Affiliate Marketing For Lenders

Carlos sits with Megan Bauer, Head Of Customer Success at Spinwheel, to discuss affiliate marketing & business lessons learned playing poker. ****** This episode is reposted from Spinwheel's Video Podcast - "What's Your Wheelhouse." Check out the video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcLSTMLAK4

Nick and Carlos discuss an Editorial piece recently published in The Free Toaster Newsletter https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/how-lenders-win-when-ai-calls-the   The premise of the conversation -- an LLM-based personal finance tool is going to be the most effective/useful way for consumers to shop for cards and lending products. Given that future, how should CMOs at lending companies be thinking a...

Most lenders underestimate how long it takes to get onto a major affiliate platform. The honest answer is 6 to 12 months. Sometimes 18. If one of these channels is on your 2027 roadmap, you need to start now.   In this solo episode, Carlos breaks down the five phases that explain the timeline: Internal prep. Do you have a competitive product and funnel? Get your application rate above 40%. Card is...

We've been writing about Cash Flow Underwriting lately. This week we continue the conversation. We expand on what we wrote this week in The Free Toaster Newsletter: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/will-llms-solve-distribution-for   ***** The Free Toaster is hosting the Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders on September 23rd & 24th in San Francisco.  Learn more: https://events.thefreetoaster....

In an October 2024 article in The Free Toaster, Carlos laid out 3 things that would unlock distribution for Cash Flow Based Lenders. In today's episode, he shares the progress we've made on all 3 fronts over the last 18 months. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/where-is-the-demand-for-cash-flow-underwriting   ***** The Free Toaster is hosting the Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders on September...

ChatGPT just integrated Plaid, giving 200 million monthly users a personalized finance experience built on real account data. Carlos and Nick break down what that means for affiliate marketing. Credit Karma's approval odds models (and Experian's) become foundational infrastructure. Intuit's $100M OpenAI deal puts TurboTax and Credit Karma inside the chat. Generic content sites ranking for "best tr...

Jeff Keltner was the first non-founder employee at Upstart. He spent over a decade there running consumer acquisition, building the bank partnership business from zero to ten banks, and managing both sides of the affiliate marketplace. Today he hosts What the AI, a weekly podcast covering the top stories in AI with co-host Annie Delgado. This conversation goes two places. First, how a Business Dev...

Carlos and Nick break down NerdWallet's Q1 2026 earnings, the first full read on the company since the stock dropped 32% post-print. Headline numbers look fine on the surface. $222M in revenue, 6% YoY growth, $34M in non-GAAP operating income at a 15% margin. Look one layer down and the story turns. A major insurance carrier pulled back. Small business was down 15% YoY and got zero analyst questio...

Zak Ali runs the US business at Finder, the financial comparison site that started in Australia in 2006 and launched stateside in 2015. Lending now drives roughly 40–50% of Finder US revenue across personal loans, business loans, and earned wage access. In this conversation, Zak pulls back the curtain on how a major comparison publisher actually thinks — about Google's SEO meltdown, the reality of...

Free Toaster co-founder Nick Madrid interviews Carlos Caro live at the Fintech Summit in NYC on April 28th.   On the heels of a Curated Table Event on April 27th (sponsored by Spinwheel), Nick bumped into Carlos at the Fintech Summit and did a short Q&A on how lenders eliminate friction from their application flows. ****** To support this Podcast, please visit our sponsors:   Bulldog Media Gro...

Rachael Olson spent years running product strategy on Discover's $6 billion personal loan business, and she joins the show to walk through a real lender's application from marketplace click all the way to the hard pull, screen by screen. Using a hypothetical billion-dollar lender for round numbers, Rachael shows why the highest-leverage work isn't always at the top of the funnel. A 3% lift in soft...

Deposits aren't loans. That sounds obvious, but the implications for affiliate marketing are anything but. Alana Levine joins Carlos Caro to break down how affiliate marketing works on the deposit side of the house: different unit economics, different optimization cadence, different failure modes, and a compliance environment that will humble anyone coming over from lending. Topics include how CP1...

