How Salt Bank App Launch Beat Expectations by 2x with Amplitude
Salt Bank leveraged behavioral insights from Amplitude to successfully launch a new app and establish a strong foundation for long-term growth.
Insight/action/outcome: Salt Bank launched a digital banking app and got double the signups expected—but their activation rate was way below target. By digging into the data and running experiments with Amplitude, Salt Bank discovered new strategies for their onboarding and customer education flows that boosted customer activation by 80%.
In Romanian, the word “salt” means “leap.” That’s exactly what Salt Bank, Romania’s first 100% digital neobank, wants their customers to do.
“We want people to make a leap from their traditional bank into the digital world,” says Adrian Chirila, head of growth at Salt Bank.
Salt Bank launched in 2024, and their customer-centric technology, irreverent branding, and keen sense for incentive programs did get a lot of customers leaping. Within the first week, they had more than 100,000 signups. “We had the number of customers we expected to have in three months,” says Carmen Tale, Salt Bank’s growth strategy analyst.
A huge influx of users can be great for growth—but it can also be a pressure test. To make sure their app could handle and even thrive under that pressure, it was critical for Salt Bank to gather meaningful customer behavioral data, discover new insights, and act on them quickly.
Salt Bank was able to do that with Amplitude. And while they did encounter hurdles in their first months, as any new product would, the insights and actions they took with Amplitude turned their initial pressure test into rocket fuel. Within a year, they’ve secured over half a million active users—2x the initial projections.
Uncovering how to help customers make the digital leap
One of Salt Bank’s first major pressure tests came early in the customer journey. As new users streamed into the app, Salt Bank noticed that a large percentage of them weren’t activating their bank accounts. They’d sign up, but they wouldn’t start making payments.
By combing through qualitative data with Amplitude and doing some good old-fashioned customer outreach, the growth team realized that new customers weren’t using their accounts because they hadn’t received physical cards from Salt Bank yet. They didn’t understand they could start paying for purchases digitally once they had the app.
“People were waiting for the plastic. It was a breakthrough moment for our entire team,” Tale said.
The team jumped into action to address the customer education gap. They retargeted their in-app messaging around Salt Bank’s digital-first approach, highlighting how the app allowed customers to add a new digital card directly to their mobile wallet. They even added an “Add to Wallet” button to their onboarding flow to make sure new users didn’t miss it.
These data-backed decisions resulted in an 80% increase in activations, shortening the time to activation from several days to less than a day.
Testing for onboarding optimization
Another activation hurdle Salt Bank discovered happened during the actual app onboarding flow. By following funnel charts in Amplitude, the Growth team found that customers were abandoning the signup process when prompted to provide identification.
Our main KPI was acquisition, so it was important to fix the onboarding funnel. Amplitude data helped us identify the drop-off point so we could focus our experimentation around that.
Using Amplitude Feature Experimentation, Salt Bank’s team set up two variations of the onboarding flow to test ways to get users over the ID roadblock. The first offered a tutorial that guided customers through the ID upload and verification process. The second offered a single screen that stated the ID requirements and allowed users to exit the app and return to the verification later. The second option was more successful, so the team used Amplitude to roll out the new experience to all users.
“People are so used to swiping left and ignoring screens. The option to exit the app and return another time gave people the opportunity to go look for their valid ID if they didn’t have it on hand,” Tale says.
The new onboarding flow improved their activation—but that’s not all. Salt Bank works with a third-party ID verification service, and they pay for every validation attempt. The new flow reduces failed validation attempts, lowering the cost of their verification budget significantly.
Experimenting with innovation—and keeping it fun
After the success of their onboarding experiments, Salt Bank continued to test strategies to get new users spending and solidify their growth.
We want to be a beautiful application, a beautiful bank, and we want to be fun. So we needed to understand the threshold where people would become engaged and where they see their experience as fun.
Based on new customer activation data from Amplitude, Salt Bank added a cashback campaign that wasn’t part of their initial roadmap. The promotion offered a month of 5% cashback for both customers and friends, aiming to get them to start using their cards immediately after registering. Tracking the numbers in Amplitude, Salt Bank saw a 50% increase in customers making purchases within 7 days.
“With our initial roadmap, we wanted to have parity with what the traditional banks are offering,” Tale says. “The challenge for us now is to keep adding products the market expects, along with innovation that delivers a better experience than any other fintech or traditional banking app.”
Growing by leaps and bounds
During its first year, Salt Bank rolled out over 17 releases in the app and achieved 1,000–1,500 sign-ups daily. On its busiest day, it brought in 14,000 new customers.
It’s been a very busy period for us as a growth team. We had to keep up with all our product teams and view everything they launched as an opportunity to improve onboarding, activation, and usage. Amplitude allowed us to analyze each launch and make the most of them in terms of growth.
By the end of 2025, Salt Bank expects to have 760,000 active users on its platform, and they aim to secure 1 million customers by the end of 2026—5% of Romania’s commercial banking market. The solution to getting that many customers to leap into digital banking is one part innovation and one part data-driven decision making—and the Salt Bank team relies on Amplitude to do both.
