In the data-centric online ecosystem, it’s typical for app users to feel like they’re a product being sold to advertisers.
The financial services app Klover is betting it can flip that dynamic by offering to compensate people for their data when they use the Klover app.
Paying for data is one piece of Klover’s app, which offers multiple tools to save money and make smarter budgetary decisions.
Users can request cash advances to avoid overdraft fees and cover costs between paydays. They can also access a slate of financial services, including credit monitoring services and budgeting and savings tools, through the subscription-level Klover+ offering. The company is also working on implementing banking services and a system where users can watch videos, engage with partner offers and upload receipts to receive in-app points that can be spent to increase their cash advances and cover expedited fees.
“We’re moving quickly towards a full banking suite,” said Meredith Guerriero, Klover’s COO. “And we’ll do this by driving new financial products for our consumers with banking products like checking with cashback on debit transactions, savings, even mortgages.”
End users in the free and subscription tiers opt in to sharing data with Klover and link the app to their checking accounts. The app compiles real-time transaction data, survey-based data and retailer-specific data from retailers like Amazon, Target and Walmart. This helps Klover understand the products users buy often, where they shop, the kind of car they drive and the types of financial services they might be interested in. Klover draws the line at sharing or selling that data appended to any personally identifiable information (PII) and uses bank-level PCI/SOC2 encryption on its user data.
That data is used to serve in-app ads. Klover builds out custom audiences based on its user data, and those custom audiences can also be traded in all major DSPs, including TradeDesk, DV360, Adelphic and Xandr, with sales lift measurement. Advertising partners can also build custom integrations into the Klover app to promote their product offerings.
“We’re still very early in our journey,” Guerriero said. In addition to its endemic advertising categories of financial services and retail, “we’re also starting to see a diverse set of customers, such as Verizon, GoodRx, Wayfair and many others lean in because of our insights and our overall performance.”
Klover also feeds data into its own suggestion engine, which offers shoppable ads and tips for how users can spend less money on consumer packaged goods (CPG) and services they use frequently.
“We can see that you consistently buy Tostitos, and you buy them at Walmart. But we also see Tostitos are cheaper at Target just down the road from you,” Guerriero said. “We’re able to bring that type of intelligence to users so that they can make better decisions and hopefully save more money.” That same data is also improving advertiser performance.
One of Klover’s advertising partners is Savvy, a car insurance comparison service. According to Savvy, Klover users are two times more likely to sign up for Savvy compared to Savvy’s average conversion rate. By its calculation, Klover users have saved an estimated $1.7 million on their car insurance by linking their Klover accounts to Savvy’s service.
“We’re seeing, on average, partner ROAS is upwards of 5x to 10x within their existing channels,” Guerriero said. For example, a wireless carrier saw a sales lift of 282%, a trading platform boosted sales by 40% and boasted a 14x ROAS, and a mass-market retailer saw a 65% membership lift and 41x ROAS.
Though Klover’s app was built to be GDPR and CCPA compliant, it’s currently only available to US-based users. Millennials and Gen Zers comprise much of the audience. Geared toward helping those on the lower end of the income spectrum make ends meet, household income among its user base ranges from around $40K to more than $150K.
Going forward, Klover plans to launch a self-service audience builder and targeting solution for in-app and programmatic as well as a separate insights and measurement suite for its advertiser partners.
