Name: Benchmarking Success: Key Insights from the 2025 Fintech Analytics Report
Uploaded: 2025-03-05T11:16:08.174Z
Duration: 59 min 4 s
Description: Benchmarking Success: Key Insights from the 2025 Fintech Analytics Report

Transcript for "Benchmarking Success: Key Insights from the 2025 Fintech Analytics Report": Good morning, everybody. We're gonna get this webinar underway in just a couple of minutes. We'll let some people kinda catch up from their morning coffee, for instance. We'll kick this off in about, yeah, about a minute or so to give some people some time. Alright. So sit back, relax, and then we'll get this underway very shortly. Feel free to drop a message in the chat saying where you're calling in from today and where you're watching from. And as I said, we'll get this underway in about about thirty seconds. Just give some more people time to join. See, couple more trickling in, and then we'll we'll get this underway. Dubai, very nice. Probably warmer than The UK is today, I imagine. Cool. Alright. Well, we we waited about a minute, so we'll we'll kick this off, I think. So a bit of housekeeping before we get started. So first of all, if, if you do have any questions throughout today's session, please use the chat or the q and a function on the right hand side, and we will endeavor to answer the questions. But for anybody who isn't familiar with what they're here for today, we're gonna go through a bit of a summary of Mixpanel's fintech reports of the benchmark report we reached a couple of weeks back. And we're also gonna have a chat with Alf here who's gonna talk us through some of the Vipps use cases about how they use Mixpanel and how they relate to the fintech industry in general. K? That being said, let's, let let's just share a few slides. It won't be death by PowerPoint today, but I think it's worth. Just going a few slides just kind of talking about what exactly we we released in this benchmarks report. Right? So first things first, quick introduction from myself. I'll go first. Why not? I'm Thomas Mather. I'm a senior solution engineer at Mixpanel. I've been here for three years now. Bit of a specialty in the media entertainment and fintech industries, and I help customers understand how exactly they get most value from Mixpanel from a technical aspect. Okay? I'm also joined by Alf Thomas Nielsen, who is who is head of apps and comms at VIPs. Alf, do you want to introduce yourself, maybe get a bit of give a bit of a background from kind of how you got to this position, and maybe a little bit about VIPs as well for maybe our non in the, users in the audience today. Yes. Thank you, Tom. So as you said, I'm, of Thomas Nielsen. So I have an engineering background, worked as an engineer for about ten years before transitioning into management. And, I've not been programming for the last ten years, but I've been working with mobile apps both on iOS and Android for about fifteen years now. And I'm based in Oslo in Norway. And to say a few words about VIX mobile pay. So we are the company that operates the VIX service in Norway and Sweden, and we operate the mobile pay service in Denmark and Finland. So we have different brands in in in different markets. We used to be separate companies, competitors, actually, but we merged in 2022. And although we operate the different brands in the different markets, we are running on the same technical platform. So we merged onto the same technical platform early last year. And apart from a few local adaptations, in each market, and the branding, the apps are basically exactly the same in in all those markets. We are a mobile wallet. We launched more than ten years ago, and we then made it very, very easy to transfer money to other people without knowing their account number, basically. So all you needed was, someone's phone number. And then we moved on to add the ecommerce capabilities to the product, and currently, we enable more than 400,000 merchants across The Nordics to get paid using our services. And last year, we processed the processed about 1,200,000,000 transactions. Yes. And also, after the migration to a common platform, we also added the support to send money across borders both, to persons and also to businesses. So that's the quick summary of, of what our product is. Brilliant. Yep. That's, I think that gives a lot of context to the user in the audience. And Vips is a pretty novel novel idea in The UK, especially or the in the mere, sorry, especially as, you know, typically Apple and Google have been the main place in that kind of mobile payments scenario. And I guess just one question for you before we kick it off. Do you miss the coding? Do you think you'll ever go back? I think I'm too deep, deep into it now. So it'll be hard to go back. Yeah. Sure. That's Somewhat. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. Sure. Cool. Alright. So thanks for that, Alf. That kind of gives a bit of an intro into yourself and a bit about VIPs. So we'll just now quickly run through this presentation. So it's a few slides covering about mixed panels, benchmarks report as we touched on. We will put the link to that in the chat if Larissa, my my backstage assistant, hasn't done that already. So so feel free to read that in your own time. This is more of a summary of all of the kind of the trends and focuses of that report. Alright. So quickly about what what was in this report? Like, where did this kind of come from? Right? So for anybody who isn't familiar with Mixpanel, we are, of course, kind of an event product analytics tool. And that tool collects about 2,200,000,000,000 events or 2,200,000,000,000 data points. And that's what this this analysis has been based off of this 2,200,000,000,000 data points of the dataset of Mixpanel customers. Those 2,200,000,000,000 events were triggered by 5,840,000,000 unique users, which is about what, three quarters of the entire globe, which is a pretty pretty crazy statistic. And of course, Mixpanel does have a particular focus in the fintech industry. We have around two and a half thousand or 2,533 fintech companies who use Mixpanel every day. Okay? So who did we look at in the financial services space? Because obviously, fintech covers quite a broad spectrum of companies. Right? So for instance, we've got wealth management, blockchain and crypto has made a bit of a resurgence recently, and there's also alternative financing like DeFi companies as well. Banking and payments has always been a core part of Mixpanel's user base, and insurance as well. So we cover quite a few different aspects of the entire financial services industry. Okay. So what were the key fit trends that we saw last year? Okay. Well, obviously, AI continues to dominate. Right? Twenty twenty four was indeed the year of AI in reality, and investing in AI and big data and looks improved risk modeling and predicting market volatility. So I think we've all seen quite a lot of market volatility in the past couple of days, and AI is going to be a big driver in helping that risk and managing that risk. Okay? We also saw quite a big increase in regulations across the world. Right? Companies continue to get pushed by regulations in reality, and I think Alf might touch on that a little bit later. And Blockchain