Scaling with confidence: how MONIX reduced fraud by 57% and cut CAC by 13.4%

Overview

• When scaling growth, mobile ad fraud will inflate costs, distorting key metrics, and making campaign scaling risky.
• Fraudulent installs and attribution hijacking will lead to wasted ad spend and unreliable data from a wider range of ad networks.
• MONIX integrated AppsFlyer’s fraud protection solution, gaining full visibility into fraudulent activities and optimizing user acquisition strategies.
• With fraud mitigation in place, MONIX safeguarded ad spend, confidently expanded into new ad networks, and improved marketing efficiency and outcomes.

Background

MONIX, a Bangkok-based fintech company, is revolutionizing access to legal loans through its flagship AI lending app, FINNIX. Guided by its vision to create opportunities for people to prosper and enjoy life, MONIX is committed to financial inclusion, providing collateral-free, legal nano loans to underserved people in 5 minutes via smartphones without human intervention like traditional banks and financial institutions. With over 20 million app installs and loan disbursements exceeding $1 billion USD, MONIX was focused on sustainable growth.

However, the rise of mobile ad fraud threatened their ability to measure ROI accurately, optimize campaigns, maintain trust with ad partners, and proved to be a barrier of growth.

Challenge

As MONIX focused on scaling its user acquisition efforts, fraudulent activity within mobile advertising became a major possible roadblock. Click injection, install hijacking, and bot-driven traffic emerged and influenced performance metrics, making it difficult to gauge the true effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Without clear insight into which installs were genuine, the challenge of rising acquisition costs, inefficient ad spend, and decreased quality of users were critical to aspired growth.

Additionally, the lack of transparency across various ad networks made it difficult to negotiate partnerships effectively. With no independent fraud detection system in place, assessing the value of different ad sources was a challenge. This uncertainty led them to limit their UA campaigns to some ad networks, preventing them from fully capitalizing on potential growth opportunities. To scale confidently, MONIX needed a solution that would proactively detect and eliminate fraud while providing clear, actionable insights.

Solution

AppsFlyer’s fraud protection has completely changed the way we approach user acquisition. With fraud under control, we can now scale with confidence.

Natthapong Inpo, Head of Marketing, MONIX

To tackle ad-fraud head-on, MONIX implemented AppsFlyer’s fraud protection, a real-time fraud detection and prevention platform. With it, MONIX gained immediate visibility into fraudulent attributions, allowing them to optimize their UA strategy and make data-driven decisions with confidence.

One of the key benefits of Protect360 was its ability to block fraudulent installs at scale. Over an 18-month period, the system flagged and prevented millions of fraudulent attribution attempts, drastically improving data integrity. This, in turn, led to a 13.4% reduction in customer acquisition costs (CAC) by ensuring marketing spend was allocated to real users rather than bots or hijacked installs.

Beyond fraud mitigation, the fraud protection enabled MONIX to expand into new ad networks. MONIX leveraged AppsFlyer’s fraud prevention capabilities to confidently invest in such ad networks. The seamless integration and dashboard provided MONIX’s marketing team with clear fraud patterns and insights, further enhancing campaign efficiency. By customizing fraud prevention settings to their fintech-specific challenges, MONIX successfully transitioned from a reactive approach to a proactive, scalable UA strategy.

Results

We successfully acquired higher-quality users at a lower cost thanks to effective fraud protection and transparency that improved UA campaign analysis.

Atichat Laovisettanakarn, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist, MONIX

The impact of the fraud protection solution was immediate and transformative:

• 57% reduction in fraud rate – AppsFlyer’s AI-driven fraud protection eliminated over half of fraudulent installs, ensuring UA efforts reached real users.
• 13.4% decrease in CAC – With a cleaner dataset and improved efficiency, MONIX lowered customer acquisition costs, enabling impressive scale.
• Improved ad network relationships – Transparent fraud reporting strengthened trust with ad networks, simplifying performance-driven negotiations.
• Expanded UA channels – MONIX confidently scaled beyond traditional networks, incorporating new acquisition channels while maintaining cost efficiency.
• Real-time fraud insights – The marketing team can now proactively detect and block fraud, optimizing ad spend for genuine users.
• Increased user Life-time-value – Thanks to enhanced promotional efficiency for targeting and budgeting, user quality improved, translating to an average of double-digits increase in loan amount.

Looking ahead

With fraud under control, MONIX is focused on scaling user acquisition while maintaining cost efficiency. By leveraging AppsFlyer’s fraud protection capabilities, MONIX is well-positioned for sustainable, scalable growth while ensuring advertising dollars are spent effectively.

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