EXCLUSIVE – Before social media platform Facebook became a popular channel for digital banks to offer banking features to its customers, let’s not forget that FB was first and foremost an important advertising tool for banks to reach a younger audience.

Take British challenger bank Starling Bank, for example. According to numbers released by Facebook for 2017, 44% of account opens for the London-based Starling came from Facebook and FB-owned picture sharing platform Instagram compared to all other paid ad platforms.

For Turkish bank Akbank, which used Facebook to target audience with high credit scores for its personal loans, 15% of its personal loans originated from FB ads, while 45% of approved loan applications made on the Akbank Direct mobile app came from Facebook ads.

With over 2.2 billion users per month for Facebook and 800 million users per month on Instagram, it’s easy to see why the social media company is such an effective marketing tool for banks. Even major banks like U.K.’s Lloyds and Bank of America all have campaigns on the platform.

Of course, Facebook has found other applications for banks and fintechs besides advertising, like payments.

In fact, in its 4Q17 earnings released last month, Facebook reported $193 million in revenue from payments, representing a 7% increase from the previous quarter and over 10% from the year’s first quarter. Although that number makes up a tiny portion of the company’s nearly $13 billion revenues for Q4, it is worth noting as Facebook continues to look at financial services as an important part of consumer engagement.

Look at payments company PayPal, which formed a partnership with FB in which it allows users to make P2P payments via Facebook Messenger. Users can also make B2C payments via Messenger by linking their PayPal accounts and shop through the payments service.

Banks such as Sweden’s Nordea also uses Facebook Messenger as chat bot for communicating with their customers but also for providing various digital banking features. U.K. fintech, Nuvo is even using Facebook Messenger to guide users on personalized mortgage options.

In 2017, Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook inked many partnerships with financial services companies including credit card provider Visa, safe to say there will be many more to come in 2019.