Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
The goal of the fintech industry is a lofty but important one: to make financial services more accessible to the general public. The fintech companies and apps that succeed are those that understand customers come to them as a means to improve their lives, by gaining access to the tools and services that give them greater financial freedom and access.
At our recent CleverTap Quarterly, we spoke to two fintech companies in Latin America that are raising the bar for these services while leveling the playing field for their users. And they do it with the aid of hyper-personalization.
The following are highlights from this discussion with Christian Carvajal, one of the founders of Sumer, and Marcelo Zuppardo, Co-Founder & CMO of Guru Investimentos. Anand Jain, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of CleverTap led the discussion.
Sumer is a Colombia-based company that is in the process of building a super app for the 50 million SMBs and entrepreneurs in Latin America. Their goal is to address the lack of technology that is hampering opportunity in the region.
They offer a variety of services, such as ecommerce, payments, logistics, advertising, and more. Their main product however is a simple online store that can be built in 15 seconds by simply uploading some photos along with a product description and other pertinent details.
Sumer is capitalizing on a momentous period for ecommerce in Latin America and the Caribbean. Just four months after launching, their app has more than 500,000 downloads in 15 Latin American countries, and has created around 170,000 online stores.* The leading categories are home, beauty and health, clothing, accessories and food.
Guru Investimentos is a fintech company that bets on technology and design to simplify investing in stocks, challenging traditional brokerages. With more than 300,000 users, Guru enables consumers to buy and sell shares, without a brokerage and without a minimum deposit.* While they currently only allow for trading stocks, they plan to add cryptocurrency trading very shortly.
The app also includes market information such as news, charts, and real-time quotes — everything you see in most American apps and others from more established trading markets. The goal of Guru’s co-founders is a market share of 5% by 2024, in a projection made on the current situation that predicts R$ 190 million in revenue per year until then.*
In terms of how they use personalization, Zuppardo noted that they have many different types of investors: those who have never invested before, those who invest only in stocks, and those interested in crypto. To support retention, the company uses hyper-personalization to educate each segment about the other types of assets that they can also invest in.
As well, their registration process requires nearly 60 different data fields to open an account. Every time someone drops off, they send a very personalized message mentioning the field at which they dropped off— this way, when they come back, they can immediately finish the signup process. Because they are digital, this enables them to add a human touch to help the user complete the process, which they recognize can be onerous, especially for first-time investors.
They also try to add a human touch when encouraging a new user to make their first deposit, which is one of their biggest challenges. They found that sending the user an automated but personalized WhatsApp message was very effective, and increased that first-deposit conversion by 30-40%, they estimate. CleverTap supports WhatsApp messages in Journeys.
For Sumer, Carvajal reiterated that they rely on hyper-personalization for engagement but also to support rapid growth. As a new company, launched less than a year ago but available in 15 countries, they understand the power of data for analytics. Analytics provides key information in how best to execute campaigns and for understanding users and their behaviors in the different countries they serve.
So, even though the product may be the same, they realize the need to adapt how they sell their product to different audiences. And hyper-personalization helps them do this.
He also emphasized again the importance of data in terms of understanding the customer and stated the need to have a two-way dialogue with customers—whether by reaching out to them via WhatsApp or whatever communication channel is most effective. The more one can listen and truly understand how users are using a product, the easier it will be to make the kinds of improvements that will benefit them — and of course, ultimately retain them.
We hope our many customers, partners, and friends of CleverTap and Leanplum had an opportunity to attend the event. For those who may not have, a recorded version is available here. We’re certain there’s lots to be learned from the many industry leaders and experts who joined us in putting on this event and we hope you’ll have a chance to watch it.
