Nearly one in every two investment app installs in Western Europe was flagged as fraudulent
Eastern Europe’s Android banking installs nearly tripled in two years
Session growth is outpacing install growth across finance sub-categories
Europe’s finance apps enter a new era: Growth, AI, and the battle for retention
Europe’s finance app ecosystem has entered a new phase: one shaped less by digital adoption itself and more by fragmentation, maturity, and shifting consumer expectations. Financial behaviour, regulation, and trust vary significantly across the region. Markets like the UK and the Nordics continue to push innovation at scale, while Central and Eastern Europe leapfrogs legacy banking through mobile-first experiences.
What connects these markets is acceleration. Mobile payment transaction values in Europe grew nearly 50x between 2017 and 2022, and digital payments are projected to account for more than a third of all point-of-sale transactions by 2030. Consumers now manage every aspect of their financial lives through apps, from payments and savings to investing and insurance.
But the competitive landscape is shifting just as fast. AppsFlyer data shows traditional banks continue to dominate retention, with Day 30 rates reaching 1.5–2x higher than neobanks. Meanwhile, challengers are winning the acquisition race. In France, neobanks attract twice as many new users as incumbents. The result is a market increasingly split between institutions that can retain users and those that can acquire them efficiently.
At the same time, AI is reshaping the discovery layer of finance itself. Consumers are increasingly turning to conversational AI tools for budgeting guidance, spending analysis, and product comparison, a trend well-documented in the US and gaining traction across European markets. As this behaviour scales, finance brands that aren’t visible within AI-driven ecosystems risk losing relevance at the top of the funnel.
For finance marketers, this creates a new challenge. The battle is no longer only about installs or transactions, it’s about visibility within AI-driven ecosystems, engagement across fragmented channels, and the ability to measure the full user journey in real time.
In this report, AppsFlyer, together with our partners Sensor Tower and Google Ads, explores how finance and fintech brands across Europe are navigating this transition. We examine the trends shaping installs, retention, engagement, and competitive positioning across key markets including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
* All results are based on fully anonymous and aggregated data. To ensure statistical validity, we follow strict volume thresholds and methodologies and only present data when these conditions are met. When normalised data is presented, the share of each month out of the total for the entire time frame is shown to create a trend.
The new economics of finance app growth
European finance apps are operating in a rapidly evolving market. User acquisition remains a priority, but the economics of growth are evolving.
Finance brands are increasingly prioritising the re-engagement of existing users over acquiring new ones, particularly on iOS, as they seek growth opportunities in a maturing and highly competitive market.
While traditional banks remain the largest advertisers, with budgets weighted toward retention and re-engagement rather than net-new user growth, neobanks continue to lean into acquisition-led strategies. Money transfer apps sit somewhere in between, with retargeting driving a significant share of their conversions.
Finance marketing is shifting toward a more retention-focused economy, as acquisition costs climb. The strongest performers are those treating re-engagement as a core growth engine.
The finance user journey is also becoming more fragmented. While mobile apps have become the primary gateway to retail banking, discovery and research still frequently begin on the web, creating a cross-platform journey that many marketers still struggle to measure effectively.
In Western Europe, web-to-app is the dominant channel at 41.8% of conversions, while in Eastern Europe, text-to-app leads by a wide margin. Deep linking is playing a central role in bridging these cross-platform journeys, helping brands create smoother transitions while improving conversion efficiency across channels.
Meanwhile, the EU’s open banking framework is lowering barriers for fintechs to access payment infrastructure, while privacy-first policies are redefining how marketers measure, engage, and retain users.
The result is a finance ecosystem where growth is no longer defined by acquisition alone. Success depends on how effectively brands retain users, connect journeys across channels, and adapt to a market shaped by both technological and regulatory change.
Top app genres by downloads in Europe in 2025
Top finance app subgenres by downloads in Europe in 2025
Owned media conversions by channel in 2025
Installs flatline as the platform quality divide sharpens
Finance app installs remained stable in Europe in 2025, reaching 960 million downloads (+0.4% YoY). But stability at the top-line masks a deeper shift in user priorities and market maturity.
