Contents
- The financial services lead generation market is not one market.
- A 2024 McKinsey analysis of financial services technology found that companies operating lead generation across multiple financial verticals spend 30-45% of their technology budget on infrastructure duplication -- building and maintaining the same basic capabilities (user capture, lead routing, compliance tracking) separately for each vertical.
- The five verticals share a common infrastructure: the same deployment pipeline, the same hosting configuration, the same CI/CD automation, and the same API routing patterns.
- The financial services lead generation market rewards breadth.
The Setup
The financial services lead generation market is not one market. It is a collection of adjacent verticals -- retirement products, credit products, investment products, insurance products -- each with different buyers, different compliance requirements, and different per-lead economics. An operator who wants to serve multiple financial verticals faces a choice: build a separate platform for each one, or find a way to serve all of them from a single infrastructure.
The separate-platform approach is the default. Each vertical gets its own build, its own team, its own maintenance burden. The advantage is isolation -- a problem in one vertical does not affect the others. The disadvantage is cost. Five platforms means five builds, five hosting configurations, five deployment pipelines, and five times the maintenance. For most operators, that math limits them to one or two verticals at most.
The single-infrastructure approach has the opposite tradeoff: lower cost and faster deployment, but only if the architecture is genuinely designed to handle multiple verticals without creating fragility. The question is whether it can be done without compromising the vertical-specific requirements that each financial product demands.
What the Data Shows
A 2024 McKinsey analysis of financial services technology found that companies operating lead generation across multiple financial verticals spend 30-45% of their technology budget on infrastructure duplication -- building and maintaining the same basic capabilities (user capture, lead routing, compliance tracking) separately for each vertical. Deloitte's 2024 fintech infrastructure report found that shared-platform approaches reduce per-vertical operating costs by 35-55% compared to siloed builds.
PRJ-11 in the Stealth Labz portfolio is a multi-vertical finance lead generation platform spanning 5 product verticals -- Gold IRA, credit cards, investing, dating, and base insurance -- each with its own offer wall, questionnaire flow, and provider cards. It was built in 11 active development days at a total external support cost of $1,680.
The build metrics:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total lines of code | 127,832 |
| Total files | 317 code files (2,240 including assets) |
| Calendar span | 38 days |
| Active development days | 11 |
| Total commits | 71 |
| Net-new delivery rate | 88.7% |
| Rework rate | 11.3% (8 of 71 commits) |
| Reverts | 0 |
The 127,832 lines of code is the largest codebase in the portfolio -- driven by 5 separate vertical directories, each with its own funnel, offer wall, and provider cards. The size reflects breadth (five distinct product verticals), not unnecessary complexity.
Each vertical serves a different lead economics tier:
- Gold IRA: $30-$100+ per lead (high-value financial product, affluent demographic)
- Credit cards: $10-$40 per lead (high volume, lower per-lead value)
- Investing: $25-$75 per lead (financial advisory leads)
- Dating: $5-$20 per lead (consumer volume play)
- Base insurance: $15-$45 per lead (standard insurance economics)
The platform integrates with multiple lead routing APIs -- Waypoint and SelectQuote for direct routing, plus QuinStreet and MediaAlpha widget integrations for additional monetization paths. All five verticals share the same deployment pipeline, the same CI/CD configuration, and the same underlying infrastructure patterns.
PRJ-11 was the fourth product built on the shared insurance-cluster architecture. It was the most complex product in the cluster but shipped in the fewest active days (11 versus 23-25 for its siblings). This inversion -- more complexity, less time -- happened because each prior product had deepened the shared foundation. By the time PRJ-11 was built, the infrastructure layer was so mature that development focused entirely on the vertical-specific work: building five distinct offer walls, five questionnaire flows, and five sets of provider integrations.
How It Works
The five verticals share a common infrastructure: the same deployment pipeline, the same hosting configuration, the same CI/CD automation, and the same API routing patterns. Each vertical is a directory within the codebase containing its own funnel flow, offer wall, and provider card configuration. This means each vertical can be operated independently (an operator could run only the Gold IRA vertical) or all five can run simultaneously.
The shared components include Waypoint API lead routing, SelectQuote API integration, QuinStreet widget integration, MediaAlpha widget integration, and CI/CD deployment -- all configured once and available to every vertical. The vertical-specific components include the questionnaire logic (a Gold IRA prospect answers different questions than a credit card prospect), the offer wall design (different providers for each vertical), and the compliance requirements (financial products have different disclosure rules than dating).
This architecture means adding a sixth vertical -- say, mortgage or student loans -- does not require building a new platform. It requires adding a new vertical directory with its own funnel, offer wall, and provider cards, then plugging it into the existing routing and deployment infrastructure. The infrastructure investment was made once across the first four products in the cluster. Each new vertical inherits that investment.
What This Means for Business Operators
The financial services lead generation market rewards breadth. An operator running five verticals is not dependent on any single vertical's performance. If the Gold IRA market contracts, credit card and investing leads may compensate. If dating lead economics tighten, the higher-value financial verticals carry more weight. The portfolio itself provides diversification.
The economics of PRJ-11 make this diversification accessible. Market-rate replacement value for a 5-vertical lead generation platform with widget integrations, API routing, and deployment automation is estimated at $200,000-$400,000. The actual build cost was $1,680 in external support across 11 active development days. That gap -- between what it would cost to build independently and what it actually cost on shared infrastructure -- is the measured value of architectural compounding. For operators evaluating financial services lead generation, the choice between "one vertical, well-built" and "five verticals on shared infrastructure" is a choice between concentration risk and diversified opportunity.
Related: How to Launch in 4 Verticals with 79% Lower Costs Using Shared Software Architecture | What Transfers Between Products When You Share Software Infrastructure (and What Doesn't)
References
- McKinsey & Company (2024). "Financial Services Technology Analysis." Infrastructure duplication costs in multi-vertical lead generation.
- Deloitte (2024). "Fintech Infrastructure Report." Per-vertical operating cost reductions from shared-platform approaches.
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "The Compounding Execution Method: Complete Technical Documentation." Stealth Labz. Browse papers