Insight/Action/Outcome: Aplazame used Amplitude to measure a new credit card offer and discovered that only 5% of eligible users clicked to accept it. They took a closer look at the layout, moving the request-card button from below the legal text to the top of the window. Within weeks of making the change, 30% of eligible users accepted the offer—a 25-point increase. This success increased awareness of both Aplazame and Amplitude within their broader organization.
It’s not always easy being a small fish in a large organization. Your every move is scrutinized to increase efficiency or ignored because leadership prioritizes other areas.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Becoming part of the Spanish bank WiZink gave fintech startup Aplazame the opportunity to grow. We found a new platform, Amplitude, which enabled us to build a stronger product, gain a fresh understanding of our users, and demonstrate our value to the larger organization.
Product teams need product analytics
Founded in 2014, Aplazame is a consumer credit company that provides instant financing for online purchases. Our core product is a B2B2C checkout process: once our customers (retail stories) onboard our product and integrate us as a payment method, their customers can select Aplazame if they want to finance their purchase. By offering Aplazame financing and payment installment options, our customers boost their sales without taking on additional risk.
I joined in 2019, just after the Madrid-based team became part of WiZink. With infused capital, Aplazame grew from one vertical to two, expanding into the B2C space and reaching end consumers through the Aplazame app.
My role as head of product and engineering sits at the intersection of software, business, and product, and I’m responsible for 25 people across our product and engineering teams. I foster our growth by improving agility around software implementation.
As a startup, you do what you can with the resources you have—but sustained growth requires a deep understanding of product behavior.
It wasn’t long ago that Aplazame didn’t have a tool to track product performance or user behavior. The engineering team used Tableau, but mostly for tracking financial metrics. We knew how many euros we financed on a given day but we couldn’t see how users engaged with our product. Our product team was acting in the dark/ Becoming a part of WiZink gave us the time to explore our options.
Seeing our customers clearly for the first time
My research included reading documentation, listening to podcasts, and noting our competitors’ tools. I learned about Amplitude Analytics and got some ideas of what it could do for our product team. We decided to try it, and it’s given us the clarity we needed to take huge strides forward.
B2B2C remains our core product, representing 90% of our business, and we use Amplitude to measure how users behave in our onboarding funnel. I’m the primary Amplitude user at Aplazame, along with our four-person product team. We use the platform to easily see the common paths users take, conversions between steps in the process, and where our users drop off.
Product teams also use Amplitude to get a high-level view during troubleshooting. If something breaks after a new release, non-developers can easily pinpoint the problem’s location before developers dig into the code.
The customers in our B2B2C vertical interact with our app on an ongoing basis when making purchases. This continuous interaction presents a powerful opportunity for our marketing team, who have started to use Amplitude to explore various funnels and common user paths. By examining users’ daily behavior—like how they react to push notifications, for example—the marketing team can determine which campaigns are most effective and the best ways to increase app engagement.
A/B tests increase product value and compliance
We recently expanded our Amplitude use to compare funnels using A/B tests. We ran a test to compare various third-party geolocation providers because, though our current provider (Google) works well, it’s expensive. Splitting our traffic evenly between Google and another provider, we compared the accuracy of each service against the address the user provided.
These tests showed us that both providers are very accurate. Though it’s likely that we’ll stick with Google for our top merchants, it’s worth considering less expensive providers for others.
Amplitude enabled us to easily complete the evaluation as part of the KYC (know-your-customer) process for identity verification in fraud prevention. The result supports a great cost savings opportunity for us.
Increased conversions for new offers
Our most recent initiative involved cross-selling a new WiZink credit card during our checkout process. At the last stage of checkout, customers who met specific requirements saw a pop-up window for the credit card offer. If interested, they could click “request card” to begin a separate credit card onboarding.
Initially, our cross-selling efforts didn’t go well: in Amplitude, we could see that only 5% of eligible users clicked to request the card. Meaning 95% of these users appeared uninterested.
We wanted to investigate if the pop-up layout was a factor. Our original pop-up window design placed the “request card” button below all the necessary legal text requested by our regulatory team. We wondered if people didn’t scroll down far enough, so we moved the “request card” button to the top of the window. This change yielded dramatic results.
Within one month of the change, card requests increased from 5% to 30% of eligible users—a 25 percentage-point difference. Those results got people’s attention at WiZink, increasing the organization’s awareness of both Aplazame and Amplitude.
Cementing our place within a large organization
When we chose Amplitude for our product analytics, WiZink had an existing account with AWS Marketplace, so that’s where we began our product search. Finding Amplitude on the AWS Marketplace made for a seamless procurement process. Our DevOps team worked with Amplitude directly, and the procurement and implementation process was transparent from start to finish.
Our Amplitude data continues to enable the business to make better decisions. When WiZink considered implementing a new mobile app, they questioned whether we still needed a separate Aplazame app—and whether our department was redundant. We used Amplitude to demonstrate the impact of our app. More than just numbers, we showed them how our users behave, which gave more weight to our product.
Pulling up our usage data in Amplitude, I showed how creating a separate app would impact our 40,000 active monthly users. That data helped bank leadership see the value of our product.
Using Amplitude dashboards, the product teams and I can make connections and correlations between events and classify users into cohorts to study further. I also use dashboards to connect data to broader business concepts for leadership.
They’re pleasantly surprised by our insights, such as the financial impacts of user drop-offs at a certain onboarding stage. We dig into the details to help them see the big picture, and Amplitude ensures we’re all seeing the same things.
The more money Aplazame lends, the more we make. Aplazame needs to continue growing and being profitable, and Amplitude helps our teams see where we have technical issues, where we lose customers, and where to focus rescue operations. In that way, Amplitude brings value to the business.
A great team makes growth easy
Our Amplitude account managers consistently introduce us to new features and advise on improving our processes to meet our business goals. They’re genuinely invested in Aplazame’s growth, and it shows—they even made a trip to Madrid to discuss an upcoming release. With the support of Amplitude and WiZink, Aplazame can continue to make significant product improvements.
Amplitude has shined a light on our product, giving teams more data transparency and information to share with other areas of the business. Everyone has a better understanding of our product and users, and we can capitalize on that to grow in ways we couldn’t predict before.
