Developing strategies that increase the value of your customers and contribute to the long-term and stable growth of your company is essential. A great to achieve this goal is upselling – recommending additional services or goods for existing consumers based on their present preferences or purchasing habits. How to implement upselling in FinTech, what are the best practices, and how can you grow your app this way?

Cross-selling and upselling, while frequently used interchangeably, are distinct but complementary ways to maximize income streams. Cross-selling entails providing extra items or services to existing consumers depending on their preferences or purchase habits. Upselling is about elevating spending through higher-value offerings. If you want to know more about cross-selling take a look at our previous article (link do naszego artykułu o cross-selling). If you are looking to increase the average spending value per client, stick with this one.
Why is upselling in FinTech important?
By cross-selling a significant amount of products banks can easily maximize the value of customer relationships and consistent growth in a greatly competitive banking sector. But there are some important and potential cross selling factors that show the importance of cross selling in banking are:
- growth in the revenue of banks
- building strong relationships with customer
- providing satisfaction to the customers
- utilizing resources in an effective manner
- retention of customers in banks
- providing a competitive advantage to customers
- risk management services for customers
However, providing these important products to customers is not an easy task for banks and fintechs alike. The first and maybe the easiest way for this is to develop an online mobile banking app that provides all the information related to accounts anytime. This is where fintechs and merchants start to look for a FinTech software development company that can develop their mobile applications for upselling.
Such as ours. At the time of this publication, we have more than 18 years of experience in software and FinTech development. Even before it was called that way. We utilize A.I. tools for the swift process of creating apps. Plus, we hire the top 1.6% of talents out there.
OK but what can you exactly do with it? Let’s check some of the best strategies for upselling out there.
Effective strategies for upselling in FinTech
There are a few impressive things that you can do to drive growth. Let’s consider them here.
Strategy number one – upgrade path analysis
- Evaluate your current offers to discover potential upgrades.
- Determine which improvements or functionalities will most likely appeal to existing customers based on their usage habits, feedback, and changing demands.
- Create targeted upselling campaigns highlighting the added value and advantages of upgrading to higher-tier plans or premium offerings.
- Use targeted communications and incentives to entice clients to upgrade to a more extensive or advanced product.
Strategy number two – bundle offerings and add-ons
- Combine related products or services to make attractive package offerings.
- Find synergies between your primary offering and additional items or features that can improve the entire value proposition for customers.
- Provide discounts or other price incentives for purchasing bundled packages, making it financially attractive for clients to upgrade and access a wider variety of solutions.
- Use cross-promotional opportunities to highlight the advantages of bundled offerings via targeted marketing campaigns and communication channels.
Strategy number three – utilize data analytics and machine learning
- Use data analytics and machine learning better to understand customer behaviour, preferences, and usage patterns.
- Using predictive modelling and segmentation research, you can uncover potential upsells and target clients most likely to upgrade.
- Customize upselling recommendations and messaging for individual customer profiles to ensure relevancy and resonance with each audience segment.
- To enhance conversion rates and ROI, continuously alter and refine upselling strategies based on real-time data and performance indicators.
Strategy number four – launch educational upselling marketing campaigns
- Create instructional content and tools highlighting the benefits of upgrading to premium or advanced services.
- Create tutorials case studies and use cases that show how the enhanced solution can solve specific problems or open up new options for clients.
- Use targeted email marketing, webinars, and interactive demos to educate clients on the enhanced offering’s features and capabilities.
- Encourage a consultative sales strategy by offering specific assistance and support to consumers when considering upgrading their subscription or service plan.
- Businesses that follow these Fintech-specific upselling methods can effectively promote revenue growth, boost customer lifetime value, and strengthen client relationships.
A few important facts to remember about
Your opportunity to upsell fintech products will be highly dependent on your customers and vertical. For example, a sports registration platform may find opportunities across payments, insurance, lending, multi-merchant checkout, and issuing. A good starting point is to analyze products in these categories that your customers are either already using or should be using.