and crypto companies have really been at the forefront of that. The EU put some restrictions in regarding stable coins, for instance, and that's been a big part of that 2024 increase in regulation. And in reality, the there was a big chain of change in terms of the technical aspects. There's been a continued need for a unified view of data. Right? Lots of finance companies have quite siloed data, and in reality, what we're trying to look for is this kind of integrated view of data to lower risk and increase opportunity. So effectively, all stakeholders having all access to the data to make the right business decisions. Okay. Now, of course, when we think about that that, kind of maybe more more deeply on some of the metrics that some of these fintech companies might use or look at or need to understand, this report covers the first kind of part of that, which is, of course, acquisition. Alright. Acquisition, for anybody who isn't aware, is all about, obtaining users or maybe getting the users in the door. And there's a few kind of takeaways from the what we see in aqua for acquisition across the kind of the wider financial services space. Okay? Blockchain and crypto and banking experienced the largest increase increases in month over month user growth, for instance, at about 2.41% respectively. And we typically found the banking's growth rate was was given was driven by accelerated adoption of mobile banking. We've got kind of a mobile wallet here talking today, along with open banking as well. Okay? Open banking has become typically more relevant, especially as it's kind of using more APIs to share data with third party financial service providers. So lots of companies are kind of moving towards a a third party space for getting data in. Okay? The payments industry has actually seen a bit of a an increase in competition as we kind of will talk about later, for instance, and that can often make user growth harder. Right? So we can see a point 1% growth here in reality, and we've seen competition from new entrants into the market like Wiro in Europe. And traditional finance institutions like Lloyds Bank are buying their own, like building their own, like, buy now, pay pay later schemes like Klarna, and we're seeing try seeing an emergence of those new members to the market too. If we talk about LATAM very quickly, Brazil, PIX has instant payment system, has enabled new entrants to transfer new money more quickly and more cheaply than ever before. So lowering those barrier to entries has really helped the month of the month user growth in LATAM, for instance. So what can we take away from this kind of very very quick intro into, acquisition? Well, obviously, Blockchain and crypto have expanded use cases. Right? And that's something that we're trying to see some of our customers move into is kind of expanding use case based on your products. They have expanded or crypto in general has expanded into capital markets, into central bank digital currencies, into DeFi applications, which have kind of like a a more democratized use of financial services. Okay? Crypto is also being, you know, used for, like, digital identity and through Blockchain analysis and fraud management, for instance. And also maybe this was more from a couple of years ago than specifically last year, NFTs. Right? We've all heard that buzzword, for instance, to do with, like, non fungible tokens, and how they are being used in, like, gaming applications, in digital art, in collectibles. And this has helped adapt more or adopt, in fact, more users into the traditional crypto growth space in reality. We also find that for instance, for acquisition, we are tracking like KYC completion. I know KYC is a big challenge for almost every single financial services company. There is there an understanding KYC or or know your customer process is is really important for getting users in the door because often there's frustration in that space. Customer acquisition cost is something that gets focused on in the acquisition space as well. So lowering CAC would be really good for helping kind of sustainable growth numbers. And, of course, we could just look at raw volumes of app downloads, which is another way of monitoring acquisition and improving our acquisition speeds. Okay? We're also finding financial services companies are expanding to new audiences like millennials, Gen z, small business owners, right, sections like that. If we can allocate resources to a test group, for instance, if we're looking to test different acquisition methods, into these high growth potential new groups and maybe in the more developing country side of things, we can see a growth there as well. So it's another opportunity for increasing that month over month user growth. Okay. We've got an example. Right? So we've just mentioned Brazil. So PickPay is another company in Brazil, for instance. They're, Brazil's Second largest digital bank, as you saw in the screen, and they've been a Mixpanel customer for a few years now. They use their their, Mixpanel for the product teams, and they leverage their, leverage mix panel for specifically customer acquisition. Okay? They increased conversion rates per 10%, and they did this by monitoring, like, onboarding funnels. Okay? So tracking conversions hour by hour. They improved conversion rates by 10%. Okay? They did this effectively by uncovering hidden drop off points. Right? They've done this through quickly self serve dashboards. So people have had quicker, easier access to data to discover where that drop offs were happening and then improve the conversion rates off the back of it. Okay? And they also saw a 13% prevention loss on their registration funnel. Okay? That's to help get through users through the door and stopping them stopping them stopping registering effectively. Okay? But a good example there of how this has kind of been put into action. Alright. Now, of course, we're gonna probably focus a little bit more on the mobile today, so I think that's an important point to mention because mobile first experiences are critical everywhere. Okay? APAC, LATAM, smartphones are generally more affordable and more accessible than than kind of PCs or laptops, for instance. So that makes a lot of sense that those regions have a very heavy weighting towards mobile popularity versus desktop popularity or mobile versus web, for instance. Mobile phone penetration often exceeds traditional desktop computer adoption, and then we kinda see this idea of, like, mobile first culture where people start using or building applications specifically for mobile rather than maybe going for a web approach and then translating that into mobile. If we think about some, again, some industry insights into this, payment companies have an opportunity to integrate with regional payment systems like in APAC and LATAM, where where mobile is significantly more focused. So a big opportunity to maybe, again, bring some of that third party data in. Okay? Takeaways from mobile popularity. We generally suggest if we're thinking about some some advice we might give on this kind of things, segment your segment your reporting, segment your reporting by region, by conversion rate by region, by customer lifetime value by region, and