Buy Now, Pay Later apps surged 40% year over year, while insurance and budgeting apps also gained momentum. Cryptocurrency downloads fell 35%. Consumers are moving away from high-risk financial experimentation and toward tools that help manage everyday financial pressure and long-term control.
That behavioural shift is also changing platform economics across Western Europe. The UK is now the only major market where iOS leads in download share, while France is approaching parity. Germany, Italy, and Spain remain Android-led, but the gap continues to narrow.
Paid acquisition patterns reinforce this divide. Android accounts for 16.2% of finance app installs from paid channels, nearly double the 9.2% on iOS. Android’s larger audience and lower CPIs make it the default scale lever. But iOS users consistently deliver stronger Day 1 and Day 30 retention, while Android’s long-term retention weakened. The lower paid share on iOS may represent an underinvestment, not a ceiling.
Spain and Italy stand out as markets where both platforms are improving and the retention gap is narrowing. That creates a different kind of opportunity: not choosing between Android and iOS, but building stronger cross-platform experiences before those markets fully mature.
In Western Europe’s finance app market, growth is becoming less about acquiring users at scale and more about building durable financial relationships. Competitive advantage now belongs to apps that retain, engage, and monetise users, not just attract them.
YoY change in financial app installs in Western Europe by platform (Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025)
Finance app install share in key European markets by platform in 2025
Finance app retention rates in key European markets by platform in 2025
Finance app sessions trend in key European markets by platform (normalised)
Traditional banks rise to meet the neobank challenge
Mobile banking apps have become central to Europe’s digital finance ecosystem, accounting for 338 million downloads in 2025, more than any other finance sub-category. But growth divides sharply along geographical lines. While Western Europe’s stabilising install growth reflects a market of maturity, Eastern Europe, driven by rapid neobank expansion, has seen user engagement rise dramatically, positioning it as one of the region’s clearest growth opportunities.
Android installs nearly tripled in Eastern Europe between Q2 2024 and Q1 2026, fueled by rapid digital adoption in markets where legacy infrastructure is thinner. Now, as sessions rise rapidly, Eastern Europe is seeing existing users become dramatically more active, with banking apps shifting from occasional utility to essential daily financial habit.
Across the region’s largest markets, the competitive landscape is highly fragmented. The neobank Revolut stands out as the only brand achieving meaningful success across multiple markets, becoming the #1 banking app in Spain, France and Italy as well as performing strongly in the UK.
Yet the success of neobanks across Europe has not ushered in an end to the age of traditional banking. In Germany, for example, public savings bank Sparkasse remains one of the most popular banking apps, anchored by its institutional footprint. While in France, banks like Crédit Agricole are competing with neobanks via purpose-built digital brands (in this case, Ma Banque) rather than attempting to modernize legacy apps.
With one in three Gen Z customers in the UK planning to use in-branch banking in 2025, the highest rate of any demographic, the demand for physical banking touchpoints isn’t disappearing, even among digital natives. Neobanks are winning the acquisition race in growing markets, but traditional banks are rising to the challenge.
Mobile banking app install trend by platform (normalised)
Mobile banking app sessions trend by platform (normalised)
The new banking battleground: regulatory legitimacy
Regulatory legitimacy is becoming a competitive differentiator among banking apps. Fintechs that once looked like banks are now actively becoming them, acquiring banking licences that unlock product expansion: lending, credit and consumer protection.
For marketers, this reframes the messaging around compliance for neobanks and traditional banks alike: the former can credibly claim to be “real banks”, while traditional banks can remind users “we always were”. The brands who can most clearly communicate stability, safety, and full regulatory backing will have a positioning advantage. Regulatory status is now a messaging lever, rather than just a compliance checkbox.
