How Lulo Bank improved customer onboarding with actionable customer insights

Opening a bank account is something many people take for granted. But in Colombia, only 38% of people over the age of 15 currently have a bank account (as of 2021). Without access to basic financial services, it can be difficult to protect saved money, access credit, perform low-cost transactions, and build an investment portfolio. 

This challenge presents a huge opportunity for Latin American fintech platforms looking to make their customers’ lives easier. An opportunity that’s fueled by an increasing demand for simplified consumer-friendly services–such as online access, lower fees, and better customer service–that aren’t always available from traditional financial institutions. 

Lulo Bank launched in September 2021 to help Colombians enjoy a better banking experience, aiming to create simple people-centric banking services that give customers 100% control of their money. Without physical bank branches, Lulo Bank eliminates paperwork and instead focuses on automating traditionally time-consuming processes. 

Currently, Lulo Bank offers four financial services:

1. A Lulo current account
2. A fee-free savings account
3. A Mastercard debit card for worldwide and online use
4. Free destination credit with approval and disbursement in minutes

Lulo Bank has experienced rapid growth in sign-ups since their initial launch. But to translate sign-ups into loyal customers and compete in an increasingly crowded online banking market, the team faced a couple of challenges: 

• Increasing customer acquisition efficiently without going over their ad budget
• Delivering high-quality relevant digital experiences in order to build trust with their customers

To overcome these core challenges, Lulo Bank needed to leverage their customer data more effectively.

Lulo Bank’s sign-ups grew quickly after their launch in 2021, and the team realized that they needed to get a better understanding of the full customer journey. They were lacking a simple way to collect user engagement data throughout the journey and to understand how customers were navigating the sign-up experience.

Lulo Bank partnered with mParticle to collect data from their mobile banking app and website in real-time via secure mParticle’s APIs and SDKs. As data is collected by mParticle, it is unified to 360-degree customer profiles and can be forwarded to any of Lulo Bank’s marketing and analytics tools via server-side integrations, relieving their team from having to implement and manage multiple vendor SDKs. With the mParticle Customer Data Platform in place, Lulo Bank can track every step the user takes from the moment they download the app until they make a deposit in their savings account, use their debit card, or disburse a free destination credit. 

The team soon noticed a pattern in some users failing to complete their account sign-up, and they knew they needed to dig deeper and identify the exact moments that customers drop off during the journey. 

Lulo Bank began leveraging Indicative, mParticle’s customer journey analytics solution, to understand funnel conversion rates and identify drop-offs. By connecting the mParticle Indicative integration in just a few clicks, the team was able to begin streaming high-quality behavioral data from mParticle to Indicative in real time. 

In Indicative, they were able to turn this data into insights by building a funnel that modelled the events in their onboarding journey, such as sign-up forms and identity verification, and understand the major drop-off points in their onboarding funnel. They were also able to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, such as the fact that 18% of the people who install the app don’t create a savings account. 

The combination of mParticle and Indicative has helped Lulo Bank get a granular view of per-touch metrics and enabled them to improve the user journey and their retargeting campaigns.

Once the team had identified drop-off points, they wanted to turn these insights into action by building Facebook campaigns to re-target users that had dropped off at specific steps. 

Previously, launching digital ad campaigns was a highly manual, time-consuming process. Every time the team needed to make a change to their Facebook ad targeting, they had to manually upload a database of customer data as a CSV file.

Using mParticle Audiences, however, the team is able to build dynamic audience segments based on the insights uncovered in Indicative and connect them to Facebook in real-time using the mParticle Facebook Audience integration, resulting in a 95% decrease in the amount of time required to create audiences for Facebook Ads and a 15% decrease in drop-off throughout the onboarding process. For example, they could create an Audience of all users that start onboarding but failed to create the savings account.   

Using mParticle, the team only needs to create audience segments once–mParticle Audiences stay up-to-date in real time and can be connected to multiple destinations without engineering support or manual list uploads. 

“By sending Audiences from mParticle to Facebook, we can measure the return on our campaign investment. For example, we can see the cost of each app download or the cost of a newly created account," describes Jorge Uribe, Media Lead at Lulo Bank. "The integration also helps us improve our customer acquisition investment according to the audience segments we’re testing."

With proven success using Indicative and mParticle across their Facebook ads, Lulo Bank is ready to launch the use case across additional advertising channels, such as Twitter and TikTok ads, using mParticle Audience integration network. 

Partnering with mParticle has helped increase the team’s understanding of their target users’ engagement habits. Instead of guessing why users don’t complete sign-up, they have a clear view of drop-off, and can retarget these users more efficiently.

To see how you can get more value out of your customer data with mParticle, you can explore our interactive platform demo here.