Case Study · Fintech · Remittance · B2C · Pan-African
The raise was priced on $9.54m of fees.
The base sustained $5.04m of it.
A pan-African remittance business growing at exceptional speed and preparing to raise capital. Fees up 561%. Transaction value up 507%. Customers up 408%. Whether it was growing was never the question. What the growth was built on, whether the revenue was durable, and whether the customer base could support the next stage of the story, were.
Growth was real. Durability was the question.
When all 31,167 transacting customers were scored using the Keystone IQ Revenue Quality Architecture™ and tracked year on year, three numbers emerged that do not appear in the raise.
$5.04m
What the established base sustains with no new customers at all
47.2%
The fall from the $9.54m fee run rate. Acquisition was not optional upside, it was load-bearing
+$4.38m to $4.63m
Incremental fee opportunity from eight levers in the existing book, no acquisition uplift assumed
Three numbers looked like good news. None of them told the real story.
What the customer base actually showed
38.6% of customers carried 68.8% of fee revenue and 73.2% of transaction value. Blended churn read 49.3%, and inside that blend three of the five customer cohorts destroyed value at a standard acquisition cost. 79.5% of the fee growth came from new customers, not from the base. Silent churn, customers who made no transaction attempt at all in year two with no advance warning signal in the data, was the single largest loss line at $302k. And 150,072 dormant registered customers, which looked like the largest opportunity in the business, contained 7,273 who had ever tried to transact. See how the analysis is built.
None of this appears in standard reporting. All of it changes how you price the raise.
The concentration story
The business was not 31,167 customers of broadly similar quality. Two cohorts, 38.6% of the transacting base, carried 73.2% of transaction value and 68.8% of fees, and they got there in completely different ways. Network Senders transact 27.8 times a year across an average of nine beneficiaries, anchored by family support and tuition fees, so losing any single connection rarely ends the relationship. Power Senders send $94,692 a year to an average of 2.5. Their value comes from size and frequency, not breadth. See revenue quality.
The floor story
The $9.54m fee run rate is real. What it does not show is what the established base sustains on its own, which is $5.04m, a 47.2% fall. Repeat the same acquisition volume and the same quality mix and fees reach $12.62m. The constraint is not headcount, it is mix: 27.5% of new customers landed in the top two cohorts and that 27.5% carried 58.3% of all new-cohort revenue. Eight levers inside the existing book add $4.38m to $4.63m above the floor, with no additional customers assumed. Related: the Health Check and the Value Creation Map.
The execution story
The cohort with the best headline numbers was the most structurally exposed. Power Senders had the strongest customer retention in the book at 78.7%, the narrowest network at 2.5 beneficiaries, and they paid out almost exclusively on the rail that was failing hardest. Nigeria carried a 45.7% attempt failure rate by volume against 32.4% in Ghana and 33.7% in Kenya, and only 35% of Power Senders' attempted value converted. Nigeria's established-base revenue still grew 130% year on year, so this was never a demand problem. It was execution, sitting directly on the least resilient part of the book.
Download the full fintech case study
The complete read, including the movement layer, the corridor analysis and the eight sized value creation levers.
Download the full case studyFAQs
It shows which customers the fee line actually depends on. In a payments or remittance business the transaction count and the fee total move together in reporting, so a base can look uniform while a minority of customers carry most of the economics and the rest transact once and stop.
By separating the revenue the existing base can sustain from the revenue that has to be replaced each year through acquisition. In this engagement the split was $5.04m sustainable against a $9.54m run rate, so 47.2% of the fee line depended on customers the business had not yet acquired.
A zero-acquisition floor is the revenue an existing customer base would generate with no new customers at all. It is a stress test, not a forecast. It isolates how much of the reported line is structurally supported and how much is being held up by the acquisition engine.
Yes. The analysis runs on an anonymised transaction extract. No names, no contact details, no personal data leaves the business.
No. Customer due diligence is an anti-money laundering check on who a customer is. Customer base due diligence is a commercial check on whether a target's revenue will hold. Customer due diligence, usually shortened to CDD and closely tied to KYC, is a regulatory obligation. A bank or a payments business verifies identity, assesses money laundering risk and monitors activity because the law requires it. It runs continuously, and it sits with compliance. Customer base due diligence runs on a deal. Keystone IQ rebuilds a target's customer base from anonymised transaction data to show which customers the revenue depends on, how concentrated that dependency is, and whether it is durable enough to underwrite. It answers a pricing question, not a compliance one. The clearest difference is what each one needs. CDD cannot work without personal identity data. Customer base due diligence requires none. No names, no contact details, nothing that identifies a person.
See exit readiness and the full set of customer base analysis case studies.
Identity withheld. Data anonymised. Revenue-held rate is the proportion of prior-year fee value still active in year two, each customer capped at prior value, a stricter measure than customer retention alone. Scenario rates are stated assumptions based on observed transition data. Keystone IQ Revenue Quality Architecture™.
See what your customer base is really made of
Days not weeks. Fixed scope. No PII required.
Get in Touch