The second battleground is the AI advisory layer. Revolut, Starling and Lloyds are all among the banks racing to embed their own intelligent assistants in-app, rather than ceding financial guidance to general-purpose AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity. The institutions that move fastest to offer their own AI layers are those that will stay essential to the daily lives of their users.
Three patterns cut across every European market for banking apps. Standalone digital brands consistently outperform their parent institutions’ legacy apps, suggesting that modernizing a traditional banking app is not enough. To keep pace with neobanks in downloads, banks need purpose-built digital experiences.
Secondly, the multi-market dominance of Revolut has created a unique measurement challenge, with users spanning countries with different regulatory frameworks, currencies and behaviours. Cross-market attribution and performance benchmarking becomes significantly more complex than for a single-country player.
Finally, the persistence of traditional banking apps, even in neobank-dominated markets, suggests these institutions do still generate substantial download volume. The question comes in the quality of those downloads: whether legacy banking app users are converting to active, paying, retained users at the same rate as neobank installs.
Top banking apps in key European markets by downloads
Digital wallet and payment app market reaching maturity
Europe’s digital wallet and payment app category is entering a new phase. Quarterly downloads remained relatively stable at 40–50 million across the continent over the last two years, following familiar seasonal patterns, before declining noticeably in Q1 2026.
Part of that slowdown is cyclical. Wallet and payment apps typically benefit from Q4 holiday spending and new device activations, followed by a natural cooldown in Q1. But the broader trend points to a maturing category, where growth increasingly depends less on acquisition and more on retention, engagement and monetisation of existing users.
Against that backdrop, it is unsurprising that two global players dominate downloads across four of Europe’s five largest markets: PayPal and Google Wallet. France stands out as the exception, where Wero, backed by the European Payments Initiative, has become the only European-built alternative to claim the top spot. Whether Wero can deepen its presence across the eurozone and eventually expand beyond it will be one of the defining competitive questions for European payments in the years ahead.
While download growth has flattened, session data shows engagement is deepening. Users are not just installing wallet apps — they are using them more frequently as digital payments become embedded in everyday financial behaviour.
For marketers, the competitive landscape beneath the global leaders remains intensely local, with players like Wero, Satispay, Swile and Mobiles Bezahlen carving out strong regional positions. The category is also broader than it first appears. Apps like Wise, Remitly and WorldRemit consistently rank alongside domestic wallets, reflecting Europe’s highly mobile, multilingual and cross-border population. Wallet apps serve everyday spending while transfer apps solve a different financial need, but both compete for the same app store attention. Competitive benchmarking needs to account for both.
Digital wallets & payment app install trend in key European markets by platform (normalised)
Digital wallets & payment app sessions trend in key European markets by platform (normalised)
Top digital wallets & P2P payments apps in key European markets by downloads
Investment apps show session-to-install divergence
Europe’s investment and trading app category has entered a new phase of maturity. The explosive neobroker wave driven by meme stocks, crypto speculation, and low-cost trading has largely stabilised across the region. Germany remains the clearest example of that shift. Platforms like Trade Republic, Scalable Capital, and finanzen.net zero helped build one of Europe’s largest retail investing audiences, but the challenge now is no longer awareness. It is retention, engagement, and monetisation of an already-established user base.
Despite cryptocurrency downloads falling 35% year over year, crypto-native platforms remain a significant force in the investment app rankings. Exchanges like Crypto.com, Binance, and Coinbase still outrank many legacy investment platforms on downloads, suggesting that while the speculative wave has receded, the category’s core user base has consolidated around a handful of dominant players. The full application of MiCA since December 2024 has raised the compliance bar for crypto exchanges operating in Europe, favouring established players with the resources to meet licensing requirements.
Users increasingly view investing through a blended lens rather than separating stocks and crypto, which gives multi-asset ecosystems like Revolut and eToro a structural advantage over single-asset products competing on only one side of that divide.
At the same time, engagement across the category continues to deepen. Across Europe’s largest markets, investment app sessions are rising even as acquisition momentum normalises, with users treating these apps as habitual financial utilities rather than event-driven products opened only during periods of market volatility.