also look at reactivation rates because they can be quite different across these various different regions. If you're in APAC, we might suggest that you would integrate with, like, mobile payment systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay for instance to help streamline transactions and reduce those barriers to conversion. If anybody is looking for advice in EMEA, experimentation is generally the way to go. Mobile first, web enhanced. That's generally what we like to suggest. So maybe build for mobile and then enhance for web. So maybe some more features for those more heavy power users on the websites. You gotta go beyond responsive website and design features, and maybe might maybe taking advantage for those customers who are on web with the bigger screens. Okay? In-depth in in-depth, like, analysis through that kind of piece that helps us understand if a larger screen, user has more to engage with, and they get a better experience off the back of it. Okay? North America has typically been very heavy on web usage, for instance, and web popularity. So we might suggest investing in enhancing the web experience and ensuring seamless integration between mobile and web platforms. Okay? Because we see a closer a closer alignment here to towards that fifty fifty mark of popularity, allowing users to switch easily between devices can go a long way with stopping frustration. Right? We've all had problems where we've clicked on a link on a website, it's opened the app, and it's taken us to the wrong place. Right? That seamless experience is critical in North America. Engagement. Right? So we've looked at it. We've looked at acquisition. We talked about those those statistics, for instance. But what about getting our users engaged or keeping our users? Okay? Well, product stickiness has typically been a metric that we focus on. Okay? And this was a a report pulled out from our from the benchmarks reports, and product stickiness for anybody who isn't familiar is all about DAUs over MAUs. So daily active users over monthly active users. It's kind of like a ratio. Right? Wealth management did have the higher product stickiness, but there can be a variety of reasons behind that. Right? So typically, we're starting to see an increase of, like, robo advisors. Right? We've we've touched on AI before. Right? Robo advisors is helping increase wealth management stickiness. Okay? Because customers are more quickly and more timely helped to that kind of answer their problems or get advice, for instance. We also find that fractional shares and micro investing have maybe had a little bit of help here. So there's lower barriers to entry in terms of the value that people need to invest before they get this kind of return on their investments. Okay? Payment companies also remain pretty sticky. Right? Despite the fact that we mentioned before that there is a lot of competition. So, we might find that users that bounce between payment platforms. But actually, mobile payments and and contactless payments in general have grown about 20 to 30% across the world. Right? So whether that's in North America, India, or APAC, we're still seeing huge growth rates in mobile payments and contactless payments. Okay? We touched on it before, but like open banking and like API connections, they've helped create great connectivity and innovation. So maybe we're seeing a few more interesting features released that's helping the, that's helping the users kinda stick around for instance. And if we think about, like, some some takeaways or some some some advice, maybe we'll go with that kind of thing. What about something like, for instance, focusing on metrics that matter for your industry? Right? So DAUs and MUs is maybe a bit more of a a global or a fintech wide metric that we might look at. We might often look at, like, more engagement metrics, like time to first transaction. That's a classic one, for instance. Or session intervals, so how how long between sessions are there, for instance. Certain feature analysis might help with this understanding of stickiness as well. So typically, when users are using digital platforms, there's always a feature that is more sticky than the others. Right? Things like loyalty programs, wish lists, points, when we talk about those kind of loyalty programs again. They help with driving stickiness, and finding those features that drive stickiness can go a long way to helping that retention. Okay? Cool. Alright. We'll keep we'll keep this rolling. Obviously, there's other ways of measuring engagement in this in this report as well. So a classic one is is actions per user. This is, of course, understanding, like, the volume of actions per per individual customer. Okay? This varies massively from every single industry. So I know we're focusing on on kind of sub industries in the fintech space, but actions per user for ecommerce to SaaS to gaming is very, very different. So, of course, understanding it in your specific industry is the way to focus on this, and don't compare fintech to ecommerce because it's complete different spaces. Okay? Wealth management, again, had the highest number of, actions per user, but but it's important to look at trends across the year when we focus on, actions per user because seasonality can play a really big part. Right? If we think about ecommerce, we're gonna see a big spike in in, in Black Friday and Christmas, for instance. Whereas, we might see more, we might see more seasonal spikes at the end of a quarter. Right? Because we're more than the end of a month where people get paid, for instance. Okay? As we saw in in the previous the previous reports, we saw that crypto and and Blockchain had higher acquisition numbers, but we're seeing them quite hard to engage those users. Okay. So we're we're doing really well in the blockchain space of acquiring, but actually kind of getting them engaged and driving them to value was always a bit of a bit of a challenge. You can kind of see this this like light blue line right at the bottom. If anybody is in that space and is looking for a bit of a bit of guidance here, focus on retaining those active users by using tailored onboarding experiences. Personalized learning paths, for instance, and customizing to each individual user's experiences can help a lot with a long way of getting users engaged and then locked in. Okay? Couple more takeaways from from this insight as well. We also look at we're obviously we mentioned before looking at time to first transaction, so looking at how long we take our users to get that immediate piece of value. That can go a long way for understanding a, our product's value, but, b, more about how we actually get our users to that end goal. Okay? It can also be a predictor of customer lifetime value. So getting users in the door quickly and getting them to value quickly can go a long way for actually predicting how valuable they be off of the kind of the back of it. Okay. So focus on that as well. Go beyond basic demographics as well. We're generally seeing customers use things like AI to analyze individual user behavior, understand risk tolerance, for instance, and understand financial goals as well. Okay? Imagine your platform suggesting specific stocks based