Hi Fintech Architects —
Today, we are excited to highlight AppsFlyer’s State of Finance for Marketers: Europe 2026 report.
It tracked 2.4 billion installs and roughly a billion dollars of spend to figure out where Europe’s finance marketing budget is actually going.
There are some pretty fascinating metrics in here, so let’s dig in. Or, if you want to just see the numbers, click below:
Neobanks win the download. Banks win the customer.
For most of the last decade, consumer fintech in Europe was a race to acquire, and the neobanks have been really good at this.
And to a large extent, neobanks still win. In France, they pull close to two new users for every one a traditional bank gets, and Revolut now sits at number one in Spain, France, and Italy all at once.
But follow those users past the install, and the picture flips. Traditional banks keep 1.5x to 2x as many users around at day 30, which means the brands are losing the download war, but are getting the money.
Half of finance app installs aren’t even real!
Of course, holding onto customers only matters if they were ever real to begin with, and a lot of them aren’t. In Western Europe, close to one in every two investment-app installs gets flagged as fraud.
This was a pretty big surprise to us as well.
But it makes sense economically: the higher the payout per install, the higher the fraud incentive, and digital wallets and banking apps suffer proportionally lower rates of install fraud throughout the region.
The front door is moving to AI.
Even the way people find these apps is changing.
More and more, they're starting their money questions inside ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of on a bank's homepage. Revolut, Starling, and Lloyds are already scrambling to put their own AI assistants in the app before a general chatbot gets there first.
The handoff is real money, too: web-to-app already drives 41.8% of owned-media conversions in Western Europe. A click that lands straight in the app converts about 2.8x better than one stuck on mobile web.
Europe isn't one market.
The two European markets do not behave the same way.
Western Europe is mature and flat, so growth there comes from moving people who already visit the website into the app.
Eastern Europe is still in land-grab mode, where Android banking installs have nearly tripled in two years and people sign up straight from a text.
Germany is its own animal, heavy on retail investing and, by the report's math, about 18 months out from a neobank majority. GTM leaders have to think locally and not optimize for a single profile across the continent.
This is just a preview of the data in the full report.
Check it out to see where traditional banks are out-retaining the neobanks, how install fraud a real problem, and where AI search is changing the way customers find their next app.
Additional key topics include:
Retention and engagement benchmarks across banking, BNPL, crypto, and investing
Install fraud rates by platform, channel, and country
Web-to-app and deep-linking conversion lift, market by market
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