For marketers, this changes the metrics that matter. Success increasingly depends less on install scale and more on session frequency, product adoption, and long-term customer value. For investment platforms, the priority is converting free-tier users into deeper engagement and premium adoption. For crypto exchanges, the battleground centers on trust, regulatory positioning, and fraud prevention in a category where transaction values remain high.
Investment app sessions trend in key European markets (normalised)
Top investing and financial management apps in key European markets by downloads
Install fraudsters targeting high-value iOS users
Install fraud in European finance apps operates at a scale that significantly affects the economics of every marketing campaign in the category, distorting ROAS calculations, CPI benchmarks, and cohort analysis.
In Western Europe, investment apps averaged the highest fraud rates of any finance sub-category over the period: remarkably, nearly one in every two installs in this vertical was flagged as fraudulent. That tracks 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.
This also accounts for the way that iOS fraud runs higher than Android across most of the vertical, a surprising finding given iOS’s well-documented quality premium in paying users, retention and engagement. But as with investment apps specifically, iOS’ higher CPI rates have made it a more attractive target for fraudsters. For marketers, this means that the iOS quality advantage we discussed earlier in this report only holds true if fraud is first filtered out. Without robust fraud detection, this higher-value iOS cohort is diluted, with fraud inflating acquisition costs without generating real users.
Not all media sources carry the same risk. More traditional sources like SRNs (Self-Reporting Networks) consistently deliver reliable, high-quality traffic, and DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) perform well in this regard too. Ad networks are generally dependable for the most part. Where the picture shifts is with affiliate networks, which remain the most likely channel for fraud exposure in the finance vertical. This makes the choice of media mix a fraud prevention decision as much as a performance one.
Fraud detection and prevention tools should be seen not as optional add-ons but as essential infrastructure, protecting both budgets and measurement accuracy across every channel in the mix.
Finance app install fraud rates by platform & key categories
- What can traditional bank marketers learn from neobank download and engagement trends?
- Traditional banks can learn from neobanks’ agility in adapting to new finance trends and consumer preferences in ways that make banking feel fresh and engaging. Neobanks effectively target specific audiences on social channels to promote offerings like credit and debit cards, business accounts, under-16 accounts, and early paycheck access. Traditional banks already offer many of these products, but can benefit from more targeted marketing around their key differentiators while reducing friction to make it easier for younger, mobile-first users to sign up.
- Are new investment or fintech apps still breaking into Europe's top charts?
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Market saturation and increased competition have made it more challenging than ever for new investment and fintech apps to break into Europe’s top charts. However, there are still opportunities to stand out. Examples from 2025 include Wero, a digital wallet and P2P payment system created by the European Payments Initiative to compete with services like PayPal and Google Pay, as well as Kraken (cryptocurrency), Edenred+ (digital wallet and employee benefits), and Emma (budget tracking).
Breakout apps tend to share a few key traits. First, they offer convenient, mobile-friendly features that simplify financial services for consumers. Second, they often focus on a small number of core markets, such as the UK or France, before expanding across Europe. This helps them build a strong foothold before taking on the added complexity of localisation and varying financial regulations.
- How is crypto app competition evolving as MiCA reshapes the regulatory landscape?
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Interestingly, the crypto app market appears to have adapted quickly to MiCA. Overall, download trends in the European Union continue to mirror the volatility seen in the US and UK. Despite the 35% decline, demand has remained relatively stronger in the EU during both boom and bust cycles, suggesting a more structurally committed user base.
While the regulations may favor larger platforms with greater resources to maintain compliance, competition remains fierce. In 2025, the top 10 crypto apps accounted for nearly the same share of downloads as they did in 2023 (and under 50% in both years), suggesting that new competitors continue to emerge despite the increased regulatory burden.
- Which finance sub-verticals show the widest gap between downloads and actual engagement?