on, like, reading habits or career paths. That's like AI to hyper personalized user experience. Okay? Also, we're often finding that the reason the customers aren't engaged is that they don't know enough. So education can go a long way with helping this this these kind of metrics as well. So we often we're seeing more of a slicing of that content into more bite sized pieces, so bite sized articles, videos, podcasts, explaining these complex topics or complex features to help get users to do the thing that they actually came into the platform for. Okay? And if we can keep those bite sized videos and articles in platform, it helps that learning experience much more seamless. Okay. Conversion paths. Obviously, we've looked at a lot of the reports, but of course, we mentioned conversion paths. So we mentioned that kind of metric of time to complete first transaction. We can Mixpanel can show the optimal conversion path. So for instance, this is kinda like a sample banking company here where they're looking at, like, an onboarding into their first transaction where they're paying a bill, for instance, in the scenario. And we can look at the the optimal conversion path for the steps the users should take to get them to that scenario or maybe even, like, how long it takes them to get that scenario for certain pathways or certain of those personalized onboarding experiences can get our users to that transaction in a quicker way. Alright. Final bit of the topic or the report is about retention. Okay? And retention is obviously can be a very complex topic in reality. A lot of customers don't know about how how to measure retention or what their attention really means for them. Okay? Retention is all about kinda keeping users in the platform. Right? In the report on the benchmark report, it focuses on week one retention rates. Right? So effectively, how many users who registered today, for instance, on the March 5, are likely to be here in about a week's time. Okay? And that is measured as a percentage. Okay? And once again, wealth management, really strong retention rates. So they see about 28% of their customers retain, week like, after that first week. Okay? So 28% of customers are still with us one week later. Okay? Insurance. Now this is probably not a great metric for insurance because if we think about what insurance or when you buy insurance, you're typically buying, you know, an annual policy, so it's unlikely you're gonna come back after a week. But But often, for instance, when we we we do measure retention for insurance companies, when they look at, like, users signing up for new insurance policy, they don't make a claim, but also we could use it to measure the number of people who did make a claim within a full first week of that policy starting, for instance. But we would typically expect insurance to be quite low on this retention rate metric. Okay? How do we improve retention? Right? What can we suggest? Segmenting users, again, based to to personalize their user experience, to make sure that their the content they're receiving is hyper personalized to their to their use cases. Right? We could also track various metrics to see if maybe the changes we're making help retention rates. Things like customer churn rates, revenue churn rates, cohort analysis on retention for instance. And then also measuring that time to first time value can help understand are our users going to stick around or did they have a frustrating experience. Okay. We're seeing customers start to use predictive analytics, right, to anticipate client needs and also offer relevant solutions to make sure that we know the problem with them before they do. Okay? If week one retention rates aren't your kinda key metric for retention, so if you're in the insurance industry, for instance, you could look at other retention metrics like renewal rates, lead and revenue generation. So in if like an example specific to insurance might be, for instance, average policy lifetime, for instance, or claim ratios or things like that, to help understand a different side of retention. Okay. Summary. I did say it wouldn't be death by PowerPoint, and this is gonna be my last slide for the for this kind of session before we have a Alf and I have a bit of a chat. 2025 will be a big year for FinTech. Right? We saw a huge growth across a variety of the sub industries in the previous reports. Okay? And it's gonna be more competitive than ever. Okay? So it's vital to have all of your data in a clear integrated way to make sure that everybody can make the business decisions that they should be making. Okay. So a few takeaways, segment your data to identify nuances, opportunities, and gaps. Focus on your onboarding. I think that's been key throughout the entire report is the onboarding and personalized user experiences are critical for acquisition, but even more critical for retention. Imagine your KPIs. Use the benchmark as a helpful guidance. Right? Make sure you track your metrics to make sure that actually we can see how we're benefiting from the changes we do make to our platform. Okay. And we will put the link in the in the in the in the chat. So if you do want to download the 2025 report and learn about a bit more in detail about some of the metrics that we've covered, that'll be available to download, so feel free to look at that. Alright. Cool. Alright. So that's, I think that's enough on that, on covering off the that report. Alf, thoughts? Any any feedback immediately off the back of just talking about that report? I think I think yeah. I mean, it's very interesting to to to to focus on on the different topics around acquisition and, and the retention, as well as the engagement. Right? So I think it's it's it's good to give the report a good read through. And, probably there are some metrics and some things in there that you aren't reflecting on day to day. And, maybe maybe you should. So I think it's a it's a it's a good, good intro to to the topics. Yeah. Good. Good. Cool. Yes. I I totally agree. I totally agree. So let's let's talk a bit more about about you and Vips then. Right? So, obviously, you gave us a bit of an introduction to Vips Mobile Pay before. Could you give us a little bit more detail about the company and the product? Because, obviously, you know, in December, you launched, or you, in fact, hit the front pages or at least in payment circles, with with the launch of, like, this this first third party contactless payment solution for iPhone. Tell us a little bit about that as well, if you could. Yeah. Yeah. So I think so in terms of engagement, I think it's really so we are a payment, platform, and I think it's important then to be in people's minds whenever they pay. And, to us, the sort of missing puzzle piece has been to crack the in store payments. We've we've tried multiple times. So, so, both both, our company, but also our, owner, our majority owner, which is, DNB, which is the largest bank in in Norway. In already in 2015, they tried to launch NFC payments. But at that time, technology was not really present in many phones. And at at launch, it was sort of you had to have a specific phone operator. You had to have an Android phone. You had to, have a specific bank and sort of and also, obviously, not