Ambitious fintech outgrows its tech stack
With a unique value proposition and highly skilled team, CardUp is achieving something many fintechs dream of; rapid growth in a fiercely competitive sector.
Marketing Lead Jancis Yap explains what makes CardUp unique: “We enable digital payments in areas where cards weren’t traditionally accepted, such as rent and tax payments, so customers earn card rewards on expenses they usually wouldn’t. We’re particularly successful in the education space, where our no-code solution means less complexity and cost, simplifies the receivables processes, and makes payment reconciliation seamless.”
As CardUp saw its start-up scale up, they quickly outgrew the tools and software that previously served them well. “We needed to implement a CRM system and manage marketing, sales, and service in a more systematic way,” says Jancis.
Disconnected tools are less collaborative
In its early years, CardUp used a patchwork of disconnected tools to run the business’s front end. Aligning data and teams required significant manual effort and coordination.
Specifically, CardUp used an in-house, highly tech-secured backend system to store and manage customer information; Campaign Monitor for email marketing and automation; and Unbounce as their CMS. Updating customer data and generating reports manually was time-consuming and raised the risk of human error. Having to log into multiple tools for different activities further hindered team productivity and collaboration.
Dependency on IT causing inefficiencies
Because their CMS had limited functionality, CardUp’s marketing team was dependent on IT to get even simple website changes done. Not being able to accomplish those tasks independently caused delays and inefficiency, but Jancis wanted more autonomy and speed.
She says, “As long as you have additional dependencies, there will be extra time and resources required. We want to be able to self-serve as much as possible.”
No unified view of lead progression
To implement successful marketing strategies, CardUp needed to capture a clear picture of how leads progressed and the journey customers experienced. With disconnected software, they lacked that unified vision.
They couldn’t fully understand how conversions were generated from web assets, track leads to qualified leads, or visualize the path contacts took to become a customer. With a better understanding of the customer journey, CardUp could increase campaign effectiveness and optimize their budgets.
All-in-one platform to drive growth and efficiency
CardUp implemented HubSpot’s all-in-one platform, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and CMS Hub. Each product is connected to the same underlying CRM database, so CardUp has insights into every contact at each stage in their customer journey.
HubSpot’s connected platform was the ideal solution for enabling more growth and efficiency, says Jancis: “HubSpot enables our teams to get their work done with better productivity. Administrative tasks are faster and they can self-serve much more, with less dependency on IT.”
Increasing efficiency and success with Marketing Hub
Jancis immediately leveraged Marketing Hub’s features to save time and increase team productivity. She used Contact Management to create, organize, and grow relationships with customers and leads. She leveraged Campaign Management to seamlessly run and track lead gen campaigns. And she used HubSpot CMS to create and personalize website pages with no IT dependency.
Jancis particularly appreciated HubSpot CMS’s SEO tool, which helps CardUp optimize marketing content faster. She explains, “We’re actually not paying for an SEO agency now, because HubSpot’s SEO tool has such an impact. We are ranked on the first page, and even the first result, for several keywords. We're not even deep diving into the tool and we're already on the top results.”
Jancis implemented further marketing automations to save time and resources. Particularly beneficial is HubSpot’s workflow automation and list segmentation, which helps the team build the right user journey that converts more customers.
“Segmenting lists used to be a long process,” she says. “You had to go to our backend system, tell tech the segment you wanted, have them download a list for you, then upload it into the email marketing portal. Now the process is cut in half. You create the list yourself and add it to the marketing email feature. That's it!”
Automating sales outreach
CardUp’s sales team leveraged Sales Hub to automate key workflows and optimize their outreach. Managing, tracking, and recording all their different tasks with each prospect used to be time-consuming. Now, they use workflows and sequences to take the grunt out of the work, so they can focus on qualifying more leads.
Jancis explains, “With one automation, when a sales rep logs a call or other customer touchpoint, HubSpot automatically changes their status and moves them along the pipeline. This used to be quite administrative for the sales team, so it definitely saves them time.”
With better lead tracking, they prevent leads falling through the cracks. “We now track activity in a more granular manner, such as connected calls, non-connected calls, and all the different outcomes. This helps us streamline follow-up and achieve more with each lead.”
Deep understanding of the customer journey
With more of their customer data and behavior tracked on HubSpot, for the first time CardUp has an extensive picture of the customer journey all the way from awareness to purchase. This gives them insights into bottlenecks and opportunities, enabling them to reach out to the right audiences at the right moment.
Jancis explains, “If there’s one thing that is really helping in terms of scaling our business, it’s the user journey that we can build in HubSpot that we couldn't do previously. HubSpot’s connected app brings in our behavior events, actions taken by our customer, like every click, every movement that they do. We can therefore target them with more tailored and personalised communication that's related to what they are doing.”
4X more efficient, hyper-productive teams
With workflows and processes streamlined, CardUp’s sales and marketing teams are 4X more efficient since implementing HubSpot.
Jancis says, “HubSpot gives our teams more enablement to get their work done because of lesser dependency. And therefore, they are more enabled to get their work done with better productivity.”
Thanks to the team’s market-leading strategies, Cardup has grown 30X in the past few years. Jancis explains, “The main contributor to our massive growth is our strategies and we were able to implement the strategies that we wanted with HubSpot.”
Moving forward, CardUp will continue to leverage HubSpot to maximize the impact of innovative strategies. CardUp’s vision is to achieve corporate sustainability, where they accomplish long-term growth in harmony with people and the planet. With HubSpot, they have a scalable engine to power that success.
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