The leading European fintech turned its user base into a growth engine — driving engagement, session frequency, and retention through an integrated social experience.
Why Bankin’ bet on community
About Bankin’
Bankin’ is a top European fintech app helping millions of users manage their finances with clarity and control. In a competitive landscape where financial apps often struggle to retain users after the first weeks, Bankin’ wanted to reinforce daily engagement and long-term retention.
- 11M+ downloads
- 1 million+ bank accounts connected
Their business challenge
Despite strong acquisition, engagement was plateauing. The product team identified a powerful untapped lever: enabling users to connect, share experiences, and learn from each other inside the app. The goal? Make money management more human, social, and motivating.
Bankin’s North Star KPI is user retention.
The key question: could a built-in community drive enough of a retention boost to be ROI-positive — without triggering a spike in support tickets or moderation overhead?
How Bankin’ launched its in-app community
Bankin’ integrated Octopus Community SDK into its mobile app, creating a dynamic social hub, accessible directly from the homepage. Users could scroll, post, comment, and engage — all natively.
Octopus handles everything from community frontend & backend to content moderation, community animation, and data insights.
To measure the precise impact of community on key app metrics, Bankin’ ran a live A/B test: 70% of users had access to the community, while 30% formed the control group.
The iOS rollout came first — followed by Android a few weeks after, once early results proved promising.
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Integrated features:
- Push notifications
- Notification badge on homepage
- Custom A/B test events tracking
What the community made possible
Custom moderation to stay compliant
Bankin’ needed to filter out referral codes, loan promotions, and other sensitive content to stay compliant with financial regulations. Octopus’s flexible moderation rules allowed Bankin’ to keep the feed clean and trustworthy, without manual overhead.
Crisis response: reducing support volume
When a partner issue triggered a spike in support requests, the team used the community strategically: pinning a clear, informative post at the top of the feed for one month. This simple move drastically reduced related posts and deflected hundreds of support tickets.
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Community notifications = traffic boost
Bankin’ sends weekly notifications to spotlight trending discussions or featured posts. The impact is immediate: +122% in community views, a 3× increase in comments on highlighted content, and a powerful way to re-engage dormant users
Turning user voice into product impact
The community gave users a public channel to surface pain points, ideas, and frustrations. Some issues that previously went unprioritized internally gained momentum thanks to community visibility. When dozens of users shared the same frustration, it created alignment across product, marketing, and leadership. Without knowing it, users became internal influencers.
Proactive support, at scale
Beyond deflecting tickets, the community became a place where users could help each other, share advice, and support newcomers — reducing pressure on the support team and creating a more resilient ecosystem.
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Cross-channel promotion for a fast start
To drive adoption, Bankin’ promoted the community via in-app banners and Instagram. These campaigns created a strong boost in visits and helped build early network effects.
Community results
- +34,5% retention uplift for community users after 1 month
- 47% of Bankin’ users have visited the community
- Community users open Bankin’ app 2x more than the others.
Community-led growth unlocked
Bankin’ set out to answer a clear question: can community drive measurable business impact?
The answer is yes: with +34% retention, doubled session frequency, and thousands of users actively engaging every week, community has become a strategic asset, not just a feature.
With Octopus, Bankin’ proved that integrating social into product can deliver real ROI — without adding tech debt or operational complexity.
In-app community can boost your app too
See how you can unlock the retention, engagement and monetization gains that in-app communities already deliver for leading apps.
