How This Fintech Is Using WhatsApp to Gain New Customers

Mar 21, 2022
INC

Financial literacy is a challenge everywhere, but it’s particularly acute in Latin America, where less than half of people aged 14 and older have a bank account. Gabriel Roizner, a technology entrepreneur who often received questions from friends and family about how to manage their finances, recognized this as a problem. He wanted to find a way to improve financial education in the region - he says the more money literate people are, the better off they’ll be later in life - and settled on helping kids improve their spending and savings habits.  

In 2020, Roizner, with co-founders Yael Israeli and Pablo Klestorny, launched Mozper-- a Latin American-based fintech with operations in Mexico and Brazil that lets parents allocate an allowance to their children and set spending rules via the app. Funds are available to use with a Visa card, but unlike prepaid cards that simply get loaded with money, parents can define in which categories their kids can make purchases, give them financial rewards for chores and encourage them to save. “Parents need an easier way of managing their kids’ expenses in a way that’s digital but also gives them visibility around what the money is used for,” says Israeli, who is also Mozper’s CFO.

As much as people need financial help, Mozper is like any tech startup-- it needs customers if it’s going to succeed. When it first launched in Mexico in 2020 it was getting its message out in more traditional ways, such as through ads and videos. Last fall, however, it found a new and more successful way to bring people on board.

A more personal onboarding experience

As the company was readying for its Brazil launch, Roizner’s friend introduced him to a company called Connectly. Cofounded by Stefanos Loukakos, former head of the Messenger business at Facebook (now, Meta), Connectly helps companies extract the most value from their customer connections over WhatsApp.

Loukakos, who has had a long career in business messaging, started Connectly in December 2020. Through his work at Facebook, he saw how effective direct communication can be between companies and customers - it’s far more personal than calling a help desk and easier to follow than an email chain, he said. He chose to focus on WhatsApp because he was convinced it was the top messaging platform on the planet, where more than 100 billion messages get sent across the globe every day.

As soon as Roizner heard about Connectly, and how it creates more personal and meaningful customer connections, he knew it was a perfect fit. Not only do 86 percent of Brazilians use WhatsApp every day, according to Statista, they also love new technology. “Brazilians are super early adopters,” says Roizner. “They’re digital first.”

Roizner wanted to integrate Connectly into Mozper’s acquisition funnel to allow potential users to ask questions easily and instantaneously about its service in order to get to know the product before installing the app. Now, rather than sending people to download the app, they’re encouraging users to send a message to Mozper via WhatsApp.    

Connectly’s AI-powered chatbot prompts them to ask questions about the app, including how it works or whether they need help improving their children’s finances. This builds a more intimate connection between the user and the company, and ensures that the people who ultimately download the app are interested in using it. “We want to attract customers that result in high conversion rates,” he says, adding that Connectly has been twice as effective in getting people to sign up to the app than other customer acquisition methods.

Talking to new customers

Connectly, which has customers across the globe and in a variety of consumer-facing sectors, is effective because it allows businesses to connect with people in a conversational way. Leveraging the asynchronous thread format of WhatsApp, old chats are easily accessible, so people can recall their last interaction with the company, avoiding the need to place a call or send an email and start from scratch.

What the Mozper team likes most about Connectly is the way it’s able to support its marketing goals to connect with prospects in a more authentic way than other channels. It’s building connections with customers via personalized, two-way communication - while a bot starts a conversation, a human can jump in too if needed - rather than simply telling people to download its app. “It’s a very intimate way to communicate with the user; they don’t feel like you’re broadcasting out to them,” says Roizner.

As successful as Connectly has been for Mozper, Roizner sees it playing an even bigger part in its future. Mozper wants to make it an integral part of its customer acquisition strategy in other countries from the start.

And, Mozper is looking to its own analytics and those of its partners, including Connectly, to understand what customers want and fine-tune its communications across the board. “There’s no one recipe for talking to users,” says Roizner. “We’re going to keep testing different ways to understand the customer journey and preferences, in order to optimize conversion rates.”

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