How Paintgun helped Current to become the no. 2 challenger bank in the US

Starting off serving the teen market to becoming the second biggest mobile bank in the US, Current’s partnership with Paintgun unlocked an incredible journey over the past 2+ years. 1k+ ad creatives and 4M+ new users later, rapid testing to create continuous growth was always key to our successful collaboration.

Current’s mission was to serve the financial needs of the millions of Americans who have been overlooked by traditional banks. With benefits such as free overdraft protection, faster paychecks, cash back, fee-free ATMs and no hidden fees, the idea was to offer useful features to people living paycheck-to-paycheck while simultaneously giving everyone access to premium banking services.

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Our creative strategy initially had a strong focus on cultural currency by bringing up topics that resonated with the customer segment who would benefit from Current’s products. We relied heavily on meme creation to bypass banner blindness and dispositioned Current’s value propositions in relation to pop cultural phenomenons and items to maximize engagement.

As their product evolved, launching savings (4% APY) and crypto features, the need to reach new audiences evolved too. This meant broadening the type of ads we created, focusing on qualitative productions that ignited instant trust.

By constantly renewing our creative strategies throughout our 2+ years of partnership, Paintgun helped Current grow their user base from 2.3M users in June 2020 to 6.5M users in July 2022.

With weekly deliveries of fresh ad creatives, Paintgun helped Current to test differentiated ad creatives extremely fast, allowing us to identify winners worth scaling.

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This bullet-proof testing methodology guarantees success by following one simple rule - quantity breeds quality.