Inside MoneyLion’s shift from manual workflows to agentic marketing with Hightouch

Results at a glance

The challenge: Making personalized marketing possible at scale

MoneyLion, part of Gen, had invested heavily in understanding its customers, but turning that knowledge into more personalized marketing required significant manual work. Three challenges stood in the way:

1. Getting answers from customer data was difficult. Before Hightouch, marketers could access basic campaign metrics, but understanding why something worked or building more targeted audiences often required help from data analysts. Each new question meant another request and more back-and-forth before marketers could actually act on the data.

2. Campaign development took too long. Bringing a new campaign idea to market could take eight weeks. Marketers had to coordinate across copywriting, design, legal, and marketing operations. Multiple handoffs and rounds of feedback made it difficult to move quickly or test new ideas.

3. Personalization was becoming harder to manage. MoneyLion had hundreds of customer journeys with different rules, messages, and audience segments. Managing those journeys manually was increasingly complex, and traditional A/B testing could only go so far in determining what would work for each individual customer.

MoneyLion wanted to give its marketers more freedom to explore ideas, act on what they learned, and deliver relevant experiences to customers without manually managing every step of the process.

The solution: Putting the Agentic Marketing Platform to work

MoneyLion began its journey with Hightouch by connecting directly to the company's Snowflake data warehouse. Peter and his team organized their customer data and established trusted definitions, creating a foundation they could build on as AI began changing what was possible for marketers.

Today, that same foundation powers MoneyLion's use of Hightouch's Agentic Marketing Platform. Agents can investigate customer and campaign performance, proactively surface promising audiences and opportunities marketers might otherwise miss, and recommend where to focus their efforts next. Marketers can use those insights to build audiences and inform their next campaigns.

Decisioning: Learning what works for each customer

MoneyLion is using Hightouch to change how its marketers develop campaigns, personalize customer journeys, and improve performance. Previously, marketers had to manually build and maintain hundreds of customer journeys, defining which messages different audiences would receive and when. Traditional A/B testing helped the team identify winning approaches, but delivering more personalized experiences meant creating and managing increasingly complex campaigns.

With AI Decisioning, marketers set their goals, define the guardrails, and provide approved content. Agents then determine which messages to deliver, through which channels, and when, based on individual customer behavior. As AI Decisioning sends messages, it constantly tests different approaches. This helps it automatically improve and also inform the MoneyLion team about their customers and the marketing that drives results.

Those learnings are also helping MoneyLion's marketers make better strategic decisions. For example, the team discovered through AI Decisioning that regular Instacash customers were likely to continue using the product without additional marketing. Customers who had signed up but never taken their first advance, however, were more responsive to marketing. That insight is helping MoneyLion strategize around customers who may benefit from additional messaging to get started, rather than repeatedly sending messages to people who use the product regularly.

MoneyLion's AI Decisioning programs have delivered an 8.2% increase in first Instacash advances, a 5.6% increase in Credit Builder Plus signups, and a 4.9% increase in loan and financial offers clicked, measured against randomized holdout groups.

Lifecycle: Building better customer experiences in days, not weeks

With Hightouch Lifecycle Studio, MoneyLion's marketers now turn insights into on-brand, personalized campaigns in a day rather than eight weeks.

The team uses agentic insights from its customers and previous campaign performance to identify campaign opportunities worth pursuing and turns that into recommended audiences, journeys, and a campaign brief. From there, agents generate different creative concepts and produce brand-accurate, channel-ready content. Marketers refine that content directly and prepare it for legal and compliance review without repeatedly passing work between copywriting, design, and marketing operations. Once a campaign goes live, agents pull engagement, conversion, and revenue data from every send, surface the patterns worth acting on, and recommend the content to inform the next campaign.

Together, this creates a continuous agentic loop for MoneyLion that unlocks speed, scales growth, and compounds learnings.

Advertising: Bringing more creative ideas to market

MoneyLion is extending its agentic marketing strategy to paid media with Hightouch Ad Studio. Advertising platforms need a steady supply of fresh creative to test and optimize performance, but producing enough new ideas and variations requires considerable time and creative resources. For Peter and his team, the opportunity is to bring more creative ideas into their advertising programs without relying on the same lengthy production process.

For a campaign promoting a financial product, marketers can explore several distinct creative directions. One concept might explain how a product works, while another highlights a specific benefit, using different visuals, headlines, and messaging for each approach. Instead of developing a handful of variations and waiting for another round of creative production, the team can use Ad Studio to generate more concepts and finished assets to test across its paid channels.

MoneyLion is now using Ad Studio to generate hundreds of new ad creatives each week. Peter estimates that the platform enables 10 to 20 times the weekly creative volume that even highly productive manual teams could historically achieve. This gives MoneyLion more opportunities to experiment with different approaches and refresh its creative inventory across advertising platforms.

The team is exploring how insights can inform its paid media strategy. By applying what it learns about its customers across channels, MoneyLion can develop more informed creative ideas and build toward a more connected customer experience.

Context: Combining business knowledge with marketing specialization

What makes these workflows possible is context. MoneyLion recognized that an AI marketing platform would need to have context of its customers, brand, products, and previous marketing performance to deliver on their vision. Hightouch brings together that business context with the tools and specialization agents need to execute marketing work. This marketing-specific harness helps agents perform different jobs across the workflow while marketers remain in control of strategy and approvals.

For MoneyLion, this means its custom agents can draw on customer insights and campaign performance from its existing data foundation, create content informed by its brand and business knowledge, and learn from the results of previous campaigns. As the team learns what works, that knowledge can inform what its agents do next.

The transformation: Giving marketers the power to do more

For Peter and his team, the biggest change has been what they can now accomplish themselves. A marketer who previously needed to coordinate with analysts, copywriters, designers, and marketing operations can now explore an opportunity, build an audience, develop content, and prepare a campaign with agents. They can use AI Decisioning to understand which experiences resonate with different customers and apply those learnings to their next campaign. They can also bring more creative ideas into their advertising programs, experimenting with approaches that would have required far more manual work before.

This is giving MoneyLion's marketers more freedom to pursue their ideas, explore new opportunities, and focus on the strategy behind the experiences they want to create. For Peter, the transformation has been significant.

MoneyLion's mission has always been to help people make their best financial decisions. As Peter and his team build toward one-to-one personalization, they're working to make every customer interaction build toward that goal.