Influencer Marketing for Trading and Investing Apps

Can investing apps use influencers?

Yes, as long as you supervise them the way you’d supervise your own marketing. The cautionary tale is real and recent.

In 2024, FINRA fined M1 Finance $850,000 over its influencer program. Between January 2020 and April 2023, about 1,700 influencers helped open and fund more than 39,400 new accounts. FINRA found the firm paid influencers a flat fee per funded account with no cap, didn’t review or approve their posts before they went out, didn’t keep them on file, and let through claims that weren’t fair and balanced, including one creator’s description of margin loans that FINRA called misleading (FINRA announcement via Business Wire). M1 settled without admitting or denying the findings.

The takeaway isn’t “don’t use creators.” It’s that a campaign with 1,700 unsupervised voices is a compliance program nobody is running.

Supervision at that scale is an operations problem first. INFLUENCE runs campaigns as a closed, hand-picked set of creators: every creator is approved by you, every brief carries your required language, and every draft comes back for your sign-off before it posts. That’s the opposite of an open, uncapped referral free-for-all.

Which rules apply to investing app creator content?

It depends on what you are. A broker-dealer, an investment adviser and a crypto platform each answer to different rulebooks, and the FTC’s disclosure rules apply to everyone. Here’s the short version (it isn’t legal advice, so run it past your compliance team).

Three habits keep you out of most trouble: pre-approve every script and final cut, balance every benefit with the matching risk, and save everything (brief, drafts, final post and approval) where you can find it a year from now.

That record-keeping is the part teams underestimate. On an INFLUENCE campaign, briefs, drafts, revisions and approvals all live in one place by design, so when someone asks “what did creator #14 actually post and who approved it?”, the answer takes minutes, not a week of digging through inboxes.

Where can investing apps run creator content?

Not TikTok branded content, at least under its published U.S. rules. TikTok’s U.S. market requirements (last published October 2025, since archived) list investment and trading services as prohibited in creator content (TikTok). Check the current version, but plan around that.

That leaves plenty of room:

• YouTube, long-form and Shorts. Investing needs explanation, and YouTube rewards it. Creators must switch on the paid promotion label, and YouTube says branded content must follow Google Ads policies, with some exceptions (YouTube Help).

• Instagram Reels. Good for short, approachable “how I set this up” content, with the paid partnership label on.

• Podcasts and newsletters. Long-form, high-trust and often overlooked by brokerages.

Each platform has its own disclosure mechanics and review quirks. INFLUENCE plans which platform each creator posts on around those rules before anyone films, and coordinates publishing across them, so nothing goes up on a channel that would get it pulled.

What content works without crossing the line?

Content about how the app works and how people build habits, not about what they earned. “Here’s how I set up automatic investing” is fine. “I made 40% on this stock” is the kind of post regulators write case studies about.

Formats that tend to work:

• First-account walkthroughs. Opening an IRA, picking a fund, setting a recurring deposit.

• Deadline explainers. “What’s a Roth IRA and why people rush to fund one before Tax Day.”

• Fee transparency. Showing exactly what the app charges, including the boring parts.

• Habit content. “I invest $25 every Friday, here’s what that looks like in the app.”

What to keep out: price predictions, screenshots of gains, “you can’t lose,” and anything that makes margin, options or leverage sound casual.

Getting 20 creators to make that video, and not the hype version, comes down to the brief. INFLUENCE writes each brief around the creator’s own style with your guardrails built in (what to show, what to say, what’s off-limits), so the content feels native and still clears review.

How do you vet creators for an investing app?

Look backward before you look at follower counts. For investing apps, a creator’s old content is part of what you’re buying. That 2021 meme-stock video with “this is going to the moon” will resurface the minute they post about you.

What to check:

• History. Past promotions, especially crypto tokens, options “signals” or anything that later blew up.

• Audience. Mostly U.S., mostly adults, and actually interested in long-term money, not just trading thrills.

• Tone. Do they talk about risk without being prompted? That’s a good sign.

• Credentials. Licensed professionals can be great, but a license doesn’t make a post compliant on its own.

Digging through years of a creator’s posts is tedious, and it has to be done for every single one. Creator qualification and brand-safety checks are part of how INFLUENCE builds every campaign, so the shortlist you approve has already been through that filter.

How do you measure an investing app campaign?

On funded accounts and early deposits, measured over 30 to 60 days. Brokerage decisions take time, and they cluster around paydays, bonuses and tax deadlines.

Track cost per funded account, average first deposit, and recurring-deposit setup rate. That last one tells you whether the campaign brought investors or just bonus hunters. We cover the timing in how to measure fintech influencer ROI, and the bigger picture in our guide to influencer marketing for fintech companies.

Payment structure matters here too. The M1 case involved per-account bounties with no cap. INFLUENCE prices on delivered views instead, with a max CPM and a budget cap you set and no fees on top, so creators aren’t paid more for a riskier pitch. See how pay-per-view pricing works.