possible to pay at every merchant. So so that failed. In 2020, we we tried, we we tried in in Vipps to launch in store payments. That was a solution that was based on merchant presented QR codes. So the payment terminal would display a QR code. You would scan it with our app and, and, and authenticate the payments. But that was also lacking. It it wasn't working in all terminals. It wasn't working with all banks. It was more cumbersome than, contactless payments, obviously. Mhmm. So we we care deeply in our company about having a culture where people dare to take risks. Yep. Not reckless risks, of course, but but to go really outside of the comfort zone. We think that's where you that's where you can, create some extra value. And we encourage also people to to share, their fuck ups and, and preferably any subsequent learnings. We even have a separate channel in our in our Slack dedicated for these types of stories. And, typically, there's, stories from people on how they caused an outage or how a product launch paid to get traction, and and so on. And and the channel is just called fuck ups, and it has has a a bit of traffic to it. And I think that's really good to to highlight that it's, okay to to fail. And in fact, going circling back to the the in store payments and the contactless payments, so we took them part, in the case against, Apple in in the EU Commission, where our goal was to get the NFC chip on iPhones opened up for third parties. And, it actually turned out that our previous failures in the in store payment space had turned out to be a blessing in disguise because, this was also proof that it was very hard to compete evenly with with Apple without the, support for creating NFC payments. Mhmm. And in January, Apple announced that they would be opening up, for, what's called HCE based payments on NFC in the EEA. So HCE is, is a host card emulation. So that's the technology that's, that's, used. And at that time, we got quickly together with, with a technology vendor, Thales, and also with a domestic payment scheme in in Norway called Bankarcept. So we were quite far in the planning and partly development as well of the solution when Apple finalized APIs and made them available. That was in July, I believe. And then we had an intensive autumn where we built and, and launched the solution, in, in mid December, both on Android and iOS. And and we were the first third party developer to to to do this on on the new iOS APIs. And I actually think that we're still the only one that has launched a solution on these APIs. So we were we we won by by a mile, so to so to say. Good. Good. I think, I think, yeah, it sounds like you had a bit of a head start, which is always always helpful to have. I think the the question people will be asking is, like, well, why why would I use, you know, Dips mobile wallets ever like Apple Wallet, for instance, or or Google Wallet? Right? What's the what's the added value here? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the, the solution is actually from a user point of view is very similar. Right. On iPhone, for example, if you set our app as a default contactless app, the double click, gesture on on iPhone will open our app instead of, Apple Wallet. And you pay in in exactly the same way. Just hold the phone close to the terminal and and and and then it's paid just like, Apple Pay and and and Google Pay. Apple Wallet does have some benefits. Like, for first of all, they have, of course, quite a few years of, of a head start. So they support more things than just, payments. So that's something we we need to look into to sort of build the completeness of of of our wallet to also include stuff like tickets, loyalty, and and and similar things. And, also, Apple Pay supports what's called a low power mode because it's built not on the HCE technology, but it's built on the on the, Secure Element technology. And, Apple has actually, opened up for the Secure Elements to to for third parties to use the Secure Elements technology outside of of the EEA, or the EU. But that requires a commercial agreement with Apple. So the solution that is opened up inside of the EA based on regulations, does not require a commercial agreement with Apple. So, Apple does not have any direct revenue on on that functionality or on those payments. Cool. Cool. Yeah. I think that that that's that's really, really interesting. I think you've touched on a, a point there about, like, you know, the EEA and, like, regulations. So what role is, like, regulations played in this? Because it must have been a bit of a minefield, I imagine, to get this kind of all all working in place. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it this we wouldn't have launched this without the the regulations coming into play. I don't see how or why Apple would have opened this up without their regulations. As I mentioned, they opened up in other markets, but that's, contingent on a commercial agreement with with Apple. And, as as as you're probably aware, the payments industry is not a high margin industry. Yeah. So, it makes it a bit harder to monetize, if if if Apple also needs a a cut. Right? Yeah. So, and and to us, like, we could have, of course, launched this on on Android years ago, but it's complicated to have such, integral part of the app being different on different platforms. It's hard to design for over time, and it's hard to sort of communicate to to our end users and also to our merchants. That some users can't do this, some users cannot, and and so on. Yeah. Yeah. That that would that'd be a pretty frustrating user experience. And I think, that gives, like, a good opportunity to, like, pivot into, like, some of maybe the more metrics style. Right? But as you just mentioned, like, existing users, but what about, like, new users? Like, how are you, like, adopt, adapting acquisition strategies? Right? Because the Nordics is is is a pretty different market to a lot of a lot of the rest of, like, EEA, for instance, in the fact that kind of they typically haven't been very mobile focused. Right? So, like, how are you, yeah, how are you adapting your acquisition strategies to kind of account for that in, like, maybe a more web first market? So so as I mentioned, we've been, we we've been mobile only for more than ten years, and it has worked, great in the in The Nordics. You can, of course so you can pay for ecommerce with the with, with our app. And then, of course, you do the ecommerce on the web, on whatever web shop you you you want to shop in, and then you need to authenticate the payment on your on your mobile device. But, the benefit of it is that it has allowed us to to focus, on a single a single solution. I worked in companies previously which had both web and mobile, and it's it's always sort of a catch up game in terms of functionality, and you need to keep it somewhat, in in sync. So I think for us, that has been good. Then, of course, if moving into new markets, we need to sort of, we need to do do our due diligence and understand sort of what market are we going into, what are the challenges. Not all for us, it's not only about, mobile or web. Right? But since we're also doing digital payments, it's also the cash usage in a in a country is of, importance to us. Right? So, yeah, so I think that's, that's important. