How the Colombo Stock Exchange generated ~US$35 million* net turnover from a completely new segment of investors during the pandemic
*Figures provided by CSE in 2022.
CSE had already built the app. But no young Sri Lankan would touch it. The problem was never what you would expect the problem to be.
- Portfolio
- Principal · Fudge
- Client
- Colombo Stock Exchange
- Sector
- Capital markets · national stock exchange
- Scale
- The whole of Sri Lanka's retail investor market
- Where
- Sri Lanka
- Engagement
- Behaviour design · integrated campaign and app acquisition
- Over
- Campaign launched late 2020; the account ran roughly two years · 2020–2022
COVID closed the Colombo Stock Exchange for 51 days.
The CSE was quick to realise that they had almost zero digitally savvy traders. They developed an app and were amazed when no one downloaded it, despite the promise of compounding gains.
Low awareness → fix it with advertising.
“Stock markets are for professional traders.”
A lengthy sign up process made matters worse.
Two problems were holding people back.
- 1.The perceived effort involved in the registration process: long enough that starting felt like a commitment rather than a try.
- 2.Their identity-based choice: “the stock market is not for me.”
The category instinct was to invest heavily into advertising. We did the exact opposite.
First, we removed the perceived effort around onboarding.
We invited a representative sample of the people into our research facility and asked them to go through the sign up process then and there. We observed the change of facial expressions across each step of the process.
Many people did a 😩 during the identity and address verification steps.
No matter how good the promise is (in this case, the promise was wealth), some people don’t have their identity card with them while signing up on an app.
But this was standard KYC behaviour. We couldn’t simply remove it.
Instead we told them what they had to have ready, before they started the sign up process.
We also moved all non-essential fields in the sign up flow to after the profile creation was done.
After the friction was removed, we used ads and influencers to drive the change in perspective.
- 01
We sold a club, not a product
The ads offered a place in “the 1%”. Not a trading account, not a savings plan. Nobody joins a financial product. People do join a group they want to belong to.
- 02
We made the first step a swipe
One swipe. Not open an account, not read up on the market, not pick a stock. Something they already did a hundred times a day, so getting started took no decision at all.
- 03
We never said it was easy
Everyone else in the category says investing is simple and open to all. That would have killed it. If the stock market is easy, being in it is worth nothing. We left it looking impressive and changed who was allowed in.
- 04
Influencers made it look normal, ads made it cheap
Young Sri Lankans saw people like themselves talking about trading, which made it a thing their friends did. Performance ads then picked those people up at about US$0.30 an install.
What the work did.
- US$35mnet turnover from a completely new user baseLKR 7 billion, provided by the CSE in 2022 as the value attributable to new investors under 30. Converted at roughly the 2020–21 rate, so the US$ figure is approximate.
- 65,000app installs, at about US$0.30 eachFudge's own figure (A), independently corroborated: total app downloads exceeded 65,000 after phase one of the CSE/SEC digitalisation programme (D).
- 170,000app downloads over the full relationshipReported in Fudge's five-year retrospective (C), covering the whole account rather than the one campaign. Maalik Ibrahim's endorsement below puts it above 200,000. His count is taken roughly three months later, which is the whole of the difference.
- Opened the traditional way, through a broker
- 3%
- Aged 18–40
- 84%
- Opened through the app
- 97%
Independent figures reported for the CSE/SEC digitalisation programme (D), covering roughly 17,000 new CDS accounts opened via the app in phase one. They describe the programme the campaign drove traffic into, not the campaign alone. The honest reading is that the app became the front door of the exchange, and this campaign is what walked people to it.
The install count is the firmest figure here: Fudge's 65,000 is independently corroborated by reporting of the CSE/SEC phase-one results, which also record that 97% of new individual accounts were opened through the app and 84% of them by people aged 18–40. The LKR 7bn is a pure turnover figure: total inflows against total outflows for the period, for investors under 30 who were new to the exchange. It is not a return, a margin or a revenue line (the exchange does not keep it), and it was calculated by the CSE, not by the agency. The diagnosis behind the work came from the observed sign-up sessions described above rather than from a survey, so it reads what people did under the process rather than what they said about it afterwards. One caveat stands regardless: 2020–21 was an exceptional period for the CSE, with new investor registrations up over 70% in 2020 and turnover velocity reaching 45% in Q1 2021. A rising market lifted every number on this page, and the honest version of this case is the one that says so before you ask.
“Our initial target was 2,000 active users. We were skeptical when Kavinda told us that his team could get us 10,000 active users. As of 2023, the campaign has generated 200k+ downloads with no parallel marketing activities running.
I hope this becomes a major case study on the benefits of using behavioural science in marketing”