Building a consumer retention and monetisation strategy

A retention problem hidden inside an active customer base

When I joined Uphold, the consumer business was successfully attracting customers and generating monthly transacting users, but a meaningful proportion of those relationships weakened after the first few months. Some customers traded initially and then gradually became less active, while others continued holding significant assets on Uphold without regularly trading, depositing or using the wider product. That distinction mattered because customer value was highly concentrated. A relatively small group of higher-value customers accounted for a significant proportion of commercial activity, which meant that losing one established relationship could have a much greater impact than losing a lower-value retail customer.

At the same time, substantial assets could remain on-platform without creating much recurring transactional revenue if the customer simply held them. My retention strategy therefore focused on the relationship between customer value, behavioural decline and commercial activity rather than treating retention as a question of sending more communications to inactive users. The work developed around two connected problems: protecting high-value relationships that were beginning to weaken, and creating more value from customers who still held meaningful assets but had become relatively passive.

Understanding where customer value was being lost

The first part of the work was to understand what deterioration in a customer relationship looked like before somebody became completely dormant. Retention is often measured after the event, for example whether somebody transacted again after three, six or twelve months, but that tells you relatively little about why the relationship weakened or when an intervention might have been useful. We therefore looked at behavioural changes that could indicate declining engagement, using a combination of customer activity and the direction in which that activity was moving over time.

This gave us a more useful way to distinguish different types of customers. Somebody who had always traded infrequently was not necessarily showing signs of churn, whereas a historically active customer whose trading frequency, deposits and volume were all falling represented a very different retention risk. For high-value customers, that behavioural view allowed us to identify deteriorating relationships earlier and investigate what was actually driving the change. The analysis also showed that reduced engagement was not always caused by price or a lack of marketing incentives. Some higher-value customers were experiencing friction around deposit limits, withdrawal limits, fiat payment controls and the broader servicing experience, which meant the appropriate retention response often sat outside CRM.

Building a differentiated proposition for high-value customers

One of the main responses was to develop a more structured VIP proposition. The objective was to recognise that a customer holding or transacting significant value should not necessarily receive exactly the same experience as the wider retail base, particularly where expectations around service, payments and access to support were materially different. I helped design the framework around the VIP relationship, including how customers should qualify, what differentiated servicing should look like, how behavioural signals could be used to prioritise outreach and how the wider organisation would respond when the cause of declining engagement sat outside Marketing.

Commercial experiments formed part of the programme, including testing whether preferential pricing could strengthen retention. Those tests were useful, but they also reinforced that price was only one component of the relationship. For some high-value customers, removing operational friction around payments, limits and servicing could be more important than offering a marginally better trade price. This broadened the programme into a cross-functional retention model involving Product, Payments, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Customer Service and Commercial. The broader VIP programme contributed to an 11% reduction in VIP churn while establishing a more systematic way of identifying high-value customers whose relationships were weakening and determining whether the appropriate response was commercial, operational, product-led or service-led.

Why dormant asset holders created a different retention problem

A second part of the strategy came from the composition of Uphold's customer base. Uphold had historically developed a particularly strong relationship with XRP holders, including customers who had moved to the platform during a period when access to XRP had become more limited across several other major US crypto platforms. That history created a cohort of customers who trusted Uphold enough to retain meaningful XRP balances on the platform, but some of those relationships became relatively passive as the wider market changed and XRP became more broadly available again.

These customers were different from conventional churned users. They had not withdrawn everything and disappeared, so a traditional reactivation campaign did not fully describe the problem. The relationship still existed and the customer still held assets on Uphold, but the commercial activity attached to that relationship could be limited. The stronger question was how to create a compelling reason for somebody who already had assets and an existing relationship with Uphold to become more active again.

Designing an incentive around the existing customer relationship

Most exchange loyalty structures reward customers who are already active traders. Higher monthly trading volume typically moves the customer into a better pricing tier, which then reduces future trading fees. I explored a different model based on Uphold's existing customer base. Rather than rewarding customers solely through lower trading fees, the proposition connected assets already held on-platform with incremental transactional behaviour, allowing greater monthly trading activity to unlock stronger rewards on an eligible portion of existing holdings.

The economics needed to create a meaningful behavioural incentive while protecting commercial viability. Customers would progress through different levels of trading activity, higher activity could unlock progressively stronger rewards, and those rewards would apply only to an eligible portion of the customer's holdings. Balance caps and eligibility rules were important because a customer with a very large portfolio could not make a minimal trade and receive a disproportionate benefit across the entire balance.

The proposition was developed and commercially modelled but was not fully launched during my time at Uphold. The relevant work was the commercial design itself: identifying a pool of customers with dormant economic potential, developing a behavioural hypothesis, structuring the incentive mechanics and testing whether the unit economics could support the concept. It approached dormant AUM as a product and commercial-design problem rather than defaulting to a conventional reactivation campaign.

Bringing retention, product and commercial strategy together

The VIP programme and the dormant-holder proposition were two applications of the same retention philosophy. In both cases, the starting point was an existing customer relationship with meaningful value attached to it, and the objective was to understand why that relationship was not producing its full potential. For a VIP whose activity was deteriorating, the answer might involve service, pricing, deposit limits or payment friction. For an XRP holder who was comfortable leaving assets on Uphold but had little reason to transact, the issue was different and required a commercial incentive designed around the economics of the relationship.

Treating those customers as one generic inactive segment would have obscured the reason each relationship was weakening. The retention model therefore became increasingly multidimensional, considering the value of assets held, trading recency and frequency, transaction volume, deposits and withdrawals, operational friction, historical behaviour and how each of those signals was changing over time. That gave us a better basis for deciding whether the appropriate intervention sat in lifecycle communication, account management, Product, Payments, pricing or commercial proposition design.

What changed

The work established a more structured approach to high-value customer retention at Uphold. Behavioural analysis allowed us to identify declining relationships earlier, while the VIP programme created a differentiated model for managing valuable customers and moved the retention conversation beyond generic campaigns towards the product, service and operational factors shaping customer behaviour. The VIP work contributed to an 11% reduction in churn and established clearer ownership around how high-value customers should be identified and managed.

The dormant-holder proposition extended that thinking by exploring how commercial mechanics could convert passive asset relationships into greater transactional engagement while maintaining the controls required to protect unit economics. For me, the experience reinforced that customer retention in financial products is rarely a single-channel marketing problem. Pricing, trust, payments, product utility, service quality and economic incentives all shape the customer's decision to stay active. My role at Uphold was to bring those signals together and develop a more deliberate commercial strategy for protecting and growing the customer relationships that mattered most.