July marks the launch of Upside to customers. With an overwhelming response in the first two days, reaching our onboarding target much faster than we expected. (In fact we over-achieved a little… please don’t tell anyone)

But July wasn’t just about the launch. Here are a few other noteworthy items:

In summary:

  • Customers: Alpha launch sold out in 2 days
  • Retailers: We welcome 4 new partners. Great pipeline of conversations progressing forward.
  • Product: 64% conversion rate.
  • Tech: in production and running stable with CI/CD pipelines for all core code.
  • Ops: 92% straight through onboarding
  • Distribution: conversations progressing with 3 key banks.
  • Awards: Upside announced as InvestEast Finalist (1 of 2) and Abu Dhabi Fintech Festival ‘UK Stop’ finalist (1 of 5).
  • Funding: 49% of the target already committed for this round.

Here is the inside to Upside:

Enter Kathryn (Sales & Marketing)

Customers

I’m thrilled to say we launched to alpha customers in July and worked on a first come first served basis.

We have been pleased with the level of uptake, especially given that members are asked to first download Testflight and then Upside. So quite a friction filled journey.

We have earmarked 16 merchants as ones we hope to test moving the AOV and frequency of spend on throughout for the end of Q3. (they are live in the app today)

We’ve had some great coverage in terms of our PR thought leadership, you can see those here.

Retailers

Our partnerships team have been having some great conversations and providing us with incredibly valuable feedback which has led us to build out on our Performance Marketing proposition for partners. The realisation being that we can offer something that no other platform currently does.

We have signed up 4 partners in the last couple of weeks and are in the process of having discussions with some big name brands. Early adopters, you'll see these in the app soon.

Enter Andries (Product)

Product

Onboarding

It’s early days for monitoring customer usage data, but want we’ve seen so far is encouraging: two thirds of those that were invited, downloaded the app, registered an account (i.e. they connected their bank account).  

In app usage

Too early to comment on how users are using the app, so watch this space for next month.

Auto-cashback

Just in the first few days we already paid out well over 100 upsides and it's steadily increasing each day.

Auto-save

The adoption of auto-save was a bit of a surprise with 21% of customers also signing up to  autosave.

Enter Paul (Tech)

Tech

With our product now live to customers for the first time, our attention has switched to making sure we respond to customer’s feedback as quickly as possible as well as starting to build the key features we need for the next phase.

We now have CI/CD pipelines in place for all of our main application code, which is helping us to get code live quickly.

Enter Steve (COO)

Operations

It’s been a busy month for Operations. Dealing with real customers whilst also ensuring that the business runs smoothly in the background. Here are a few highlights:

  • Various Customer Care interactions (with great feedback from customers on usability and desired features)
  • 92% straight through processing for identity and KYC checks (all auto checks passed < 15 sec)

Re-enter Andries

OTHER NEWS:

I’m proud to announce that:

  • InvestEast Finalist (1 of 2): Upside was selected as 1 of only 2 finalists of the InvestEast Investment Readiness Programme (run by UEA) and meant that we had the privilege of presenting to the Anglia Capital Group and to the UKBAA last week.
  • Fintech Abu Dhabi - UK Stop Finalist (1 of 5): Upside was selected as 1 of 5 startups from the UK to present to the Abu Dhabi Fintech Festival.

GET INVOLVED

Seedrs pre-registration: If you haven’t done so, and are interested in owning a part of Upside, please register your own commitment here: https://www.seedrs.com/upsidesaving/coming-soon Please note that your capital is at risk when investing.

We’re up to 49% committed funds for this funding round and have great momentum.