The Australian fintech building a media play

Chris Pash
By Chris Pash | 8 December 2020

Raiz, the app using small change to invest, is finally leveraging the habits of its almost 1 million sign ups to create a fine-tuned media play.

The app, originally called Acorn until local players bought it from the US parent, is offering a B2B Facebook/Instagram marketing service for brands by using its rich transactional data to run highly targeted campaigns.

Jessica Rayner, Raiz Invest’s head of partnerships, says people have been urging the company to use the data collected when app users purchase and get a credit to their investment accounts.

The move is a departure from the key user proposition of rounding up purchases and adding the small change to an investment portfolio managed by professionals.

For example, when you buy a coffee in the morning, the app will round up $3.50 to $4 and put the 50 cents into the investment account with exposure to the share market.

A rewards program gathers data on purchases. “Essentially, it's kind of like a cash back,” says Rayner.

“For example, if you shop with the iconic, we use the commission to purchase shares and that gets invested back into the Raiz account.”

The company has more than 250 partners providing a commission, 70% of which gets reinvested into customer Raiz accounts.

And the resulting customer data -- until now unused and lying idle -- can be used by brands to finely target potential customers.

“Hypothetically a healthy food brand might come to us and say ‘We want to get in front of people that have never shopped with us, but have an interest in health and fitness’,” says Rayner.

“We can create a Facebook lookalike audience to target anyone that has a gym membership, anyone that has purchased it, or health or fitness related brands. And if someone fits that targeting, as they scroll on Facebook or Instagram, they'll get those ads.”

Raiz charges a flat 20% fee of the total ad spend. Its target market is both current and new partners looking for an effective way to get in front of finely defined audiences in a social setting, Facebook/Instagram.

The data comes from Raiz’s 946,000 sign ups. About 233,000 of those are monthly active users. At last report, Raiz had $581.34 million in funds under management with an average balance of $2,109.

The data includes demographic and transactional at store level, to target gender, age, location, income, shopped at competitors or particular interest, and anything transactional such as gym membership, car owner, health insurance, charities.

“We have started running a few campaigns with brands over the past few months and we've seen awesome results,” Rayner says.

“More and more people are shopping online and COVID just accelerated it.”

Raiz, now listed on the ASX, posted a 57% increase to $9.8 million in revenue for the year to June.

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