Scaling Active Business Banking Accounts For Finom Across Europe
When one of Europe's fastest growing fintech's raises 300 million euros, there's only one team they turn to for profitable customer acquisition at scale.
In May 2025, Finom selected Growthcurve as its growth agency of record to scale profitable corporate banking across Europe. Weeks later Finom announced two major financing milestones, first a growth investment of about €92.7 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, then a €115 million Series C led by AVP with participation from General Catalyst, Northzone and others. Together they took total funding past €300 million and set an ambitious goal to reach one million European business customers by the end of 2026.
Our mandate is clear. Acquire active business customers who adopt Finom as their primary account, not just signups. We lead customer acquisition for the corporate segment across Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, with local Growthcurve operators embedded in each market.
Finom is an Amsterdam headquartered financial platform for European entrepreneurs and SMEs, combining business accounts, cards, invoicing, expense management and, increasingly, AI enabled workflows under an Electronic Money Institution license. It offers local IBAN accounts in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, and now serves more than 200,000 business customers.
Finom was founded by Andrey Petrov, Konstantin Stiskin, Oleg Laguta and Yakov Novikov, experienced operators who previously built SME focused banking products, and has been backed over time by General Catalyst and Northzone.
Competitive context matters. European SME banking is crowded, with Qonto, Revolut Business and Wise Business prominent in awareness and distribution. Qonto alone reports more than 600,000 customers, which sets a high bar for share of voice and category memory in the region.
Challenge complexity
- Multi market, multi language, regulated. Funnel stages and disclosures vary by country. IBAN provisioning, KYC and risk checks add friction, so activation is harder than a typical SaaS free trial.
- B2B buying cycles. Only a small share of SMEs are in market in any given quarter, and finance stack changes often need multi stakeholder consensus and switching windows. Our planning standardised on a 90 day attribution window and the 95,5 reality of B2B demand creation.
- Primary account adoption. Winning the deposit relationship requires post acquisition lifecycle excellence, not just efficient top of funnel.
Why it mattered
Finom’s funding made a clear statement, expand across Europe while preserving unit economics. The mandate for Growthcurve, build a connected growth system that reliably turns media, outreach and content into verified KYC, first value events and ongoing usage at country level.
Strategy, one connected system
We architected an always on system that pairs broad demand creation with precision capture and product led activation.
- Demand generation on LinkedIn and Meta to reach the full ideal customer profile across roles, industries and company sizes, with heavy localisation per market.
- Account based marketing, using our proprietary creative engine to personalise every impression at company level, and dynamically personalised landing pages that adapt for each prospect company when they arrive.
- Scaled outbound email to fill meetings for the commercial team, run with strict suppression, enrichment and daily optimisation rules.
- Lifecycle CRM on Bloomreach to close KYC, drive first deposit, card issued and first transfer, plus ongoing engagement and referral.
- Webinars and content pipeline to educate CFOs and finance managers by country, then retarget attendees and repurpose content into short clips, whitepapers and nurture.
Crucially, the channels are run as a mesh, not silos. Our August planning deck documented why, ABM, demand gen, outbound, Meta and Google reinforce one another, and should continue until we have captured awareness and intent from all relevant ICP members.
Data, instrumentation and measurement
Source of truth
We mapped the corporate funnel and events across markets, defined a data dictionary, and implemented server side tagging with redundancy for GA4, Meta Conversions API and LinkedIn CAPI, including offline conversions from CRM to close the loop on “account opened” and “active primary account” events.
Attribution guardrails
We standardised on a 90 day attribution window to reflect finance switching cycles, and educated stakeholders on the 95,5 rule to set expectations.
Realtime dashboards
Hourly refreshed dashboards give marketing and sales shared visibility on spend, reach, CPL, opportunities, accounts opened and cost per account by channel and country. The Overview Report visual on page 1 shows our core tiles and trend charts.
Audience architecture and market localisation
Total Addressable Market coverage
Our outbound program identifies companies using 20 plus firmographic and technographic datapoints, deduplicates against sales history, enriches contacts, and stops automatically on conversion. Benchmarks target 50 percent plus opens and 1 percent plus clicks for financial services.
Market nuance
Germany emphasises DATEV and GmbH workflows, France cares about VAT automation and local support, Italy responds to cash flow and payment settlement speed. Creative, copy and disclaimers are transcreated, not translated, then validated by our on the ground operators
Hyper personalised ABM on LinkedIn
Company level creative
Our ABM engine renders tailored display units for each targeted company group including company name, city, industry context and benefit lines aligned to role, for example “Lower FX cost and faster settlement for manufacturing exporters.” This is supported in the 2025 plan with “Hyper Personalised Display Ad Engine for LinkedIn” plus unlimited variants for testing.
Dynamic landing pages
We built a bespoke appointment booking page with a pre qualification funnel and personalisation engine that swaps headlines, proof points and case references based on firmographic attributes. The spec includes calendar integration, GA4 event mapping, a tagging server and A/B test hooks.