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I think, yeah, having having, like, as I said, kinda like a a mobile first or a single approach, that that must have helped that process as well. And I guess while we're on the acquisition topic, obviously, the report we mentioned, like, customer acquisition cost. Right? So a really, really important acquisition metric. Right? How is, how is Vipshop mobile pay optimizing it? Right? Because, of course, you can spend tons of money and get loads of users, but how do you do it while ensuring sustainable user growth? Yes. Yes. So when launching, it was significant amounts of marketing going into this, backed by, owners. Mhmm. But the thing is that the heart and soul of our products, and also where it started is the peer to peer payments between persons. So sending money to a friend, receiving money from a friend. And this is a product that has very strong network effects. And in Norway and Denmark, we've sort of reached the point where we are the de facto standard service for these types of payments. Yep. So the acquisition cost for to get users into our platform is relatively low. People are coming to us because they, want to use us. Like, we have people joining the as as soon as they're old enough, sort of, because then they can finally, receive money or finally pay in shops and and and so on. But the interesting thing for us is, of course, and and where we need to invest is how we can monetize those users, by having them to use a wider range of our product portfolio. And in order to keep acquisition costs on those, parts of the portfolio as long as, as low as possible, we try to engage them when inside of our own platform. Right. So we have about two so we have 12,000,000 users in total and two and a half million daily active users. So it's a large portion of the user base is in inside of the app every every day. So we we try to show them other other functionality that they can, that they can use, but we, of course, also need to realize that our app is a is a tool. In most, in most cases, You open it with a job to be done. I mean, we can't get too much in the way of of of that, of that, job. So, Mixpanel helps us also to track metrics to understand that we don't negatively affect sort of the core, flows of our of our app. Yeah. Yeah. That because it's it's it's a fine balance. Right? Because, obviously, as a business, we need to make some money. But, also, it's a fine balance of, well, if we if we kinda push that that too hard, it just has the negative effects. Right? And that I think the visibility into that can go a long way of making the right decision to help users kind of move move the business forwards. Alright. Well, we we touched on acquisition. Right? So then, I think, obviously, the next part of the part of the report talks about engagement. Right? And if I think if if I brought the slides back up, I could if if anybody's interested. We typically find that, like, payment platforms have pretty high user stickiness, and I think you've just alluded to the fact that actually your your DAU, MAU ratio is pretty strong. Right? So how outside of those kind of metrics, how are you measuring user engagement? Okay. And what strategies are you kinda using to help maintain engagement or improve, like, stickiness ratios? So our engagement metrics, revolve around the the transactions. So, typically, the key metric for us is the is the average number of transactions that a user performs per per month. Transaction can mean different types of things. It could be sending money to a friend. It could be, also other more social functionality that that we have. Like, you can save money in a group or you can split, a cost, in a group of people. It could be regular online shopping. It could be in store shopping. So what's important as I as I also mentioned earlier is to to be available in all all payment situations. Yeah. So people over time, people don't have to think whether they are paying with this app or with something else. It's just the thing they always pay with. Yes. And that's that's why contactless payments for in store, has been key to us. It's the sort of the missing puzzle piece to that. Yeah. And so and so the those, those kind of, like, those functionalities, I guess, is what the turbo use, which you've just mentioned. How do you how do you identify which ones drive user engagement, and how do you then prioritize off the back of that in terms of that development of those features? Because I think customers can can struggle with a going, well, how do I find the features that work? Like, how do how do you approach that? Yep. So, you know, we have the I think this the social features we have connected to payments. I mentioned splitting costs, collecting money. We also have, functionality around the wish list. So sort of Yeah. Trying to expand on the on our part in a in a ecommerce journey, so to say, that we can also, make it more more natural to use the the app in a tool for more than just the payment. So I think that's where we, that's where we want to drive engagement and also gives more opportunities to to monetize, the users. Cool. Cool. And then and and how does how does that, like, kind of, like, relate to then, like, seasonality? Because I'm guessing, for instance, that, like, Black Friday, as we touched on, is probably, you know, a big a big spike in, like, engagement. How are you how are you using those seasonal trends to boost engagement? And do you use anything like promotions or anything like that to help people kind of, you know, get to grips with the app? Yeah. So one example is that we support sending money as as gifts. The functionality is basically that you can you can schedule a gift at all time, and you can add a virtual wrapping paper to it. Mhmm. And those wrapping papers are very seasonal based. So, and, and, obviously, Christmas is a huge gifting season, but we also have gift wrapping for other holidays like, Chinese New Year, Eid, and so on. And and we also, as I briefly mentioned, added support for adding and sharing wish lists. That's also a very big sort of seasonality thing. We have a everyone has a birthday once a year, so that's relatively evenly spread out. But Christmas is, of course, a huge driver. Valentine's also a bit of a driver. So we both have the functionality where users can create and share their own wish lists. We also have curated wish lists that we can partner up with with merchants to promote specific products and, and also have users, build on those wish lists and adapt them to them to themselves. Mhmm. And I think it's also it's also, in terms of regulations, it's also important to do this in the right way. So we recently started gathering consents from our users to do a bit more targeted, advertising to be able to give them, or to highlight more relevant information to them. So, so that's also one thing that we're doing. Yeah. Cool. Cool. I and I I think, yeah, I think that that seasonality thing with the with the gift wrapping, I think, is a a really cool and quite novel idea, actually, just to drive a bit of kind of round year engagement anyway. And often, we we do find that there's there's you can