Vertical positioning
Vertical positioning is crucial in fintech, as it influences everything from pricing on payments to how your customers are underwritten for lending offers.
For example, a construction platform might identify lending opportunities for their customers with capital-intensive projects and extended payment terms. While it may seem obvious to offer invoice factoring or financing solutions, it’s essential to consider how these offers are positioned to ensure a competitive advantage.
In this scenario, if the construction company has unique insights into the transaction history of previous invoices, they could leverage that information to secure a better rate or more customized loan offer for their customers, with less friction than a traditional bank.
Adoption and unit economics
The combination of adoption and unit economics is key to a successful fintech product upsell. An offer with high adoption but negligible revenue share may not be worth the effort to deploy.
Maximizing adoption involves meeting three requirements for your upsell offer. The offer must be:
- Contextual: Present the right offer to the right persona. For instance, offering a lending solution to a project manager may have a low adoption rate, while offering it to the decision-maker during a cash flow review could yield much better results.
- Timely: The offer should be presented at the right time. For example, positioning a consumer insurance product at checkout makes it easy for customers to include it in a single transaction.
- Complete: A truly embedded offer means that all possible friction has been removed. Ideally, the customer should only need to check a box to accept the terms and conditions and opt into the offer.
When assessing unit economics, it’s important to understand the market within your vertical and your platform’s distribution advantages. A platform with 5,000 customers and millions of impressions has significant leverage when negotiating the distribution of a consumer lending product.
A good rule of thumb is to avoid payment revenue cannibalization whenever possible. Many platforms these days opt for a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) offer, only to see it backfire on adoption.
Internal upselling workshops
Creating workshops is a perfect way to get to know your customers better. What to do?
- Create a visual map representing the entire customer journey across various interactions and motions.
- Develop a clear data model highlighting critical business metrics such as transaction volume, license status, sub-industry, payment corridors, and more.
- Clean and enhance the existing database to ensure clear visibility into the sales funnel and customer lifecycle stages.
Technologies transforming cross-selling and upselling in FinTech and banking
There’s no secret that everything goes through stages of development and advances along the way. New technologies and ways of generating revenue are no different. Here’s how you can revolutionize your approach:
- Machine learning: This technology allows your team to work with a vast amount of information, find trends, and make a prognosis of customers’ actions. This way, various recommendations can be made according to the specified customer profile.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Your team members are able to decipher and analyze the customer’s message, whether through chat, mail, or social media. This capability improves customer service delivery since it shall deliver apt recommendations based on the context.
- Predictive analytics: Using historical data helps you forecast future customer needs and behaviors. This technology allows banks to proactively engage with customers, presenting relevant offers that align with their financial goals.
- Robotic process automation (RPA): RPA comprises elements of a predetermined process, which can be data entries, reports, or any other routine task. This efficiency helps to free up the time that banks can devote to more important, core activities that include customer initiatives as well as product innovation.
- Recommendation algorithms: These algorithms analyze customer data to generate personalized product recommendations. By understanding individual preferences, banks can present tailored offers that resonate with customers.
Summary
The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20%, according to Invespcro. Not to mention, it can cost five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
It makes sense then, for financial institutions to look to their current customer base and focus on upselling and cross-selling tactics to increase their revenue and improve customer retention. You need to capitalize on brand loyalty and satisfied customers, but in a crowded marketplace with competitive rates and efficient fintech offerings, customers won’t necessarily use one bank for all their financial needs. So, you need to make your upselling and cross-selling efforts stand out.
Speaking of standing out… You need software that pays for itself. Robust, future-proof, made by seniors but for average users. Users don’t need a Ph.D to me your customers but power users should be able to squeeze everything from your product. That’s why here at Code & Pepper, we create FinTech applications with care.
The conversion process should not feel like gambling. Let’s make sure it doesn’t. Together. Contact us for details!