Performance marketing insights for a vehicle financing start-up

Galgo is a fintech start-up operating in 4 markets in Latin America. The company initially targeted immigrants for its core services of a marketplace and financing for motorcycles, since food delivery and shared transport are two of the more common types of informal work available to recent immigrants. After closing an investment round of $40 million, Galgo decided to expand its customer base to local citizens as well.

With many of the 1 million Venezuelan migrants in Peru needing motorcycles for personal and professional use, Galgo’s operations there had grown rapidly. In partnership with the IFC, the private sector investment arm of the World Bank, Galgo selected Digital Disruptions in 2024 to provide strategic guidance with the aims of improving efficiency and profitability of its overall operations.

Approach & Outcome

Our first step was to ensure we were solving the most important problem for the company.  We reviewed data and reports from Galgo across key business model functions: financials, risk, segmentation, product, risk, operations, and marketing.  After a series of conversations with Galgo’s CEO, we agreed that we would focus on better understanding the upstream marketing funnel to boost the conversion rates from Galgo’s performance marketing channels.

In coordinating with the Galgo team, we carefully designed a customer participant mix for our user research: current clients and drop-offs, locals and migrants, men and women, informal and formal of labor, and age ranges.  We then conducted in-person, in-depth interviews on the customer’s current experience with Galgo’s upstream marketing phase.

The participant matrix and detailed questions user allowed us to provide rich, segmented insights to Galgo, as well as plausible ideas to boost marketing conversion.  We also designed a detailed customer journey map (see below), integrating user steps, touchpoints, emotional states, and key needs.  The output helped generate alignment among Galgo’s business units on key user pain points and plausible solutions to address them.