Measurement
We send hashed offline conversions for “account opened” and “active usage” back to LinkedIn to help the algorithm learn on true business outcomes.
Demand gen on LinkedIn and Meta
UI led motion graphics, product carousels and location specific statics anchor the creative system. We rotate proven hooks by pain theme, for example international payments, reconciliation time, expense control.
Format mix
UI led motion graphics, product carousels and location specific statics anchor the creative system. We rotate proven hooks by pain theme, for example international payments, reconciliation time, expense control.
Budgeting
Spend is balanced across evergreen reach, scale and sandbox to ensure learning and freshness each month, as outlined in the first 8 weeks ramp plan.
Outbound email engine
Infrastructure
Warm sender domains and inboxes, adaptive sending to protect reputation, and strict suppression to avoid duplicating sales outreach.
Copy system
Multi stage sequences written for specific personas, with psychological tactics and lead magnets. Campaigns are optimised daily from intent signals, and stop on meeting booked. The deck on page 3 to 9 outlines volumes, enrichment and messaging approach.
Lifecycle CRM in Bloomreach
Event and profile schema
We established a shared data dictionary and profile schema covering account status, card status, KYC status, usage events and churn risk.
Automations
We launched behaviour based flows for onboarding, KYC completion, activation, re engagement and referral, with English master templates and efficient localisation per market. The CRM scope lists master copy, scenario builds, unlimited testing per flow and KPI tracking including KYC completion.
Webinars as a content engine
Topic selection, guest recruitment, Livestorm setup, risk runbook, analytics and follow up all packaged, with hype ads on LinkedIn and Meta, landing pages, reminder emails and post event nurture in Bloomreach. The proposal details each component and the optional content pipeline of video clips, a blog and a whitepaper per event.
AI Overwatch
Predictive audiences
We cluster firmographics and engagement signals to weight our ABM lists and bid smarter on high intent pockets.
Anomaly detection
Dashboards flag outliers on CPL, CPA and KYC completion by market to trigger root cause analysis within hours, not weeks.
Pivots and learnings
- Fix the opener. Early SDR calls led with “you filled a form,” which created friction. We rewrote the opener to reference the ad topic that sparked their interest and secured permission for a 30 second value pitch. This simple change lifted call quality and meeting acceptance.
- Let buyers choose their path. The prior flow forced calls at random times. We introduced product led options, open an account, request a walk through, start a free trial, speak to support, so buyers could progress on their terms.
- Right sizing ABM. After an initial period of hyper personalisation, we shifted to segmented category targeting to expand reach without losing relevance. The August plan captured this Phase 2 evolution.
Results vs benchmarks
Early multi market signal
- The August discussion pack recorded an 81.51 percent month on month increase in Italian corporate accounts opened, plus 24 opportunities created, and a view of LinkedIn as a touchpoint on opened accounts in the July cohort.
System wide performance, June to September
- Campaigns to date have delivered 10,479,064 highly targeted impressions and drove over 60,000 new business customers to start exploring the Finom offering
- Cost per Business Application Starts ↓ 31.20% showing greater targeting and efficiency in the acquisition funnel we developed
- Cost per account opened ↓ 80% based on the benchmark before we began work
- 50% of all new business accounts came from GC Corporate campaign, using <50% of budget of other campaigns
- >50% of OBAs were corporate VS 'retail business banking'
- Sales Opportunities ↑ 22.9% weekly on average, So far (measured from August 12th to September 18th 2025)
- Total cost per account ↓ 47.32% (influenced + direct) So far (measured from June to September)
- Direct cost per account ↓ 62.06% (from July to September)
Cost per account continues to drop this month (not even including influenced accounts)(from start date)
We are still in the early compounding phase. Demand creation precedes purchase cycles in B2B finance, so the 90 day window and influenced account tracking that we set are essential to see the full effect.
Broader impact and lessons
Finom’s dual financing in 2025 created urgency and runway. The connected system we built is designed for compounding. As awareness saturates the ICP and CRM removes onboarding friction, we expect cost per active primary account to fall while account quality holds or improves. The Series C announcement validated the scale thesis and the one million customer target sharpened our north star for planning.
The playbook in summary
- Run one system, not channels. Keep ABM, demand gen, outbound, CRM and content in sync. Every touch strengthens the next. Document the interplay explicitly so stakeholders keep funding the whole, not a single line item.
- Personalise end to end. Dynamic ads without a dynamic landing page leave money on the table. Personalise both, then push offline conversions back to ad platforms to train on real outcomes.
- Make KYC and activation a CRM problem. Treat KYC completion, first deposit and first transfer as product led lifecycle moments, not sales admin. Own them in Bloomreach with clear events, messages and tests.
- Content that compounds. Design each webinar to produce a short clip set, a blog and a whitepaper, then retarget and nurture for 30 to 60 days.
- Hold a 90 day view. B2B finance decisions are lumpy. Use 90 day attribution and the 95,5 lens to avoid killing working programs too early.