run the analysis in mixed panel, but we find that tools like or features like wish lists and the multi programs genuinely do help boost boost metrics like to engage users. And we we I guess that kind of pivots quite nicely into intellect retention. Right? Because this is the other part. Obviously. It sounds like Vipps is is pretty strong in reality and, in kind of keeping users retained because, of course, it becomes their de facto, you know, payment choice, for instance. But in the report, it mentioned that, like, week one retention rates across fintech is about 18%, give or take. So 18% of users will still be with us one week after they sign up, for instance. Do you mind sharing how Vipses, Vips MobilePay's week one retention rate compares to that? Yeah. So so we are a bit about above that retention rate. So that retention rate, it's across fintech. Yeah. I would imagine that paying for something is something that's a bit more of a frequent occurrence than, for example, managing your your portfolio or as you alluded to earlier as well with the insurance. Right? Yeah. Insurance is more of a fire and forget. Hopefully, at least, you don't have to do any claims. Mhmm. So but we have, built our own system to communicate with users inside of our app. It's a system we call, the voice. Mhmm. And it supports the concept of user journeys where we are able to reengage and give new users relevant information in the first sort of days and weeks after after they onboard. I mentioned that we merged in 2022 with, with MobilePay, and we moved all of their users into our platform, early last year. So that meant we had millions of users joining basically our new platform to them. To them, it was a new it was a new app. And this allowed us to sort of drip feeds information to them over the course of the first few weeks of of using that app instead of overloading them with here's everything that is new. So we Yeah. We're able to sort of, have a have a a journey for them, so to say. Cool. And I'm I'm just gonna ask a a more of a a good question surrounding that. How did, how did that process go by the kind of the merging of the two? Did you get a lot of customers being like, don't understand it, or was it pretty seamless for your users? Yeah. No. We had we we didn't have a lot of, we did not have a lot of churn, so it was quite successful in in, in that sense. Of course, people don't like change in in general. So that's, that's, of course, something that generated quite a bit of noise. And I think in that regard, Mixpanel was super important because we got a lot of, qualitative feedback. Right? But it was really good for us to also see sort of the quantitative metrics, what is actually happening. Like, there's a hundred users complaining. But are we really having any fewer transactions? Are we really is it actually taking any longer to go from opening the app to having, converted on a on a on a payment funnel? Right? So gave gave us it gave us some peace of mind that, okay, there is a bit of noise right now, but we see that things are actually running relatively smoothly. Right? So, so yeah. Yeah. People can often have very loud voices, but actually, it doesn't read very much. Right? Of course. Yeah. And what about, like, more long term? Right? So, like, what are what are kind of key factors that contribute to long term use retention on the Vipps mobile play platform? Right? And how are you measuring those longer term strategies? Yeah. So what what users want is that they want to make the payments, and they want to make them securely and easily, which is sometimes in in in conflict, but, but it's also increasingly hard to make money on payments as I also mentioned earlier. So revenue has to come from value added services, which we need to to surface at the right, at the right time in order to keep people retained on the platform. So we follow the growth of overall transaction volumes, but but but Mixpanel allows us to analyze things as I mentioned time to conversion on key funnels and really sort of keep make sure that people want to use us over time, right, and that we're not scaring them away with, with, having a too broad of a of a of a portfolio as well. Sure. Sure. And and and I guess I guess, kind of my my final question before we got some questions for the audience is, it kind of relates to the bit you've you mentioned about how when when you merged, you know, you kind of drip fed information to users. And the report talks about this as well in terms of, like, streamlined onboarding experiences. So having really easy onboarding to get users to value quickly. How are you ensuring kind of smooth and engaging onboarding? Because often, a smooth onboarding might be interesting. How are you how are you approaching that that kind of side of things? Yeah. I think this is, to be completely honest, I think this is a place where we have gotten a bit lazy and that we, have a lot of potential. So in our mature markets, users are generally relatively determined to onboard despite whatever friction is in that, process. We've not put, much effort into sort of continuously optimizing our onboarding flows, but that obviously has to has to change with, less mature markets. We need to keep a much, closer eye on how onboarding is performing and experiment with, different types of, changes and see how it how it affects the the onboarding conversion. So, yeah, that's, an area where we can improve. Cool. Cool. I think that that that that's a a good a good place to kind of end the the the questions about the reports and how it relates to VIPs and whatnot. We did get some questions from the audience pre webinar, so users could submit questions prior to joining today. So we'll just have a run through some of these because they're they're pretty I think they're pretty interesting from a different angle. Right? So I'm gonna put you on the spot here, Ralph. Okay? And I'm gonna ask, what's one metric or KPI in 2025 that you can do that can differentiate you from the pack? So I think that's the, I mentioned the average number of transactions. I think that's, that's key just to sort of see that we're actually able to, retain our market share on on ecommerce, but also that we're able to gain in, in in store, in in store payments. Cool. Cool. Yeah. I think that that that generally shows pretty good health of the business as well. And another question, which I think, I guess, I guess slightly relates to that is, obviously, we looked at a benchmarks report today. Right? So, obviously, when you when you released, maybe maybe more the mobile pay side of things, how are you benchmarking when you're kind of creating something so, you know, new to the market? How are you comparing yourself to, you know, other tools or maybe internally? How do you how do you do that that kind of process? So we did this. So the existing mobile pay platform, also used Mixpanel. So we were able to sort of have some benchmarking data there. Also, at least for, Denmark and Norway, which were sort of relative very similar in terms of maturity, we could also sort of expect that, okay, what whatever, numbers we have in Norway, we should probably have the same numbers. In in Denmark, it's it's the same app. So we should, but but also, of