Global fintech platform delivers personalized experiences to increase customer repurchases by 6x

Nylas ExtractAI enables a global fintech platform to derive real time insights from communications data to improve post-purchase experiences.

Personalized e-commerce experiences have a strong impact on conversion rates — with one study finding a 10 to 15% uplift in conversion and a 20% increase in customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is critical since retaining existing users is significantly cheaper than acquiring new customers. Some studies have found that a 5% increase in retention can increase profits by up to 95% per customer.

In e-commerce, one of the most important parts of the user journey affecting retention is the post-purchase customer experience. Win the hearts of the customer after they have made a purchase, and you’ll win these customers for life. One of the largest fintech companies in the world – a multibillion-dollar fintech platform – wanted to improve its customers’ post-purchase experience. However, the company lacked a 360-degree view of its customers’ buying behaviors.

Email is one of the most context-rich and real-time customer data sources, with key insights such as product names, images, quantities, SKU IDs, and amounts. However, tapping into this real-time email data feed with sub-second latency is an incredibly complex engineering challenge. There are complexities with different email providers, low-level protocols, and managing latency to serve millions of customers in a cost-effective way.

This problem became business-critical for a multi-billion dollar fintech platform to solve – the company’s product and engineering teams deemed it crucial to gain insights into real-time consumer buying behavior.

The build vs buy decision

Initially, the company sought to build this solution in-house with over 40 engineers, product managers, and data analysts. However, after a challenging six months and significant research and development spend, the project was unsuccessful – latency was greater than six hours, the solution could only be made available in two markets, and the accuracy of extracting key consumer insights such as SKU information and order totals was too low to be viable. The solution’s architecture was also not built in a way to scale to millions of users.

Continuing to support the project in-house would have required additional time and resources to deliver and maintain the solution, pulling the engineering team’s attention from other strategic initiatives. The company’s product team quickly realized that partnering with Nylas ExtractAI was a considerably more efficient and scalable solution for the organization.

“The primary reason we chose Nylas was scalability. We could have deployed more resources and hired more people, but it’s not our core competency. We would rather keep all our focus on the user experience, so we decided to scale by outsourcing”

Product Leader

Improved post-purchase experience to boost conversion, retention, and engagement

The company chose to implement Nylas ExtractAI to connect to customers’ inboxes, extract post-purchase order and shipping information across tens of thousands of global merchants, markets, and languages. 

With Nylas, the company was able to implement a dramatically streamlined experience in two sprints with four engineers. In the new experience, the customer connects their Google or Microsoft email account via OAuth and instantly sees order and shipping confirmation emails across tens of thousands of global merchants in one place. Seeing this consolidated view means users don’t have to leave the company’s app, which leads to increased engagement. 

Nylas ExtractAI enables the company to extract data points from emails such as shipping tracking numbers, carrier names, merchant names, SKU numbers, order totals, and more. This data enables the company to build additional value-added features such as delivery tracking – used to send push notifications that show users the real-time location of their package. The company uses these data points to derive unique insights that give them a 360-degree view of real-time consumer buying behaviors. Using these insights, the company has increased retention and engagement – which in turn led to a 6x increase in conversions and increased revenue.

Nylas ExtractAI offers an extensible filtering mechanism that enables the company to specify detailed criteria such as specific email domains and keywords to allow and deny. Additionally, Nylas does not retain any end-user PII data – all data is in transit only. Data residency is critical to ensure compliance with all applicable laws – Nylas’ global infrastructure enables the company to remain compliant – all while maintaining an average latency of seven seconds. Security is built right into the infrastructure of the Nylas ExtractAI. All the data that is processed in transit end-to-end in seconds.  Not only is everything encrypted at an OS, application and container level, the virtual machines that run the workloads are all recycled hourly to protect the workload. 

“We process billions of financial transactions each day. The Nylas platform provides us with a secure, scalable solution for extracting purchase and delivery data from user emails and surfacing it in our app in real-time”

Engineering Director

Boosting engagement, retention, and conversion for millions of users 

The fintech platform can now intelligently extract and structure data for more than six million transactions each day. In fact, the company’s Nylas-powered solution processed over four and a half million transactions during Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone in 2023.

The company uses data from those transactions to deliver personalized customer experiences in real-time for millions of users to increase repurchases. The organization boosted conversion rates for repurchases by 6x for all users. It has also seen two times more users and four times more transactions than last year. To date, the platform has reached more than 3.9 million users.

Authentication is one of the most critical parts of the user journey – this is where the users provide consent for the company to use their email data. Friction in this part of the user journey causes a big impact on overall conversions. Nylas worked closely with the company and Google to improve the overall mobile experience that increased authentication conversions by more than 10x, from 8% to 90%. This had a direct impact on the total number of users successfully completing their authentication process which in turn led to an increase in transactions.