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The gap varies widely by sub-vertical, reflecting how frequently users need each type of financial service. Banking apps have increasingly evolved into “super apps,” offering a broad range of services, and European users spent around 12.5 hours per download in the first four months of 2026. Investing & Financial Management and Crypto apps also show relatively high engagement at 8.8 and 6.2 hours per download, respectively, although engagement has softened slightly in recent years.
At the other end of the spectrum, Loans and Insurance apps see much lower engagement, averaging under 45 minutes per download. However, Buy Now, Pay Later and Loans apps have recorded the fastest growth in time spent per download since 2024, reflecting rising demand in these categories.
- Where do you see the biggest untapped growth opportunity in European finance apps?
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In the coming years, AI will enable more proactive financial management tools that span consumers’ broader financial needs. This is less about handing full control of finances to AI, and more about providing guidance that helps users make better day-to-day decisions and fill gaps across their financial lives. For example, which payment methods or credit cards to use to maximize benefits, or where spending can be reduced to save for larger goals like travel or major purchases. Financial apps will increasingly position themselves as “financial assistants in your pocket,” helping users budget, pay bills, and manage investments through simple, safe, and personalized recommendations.
Financial literacy remains a key challenge, particularly among younger, mobile-first consumers. Well-designed AI tools have the potential to reduce complexity and make budgeting, saving, and investing more accessible at scale.
- How are European banks bridging the web-to-app gap, and where do users still drop off?
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The debate is no longer “web versus app.” Success in digital finance now demands a dual mandate: a unified experience for the consumer and unified visibility for the marketer.
The mobile web excels at initial discovery and the app remains the ultimate engine for secure execution and lifetime value. To extract the best of both worlds, leading banks should be optimizing two distinct, mutually exclusive user states:
- Acquiring Net-New Users (Visibility): The sharpest drop-off occurs at the mobile web-to-app-store handoff. Marketers must eliminate this blind spot through end-to-end web-to-app measurement, actively tracking the acquisition bridge to lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) without losing sight of the user.
- Maximizing Existing Users (Experience): Forcing app-installed users into clunky mobile web logins creates immediate friction. The solution is seamless deep linking. Routing high-intent web clicks directly into the app removes barriers, yielding an average 2.8x conversion rate lift over mobile web equivalents.
We see this happening in EMEA in real time as the market matures. Rather than arbitrarily shifting dollars between web and app, sophisticated marketers are dismantling silos. They are funding fluid, multi-purpose campaigns that treat the omnichannel journey as a single connected ecosystem to drive holistic growth.
- How is AI-driven search changing the way consumers discover and choose financial products?
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The physics of how people research money has changed significantly due to the rise of Generative AI. EMEA consumers no longer open ten tabs to compare rates. Instead, they feed Large Language Models complex, personal scenarios and expect a synthesized, objective answer. In this strictly regulated environment, this creates a fascinating set of constraints we can break down into three stages:
- Discovery: AI summarizes directly on the results page. Because regional compliance is so strict, algorithms index heavily on verifiable truth. If your data isn’t structured as machine-readable “atomic answers,” the model won’t cite you. You become structurally invisible.
- Acquisition: Because AI acts as a financial concierge, users arrive pre-educated. As a result, winning user acquisition strategies are the ones with sharp, action-oriented messaging that captures immediate demand.
- Re-Engagement: Your native app is the only owned channel that completely bypasses the algorithmic gatekeeper. In an AI-first world, app re-engagement becomes a proactive defensive moat. It allows you to anticipate needs and deliver instant utility faster than the user can type a new prompt. To make this work, your strategy must account for cross-platform behaviour—leveraging Web-to-App as the essential, frictionless bridge to secure both the transaction and the measurement.
The future of App Marketing in EMEA is a barbell strategy: let AI hyper-qualify demand on the web, while aggressively defending that LTV through benefit oriented user acquisition and proactive app re-engagement within a privacy-safe ecosystem.
- What creative strategies are actually driving finance app growth in a low-trust category?
