Platforms across various verticals are constantly seeking new ways to enhance the customer experience. Product teams stand at the crossroads of endless possibilities for their next feature, bug fix, or platform improvement. When evaluating these options, it's important to consider the following:

• Near-term value: Will this help us increase the immediate value of our current customers or attract new ones?

• Adoption rate: How many of our customers will benefit from this? What percentage of our ARR do they represent?

• Competition: Does this set us apart from competitors, or is it merely necessary to keep up?

• Ease of implementation: How long will it take to develop?

• Long-term strategy fit: Does this increase Customer Lifetime Value, and is it aligned with our overall product strategy?

For platforms considering fintech as their next upsell opportunity, they'll find that it checks many of these boxes. Fintech solutions can increase customer stickiness, enhance customer lifetime value, and, when done correctly, establish your platform as the system of record for your customers—opening the door to multiple other monetization opportunities.

In this blog, we’ll cover the best practices for upselling fintech products. This includes vertical positioning, adoption, unit economics, and strategic considerations.

What is a Fintech Upsell Opportunity?

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 offer, only to see it backfire on adoption. This is one reason why it’s important to delve into the next section.

Strategic Considerations

Whether you're just starting with payments or looking to add your fifth fintech product, many platforms overlook the force multiplier that can help them build on their success and streamline the testing and iteration process across fintech upsells.

If you’re considering adding multiple fintech products, chances are you started with payments. Payments are the spearhead of any fintech-enabled platform. They provide insights into customer activities and, more importantly, the customer data needed to position a contextual, timely, and complete fintech upsell.

Owning your payments data gives you a strategic advantage—not only in how you position a fintech upsell but also in how easily your team can transfer that data between vendors to achieve better unit economics, secure better pricing, and iterate without significant overhead.