71a homeThe 71a Team
Edward Newman is the Founder and CEO of 71a, a paid media and conversion agency built exclusively for financial services. He has spent 21 years in product and marketing, including 19 years in financial services.
He built his first website at 12 and taught himself to code. By 16 he was building server infrastructure professionally, including for Lavasoft Ad-Aware, then one of the world's most-downloaded consumer apps with 450m+ downloads.
At 20, he wrote the first version of money.co.uk and built its click-tracking and revenue-reporting system from scratch. It showed revenue in real time before Google Analytics existed, and parts of the code were still live at the point of sale. He spent the next decade on the senior leadership team, one of only a handful of senior people alongside founder Chris Morling. Over his time there, money.co.uk grew from 6 people to 70. He helped drive EBITDA from £8m to £12m in the year before its £120m sale to Zoopla, stayed through Silver Lake's £2.2bn take-private of parent group ZPG, then held senior product roles at Uswitch and Bankrate within the same group.
In 2019 he founded 71a because most agencies did not understand how financial services businesses judge marketing. 71a connects paid media, conversion and measurement so spend can be judged by conversion quality, customer value and revenue, rather than clicks alone.
He still builds the software 71a runs on. 71a operates on a four-day week, and Edward has appeared in national press for his stance on staff pay and working patterns. He has contributed to Search Engine Land on performance marketing in long sales cycle environments, and is a former invitation-only LinkedIn Top Voice.
We are currently in our 2nd year of working with 71a and continue to be impressed with their expertise and proactivity. Small agency, where your account is managed by senior experts within the business.
We have had the pleasure of working with both Nathan and Ed for some time now. They have invested considerable time in understanding our business and our market. The result of this is that they have then been able to utilise their expertise to make a real difference to Compare.
71a brought deep expertise in financial services marketing and quickly became a valuable partner, delivering quality leads at a cost-efficient level without compromising on targeting or performance. They took the time to understand our audience, refined creative and media strategy to suit our goals, and translated marketing into commercial outcomes.
For financial services brands selling direct to consumers or SMEs, whether paid media is already important or you are ready to test it properly.
Talk through your current or planned paid media, tracking, pages and forms. You will speak with someone senior, and we will say what we would improve first.