course, expecting that it takes some time for users to get used to a new, a new app. So, for example, time to conversion. Like, we would expect them to finish, but maybe taking a bit more time. So Sure. We kept an eye on that. Cool. Cool. And then, another question, which I think, you you did touch on before, but I think it's worth talking about is obviously, often customer expectations, especially when you've got, like, you know, a very established player in, like, you know, your new Google Wallet and Apple Wallet. They might be expecting something very similar in reality. So how do you identify gaps between, like, product visions and the expectations of the customer? Yeah. That that that is challenging. I think I think, doing a bit of qualitative, or basically the the sort of combination of qualitative and quantitative, research, is is really important, there, where we have, sort of because qual quant qualitative is is is very is very good, but you can it it can lead you in the wrong direction if you happen to get, some qualitative data that is not representative. Right? So I think that's where you need to, understand that you cannot catch up. You cannot fill the gap immediately. So you need to sort of prioritize what what what's the most important things, and then you need to listen to, to users. But the challenge is that users might say one thing, do another thing. So Yes. You need to also get get stuff out as quickly as possible and, and and see if it sticks and, and if not, try something else. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, yeah, people can gonna beg for a feature over and over again, and then you release it and they never use it, which is, like, probably the most frustrating thing I can imagine. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Obviously, you know, we didn't we touched on regulations a little bit. But, like, for instance, I think the one question that we're always asking, I can probably give an insight into this as well, is obviously, like, GDPR, right, is always a big challenge. So how are you how are you, like, linking, you know, user data with card data? Do you have you any challenges with that, or has that been kind of okay? Because often that's especially in, like, EEA and EMEA, that's a big question. Yeah. I mean, there is, the whole PCI, the DSS, scope, and and and so on. So we need to we need to deal with that like, like everyone else. But it's also to, try to defer a bit of it also to to partners and and vendors to allow us to sort of focus on the on the product part of it and have a bit more of a free so so it's about sort of compare compartmentalizing, things. Yep. Sure. Yeah. I think I think that compartmentalizing is a is a big point. And I think, the advantage that Mixpanel has is, like, we don't really care if you, like, tell us things about your users. Like, you can just use, like, a a a user ID or a client ID, and that becomes the user. You don't need to give Mixpanel things like first names and email addresses because that's a a big no no in the GDPR world. We don't do that. Okay. Good. Exactly. Not not neither should you. So that's maybe some more advice for anybody to take away. Alright. Well, I appreciate we've only got about five minutes left. Right? So I think, there's a few questions in in the in the chat which we can just quickly answer. And if anybody does have any further questions, please feel free to ping them in now while we have a few minutes left. And I think the question that I'll I'll just take from the chat is, of course, a big challenge for, like, financial service companies can often be like to do with, like, customer journeys. Right? So if anybody hasn't used Mixpanel before, when when understanding customer journeys in Mixpanel, we often look at the flows report. Right? So the flows report is all about, for instance, looking at, journeys effectively and how users navigate. So if I just quickly bring in a bit of Mixpanel, why not while we just talk about this? So this is the flows report for anybody who hasn't seen it. But if you are looking to kind of compare and contrast journeys and see how users navigate between platforms, for instance, the flows report goes a long way for showing those exploratory paths. Okay? So if you're looking at, for instance, after somebody completes that personalized onboarding come in, how do they reach that, inevitable goal of maybe we talk about, like, a a Vicks Mobile pay example of, like, you know, transferring some money to somebody. Okay? And then we could look at the kind of the organic journeys that our users take between those two paths. And often, the reason that we look at this is because digital platforms versus traditional kind of brick and mortar experiences are generally very different because they are typically more seamless. Okay? And looking at this kind of pathways helps us understand actually if we're a building products in the right way, so are we building a digital experience that suits our users in the journeys they take? And if we're not, how are our users using the platform and how are they exploring? Okay? And the flows report goes a long way for help building out that, that understanding if we're we're building the golden journey, which is often the phrase people use. Okay. Cool. Alright. Well, I I think we're we're we're pretty much at time here, and I think there's, no further questions that I can kind of see in the chat. Hopefully, we've answered most of those. I guess a bit of wrapping up. So thank you very much, Alf, for your time today. It's been very, very useful, very interesting, I think. Some very cool quite cool insights, especially related to VIPs. There's a few few few takeaways that I'll pass on as well. Obviously, I would be doing VIPs a disservice if I didn't put their link in the chat, so I'll just pop that in the chat. If anybody does want to have an explorer, if you are in the kind of Nordic region to kind of sign up to that platform, I will do that. That service to you. And if anybody has found today really interesting, there's a a bit of a takeaway is obviously Mixpanel's customer forum or MXP is coming up towards the, towards June. I think someone will correct me if I'm wrong in the background. But we are running some industry round tables. So if you'd like to kind of speak to like minded people in similar spaces, whether that's fintech or gaming or if you're from anywhere else, please come and sign up to that. That'll be that can be a good way of kind of meeting like minded peers and also getting, some industry insights as well. Okay? And I think that gives us that gives us time. Okay? So I think we've just seen the rest of that that link in the chat for for the Mixpanel London, the customer forum. So thank you very much for everybody who's come today. Thank you very much, Alf, again, for your time. Thank you, Larissa, for helping organize. And hopefully, everybody did get a lot of value out of today's session. I know I did. But, yeah, hopefully, we'll see you inside the the Mixpanel ecosystem soon. Alf, any closing remarks? No. Just, thank you for having me, and, hope, hope you got some, key takeaways. Brilliant. Cool. Alright, folks. Thank you very much, and we'll we'll see you again soon. Cheers. Bye for now.