The cost of customer acquisition in financial services is the highest of any digital sector and the return on that acquisition is the least independently verified. As a CFO, that combination should feel uncomfortable. I want to describe why it should, precisely, rather than generally.
Your acquisition reporting measures cost per completed account opening. It does not measure the commercial quality of what that account opening produced. The customer who completed onboarding and never made a transaction is not a commercial success by any measure that matters. Your reporting almost certainly counts them as one because the acquisition metric completed and the retention metric is someone else's problem.
The gap between customers acquired and customers commercially active is a financial figure that sits between two reporting functions and belongs fully to neither. In financial services businesses at growth stage, that gap is consistently the most important untracked financial number in the business.
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