many services people used back to back, media consumption, and transfer intent. That gave us a picture of the customer that the old plan did not have.

Then we changed what the programs were chasing.

Program highlights include:

Campaign goals realigned from app installs to new first transfers
A demand gen strategy that fixed lower-funnel efficiency before scaling awareness
Programmatic display, video, and paid social against new audiences
App install campaigns through Google and Apple search platforms
A measurement stack built with AppsFlyer and Domo for third-party reporting and attribution

THE STRATEGY

Fix the bottom before spending on the top

Most rebuilds start with awareness because awareness is the visible part. We did the opposite. Lower funnel came first, so every dollar we later spent building demand landed on a path that converted.

Getting leadership aligned on the KPI change made that possible. Once new first transfers replaced installs as the target, the media plan had somewhere honest to point.

Attribution closed the loop. AppsFlyer and Domo gave Pangea a view from spend to transaction, which is what let the team defend the budget internally instead of arguing about download counts.

Upper funnel work stayed in the mix. The difference is that all of it tied back to revenue.

The Results

Every dollar tied to a transaction

By the end, 100% of Pangea’s monthly marketing budget traced back to new transacting users.

582%

Increase in file transfer volume

3X

Increase in new transacting users

200%

Increase in new user app installs

Why it matters:

Transfer volume is revenue, so growth showed up where the business could feel it
App installs still grew 200% even after installs stopped being the goal, which means the shift cost nothing at the top of the funnel
Tying the full budget to transacting users gave marketing a defensible ROI story for the first time