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Trust in finance used to be built with massive, polished corporate campaigns. Not anymore! Today, standard financial literacy content sees a dismal 2% engagement rate. In modern algorithmic ad platforms, the creative actually does the targeting for you.
To drive real app growth and overcome consumer skepticism, leading finance brands are ditching the corporate script and focusing on three core levers:
- The Message: Broad lifestyle ads are out. Consumers want to know exactly what job your app will do for them. Concrete value propositions like transparent fees, automated round-ups, or instant digital cards consistently win.
- The Format High production value can actually backfire, making an institution feel distant. Growth is now driven by User-Generated Content (UGC) and creator-led app walkthroughs. These formats demystify complex products and offer a transparent “try before you buy” experience.
- The Tone: Finance is inherently stressful. Challenger brands are breaking through the noise by using humor and relatable frustration to contrast with stuffy legacy banks, effectively beating ad-blindness and lowering their Cost Per Action (CPA).
Brand Loyalty is no longer inherited from corporate legacy. It’s earned through immediate utility and authentic connection.
- How can finance marketers balance regulatory compliance with effective performance measurement?
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European finance apps are navigating a strict regulatory gauntlet – GDPR, PSD2, and MiCA. But privacy and performance can absolutely coexist! We are witnessing a definitive market shift from deterministic tracking to probabilistic measurement especially where data is scarce.
In order to maximize the output from Google’s AI for performance, the mandate for brands is clear: robust, consented first-party data is your most critical competitive asset.
Top marketers are utilizing these three strategies to capitalize on this shift:- Value-Based Bidding: Stop chasing cheap installs. Feed hashed first-party data into the algorithm to optimize exclusively for long-term business value.
- Frictionless UX: Deploy Web-to-App solutions alongside your App Campaigns if you have both an app and a website. Do not forget that deep-linking creates a seamless transition that can further streamline the cross platform user journey.
- Authentic Creative: In a low-trust environment, ditch the polish. Lean heavily into real user walkthroughs and radically transparent value propositions.
Embrace the modeled reality and keep growing!
- Where is finance app growth strongest in Europe, and what sets the winners apart?
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EMEA finance app growth is surging across the board, though regional drivers differ. In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile payments and lending apps lead as digital infrastructure modernizes. Meanwhile, mature markets like the UK, France, and Germany are driven by neobanks and investment platforms.
Because finance is heavily regulated and largely commoditized, outperforming players distinguish themselves by leveraging innovative creatives and advanced platform capabilities. Marketers are abandoning volume-focused bidding and migrating to value-based bidding on what matters to them most: User Life Time Value. As a result, value based bidding types such as tROAS in the Finance sector grew significantly year-over-year.
Winners are also dismantling platform silos and looking at marketing funnels holistically, accounting for cross-platform user journeys. They analyse customer paths to conduct rigorous friction auditing—tracing and eliminating drop-offs during highly sensitive stages by focusing on both marketing and product development simultaneously. Success belongs to brands that treat the omnichannel journey as a single connected ecosystem.
The strongest performers are treating re-engagement as a core growth engine, using lifecycle marketing, personalized journeys, and session-based measurement to deepen existing relationships rather than relying solely on net-new users.
Successful finance marketers are increasingly localising growth strategies by region, platform behaviour, and market maturity. Adapting media mix, creative, and measurement frameworks by market rather than relying on a single European playbook is becoming essential.
As markets mature, competitive advantage increasingly comes from session depth, recurring usage, and user monetisation. Metrics like session frequency, product adoption, and LTV are becoming more meaningful indicators of growth than install volume alone.
Without strong fraud prevention infrastructure, inflated acquisition costs and distorted measurement can quickly undermine campaign performance. Integrating fraud detection early in the UA process and monitoring quality across platforms and regions protects both budgets and measurement accuracy.
Whether it's web-to-app in Western Europe or text-to-app in Eastern Europe, the transition between discovery and in-app execution is where finance brands gain or lose users. Deep linking, seamless onboarding, and cross-platform measurement reduce friction, but the channel strategy needs to match the region.