Carlos Caro chats with Rakesh Patel , the Executive Vice President of the Experian Marketplace. For those of you not familiar with the Experian Marketplace, it got started in 2017 and it's quietly become one of the largest consumer marketplaces in the world for credit cards, personal loans, and auto insurance.    In today's episode we'll cover: -Experian's vision to become a financial co-pilot for...

In April 2025, Transunion completed its acquisition of Monevo (a UK-based credit prequalification platform). In today's News Pod, Nick discovers that TU paid $56MM and that TU expects the Monevo acquisition to be immaterial to FY 2026 growth for TU. (Sources of that information below). Carlos and Nick discuss the Monevo business model and speculate on why growth could be muted in the US market. Pl...

Today we walk through a list of questions to ask yourself to determine whether your application experience needs a tune up. ***** About The Free Toaster Podcast:  Insights and interviews at the intersection of consumer lending, marketing, and technology. Hosted by Carlos Caro, co-founder at The Free Toaster and Managing Partner at New Market Growth , a growth agency for consumer lenders. ***** ***...

This week Prithvi Prabhu drops in to help us contextualize Cash App Borrow's metrics from this Edition: https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/cash-apps-invisible-200-billion-loan   Then, we discuss Mr. Beast's Fintech Acquisition and talk about why buying Fintech's could lead to trouble for the mega content creator.   Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated...

The Free Toaster hosts Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid add context to the story covered in the Newsletter earlier this week. https://www.thefreetoaster.com/p/wtf-2026-since-when-is-debit-now Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection of consumer lending & marketing, published every Wednesday. And then come here on Fridays to get o...

Today we cover the 7 traits of successful VPs of Partnerships, why they matter, and how to assess them during interviews.   ***** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, please visit our sponsors: A word from our sponsor, Fintel Connect Drive thousands of new accounts and billions in deposits with the only partner marketing solution built for fintech and banking – your all-in-one affiliate platform,...

Affirm is officially making a play to become its own bank by submitting applications to establish Affirm Bank through a Nevada-chartered Industrial Loan Company (ILC). This strategic shift aims to strengthen and diversify their platform, allowing them to scale operations and offer FDIC-insured products directly to consumers. The Free Toaster hosts Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid comment on this and th...

Cash App Borrow is quietly building a monster (and seemingly highly profitable) consumer lending business under the radar. The Free Toaster hosts Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid comment on the metrics they've seen published from the business. Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection of consumer lending & marketing, published eve...

This week Carlos Caro unpacks what Jenius Bank's exit from affiliate marketplaces could mean for other prime personal loan lenders.  Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter ( www.thefreetoaster.com ) to get our curated news at the intersection of consumer lending & marketing, published every Wednesday. And then come here on Fridays to get our hot takes on select stories from that edition.  ***...

In the News Pod, The Free Toaster founders - Carlos Caro and Nick Madrid - unpack select stories from the Wednesday news edition of www.thefreetoaster.com Sign up for the Newsletter to get our curated news at the intersection of consumer lending & marketing, and then come here on Fridays to get our hot takes on select stories from that edition.  ***** To support The Free Toaster Podcast, pleas...

In this episode, Tomás returns to share what's changed since Spinwheel's $30 million funding round—including a strategic investment from Citi—and gives us an inside look at the Spinwheel Network Token, a piece of technology that changes how lenders can serve customers across the acquisition journey. Please note: Spinwheel is a sponsor of The Free Toaster Newsletter and Podcast.  About The Spinwhee...

I sit with my co-founder Nick Madrid to discuss what we've learned in the last year of building this Podcast and Newsletter. About Nick Madrid - Co-founder, The Free Toaster. Former Bloomberg (10 years) and Chime (3+ years). Now building media properties including The Free Toaster and the Uncovered Media brand. Free Toaster Stats 1,200+ email subscribers (zero paid marketing), adding about 100 sub...

I recently sat with Alex Johnson on the Fintech Takes Podcast. I hope you enjoy! ***** (Show notes below from Fintech Takes) Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Carlos Caro (author of the Free Toaster newsletter and host of the Free Toaster podcast ) for the second episode of Facing Credit, where we unpack what’s really happening in lending right now. This one’s...