Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent time in workshops with product, operations and commercial teams across the fintech space. The firms were different. The propositions were different. But the underlying pressure points were often the same.
Once a business moves beyond launch mode and starts thinking seriously about scale, the same questions keep coming up. Can transfers work without constant intervention? Can drawdown be delivered without adding operational weight? Can firms still own the customer journey as the stack grows more complex?
Transfers still shape first impressions
Transfers came up more than anything else. Which isn’t surprising. They sit at a critical point in the customer journey – where intent is high and expectations are even higher, yet the experience still needs to feel simple.
For many firms, though, transfers still rely on too much manual handling behind the scenes. The result is familiar: delays, exceptions, rekeying, chasing. More operational handling than a digital journey should require. And the impact goes beyond the transfer itself. It introduces cost, puts pressure on support teams and reduces confidence at the point a customer is ready to act.
When that friction is removed, the difference is striking. Working with Seccl, Monzo has unlocked the full potential of its transfer pipeline, giving customers the ability to move assets from other providers with exceptional speed and simplicity. Monthly transfer volumes increased 15x in six months, far exceeding Monzo’s forecast. Average completion times reduced to 7.5 days – with some transfers completed in under a day, entirely without manual intervention. Completion times have since fallen further to 6.2 days, even as volumes continue to grow.
Drawdown is moving higher up the agenda
Many propositions were built around accumulation first. That made sense – it’s a simpler problem to solve.
But as customer books mature, drawdown becomes harder to defer.
And it brings a different set of requirements: withdrawals, tax treatment, benefit events, cash management and asset sales – all within a journey that still needs to feel straightforward for the customer.
This is where some firms are finding that what worked for accumulation doesn’t always extend cleanly to decumulation.
Where drawdown has been designed with the same level of automation in mind, it starts to behave very differently. With Seccl’s automated drawdown journey, nearly 80% of benefit crystallisation requests are processed straight through, without manual intervention – enabling a more consistent, digital and intuitive experience across the full pension lifecycle.
The trade-off between complexity and control
Control over the customer experience remains a priority. Firms want it to feel like theirs – their brand, their user journey, their relationship with the customer.
That becomes harder as more providers, integrations and dependencies are introduced into the stack.
On the surface, the proposition may still look clean. Underneath, complexity can build quickly. That can make change slower, introduce more points of failure and gradually erode the consistency of the experience.
In some cases, firms may not have the internal resource to build out every part of the journey themselves or may want to avoid adding further third-party relationships just to support specific use cases.
We work in partnership with firms to deliver more of the customer journey – including building out screens for specific use cases where needed. It means our clients don’t have to do everything themselves or rely on multiple additional providers to fill the gaps.
When the trade-off gets tested
In many conversations, the focus has started to shift – from the front-end experience to what sits underneath. As firms look to maintain control, attention often turns to the infrastructure supporting the proposition.
Most legacy platforms have been extended over time, layering new functionality onto what’s already there. This can address immediate needs but often adds complexity – making the model harder to change, and more difficult to scale.
That’s leading more firms to take a closer look at how adaptable their underlying technology really is – and whether it can support what comes next.
With platforms like Seccl, the approach is different. API-first and built on a single-instance codebase and designed to be modular and cloud-native, functionality can be added and updated as needed – without relying on patches or workarounds. So firms can take what fits their use case and evolve the proposition more easily over time.
What this tells us
These conversations don’t point to a lack of ambition. Quite the opposite. Firms know where they want to go, and in many cases, the customer proposition is already compelling.
What is proving harder is knowing where to start. Investments are often on the roadmap but sit further down a long list of priorities – something that can feel difficult to unlock, given the necessary regulatory requirements and what can feel like a lot of operational complexity and resource.
That’s where Seccl comes in – taking on the regulatory burden and the underlying complexity, while allowing firms to retain control of the experience, brand and customer relationship. We work with fintechs not just to launch investments, but to build propositions that can stand up to higher volumes, broader use cases and greater customer expectations over time.
What good unlocks
When the underlying model is built to handle complexity, the difference shows up quickly. Take Monzo, for example. With Seccl providing the underlying infrastructure, it migrated more than 300,000 investment and pension accounts in five months, processed around 600,000 transactions in under 15 minutes and achieved 99.98% auto-matching.
Just as importantly, that created the space to keep developing the proposition – including pension tracing and consolidation, ETF capability and a fully digital SIPP.
And that brings us to the bigger point. For firms with strong digital relationships and an existing customer base, investments can become a much more meaningful part of the proposition. But that only really works when the journeys underneath are built to support the next stage of growth.
Sounds familiar?
If you’re a fintech seeing these same pressures – around transfers, drawdown, or the growing complexity of your stack – it’s usually a sign that your proposition is moving into its next phase.
These are not edge cases. They are the points where scale starts to test the model.
We spend a lot of time working with firms at exactly this stage – helping teams understand where complexity is building, where control is starting to slip, and what needs to change to support the next phase of growth.
If you’re already asking these questions internally, it’s worth widening the conversation. Talk to us about what you’re seeing, and we’ll share what’s coming through across the market, and where firms are starting to make progress.
