A multi-year continuous-validation partnership with Citi Ventures' D10X program. Eighteen sub-projects with named outcomes across nine years and 100-plus experiments. Comparable signals across teams, executive turnover, and changes in strategy.
| Engagement | Continuous Validation partner |
|---|---|
| Industry | Financial services |
| Company size | Enterprise (Fortune-100) |
| Services | Demand testing, qualitative research, prototype build, post-launch optimization |
| Timeline | Q1 2018 onward; LATAM extension into 2022 |
| Sub-projects with named outcomes | 18 |
Citi Ventures' D10X program runs the bank's intrapreneur-led venture pipeline. Citi employees pitch new products and advance through Seed-1, Seed-2, and Seed-3 Growth Boards before any build commits. The program needed a validation partner who could give every concept the same treatment: comparable evidence, comparable cadence, comparable kill-or-commit standard, sustained across a portfolio of bets and across years of executive turnover.
Eighteen sub-projects with named outcomes, organized by domain. Each tile links to the project sub-page.
Four sub-projects testing wealth management, women-and-investing, and ESG-aligned banking.
Five sequential narrowing sprints validating mid-tier wealth management. Sub-segmentation became Citi's September 2020 mid-tier wealth strategy.
Women-and-investing app with a FOMO and social wedge. Three-sprint CPL optimization brought cost per lead from $82 to $45.
Women-and-investing community with credentialed expert advice. 37 conversions at $62.78 CPL across $2,500 ad spend on a unbranded test domain.
D2C digital bank with ESG-aligned deposits, ethical-footprint tracker, and recycled-plastic card. Sharper surface on the values-led thesis.
Three sub-projects testing installment lending, post-launch debt-management UX, and student-loan acceleration.
Demand test plus design tracks repackaging FlexPay for Revolvers. Persona reframe reshaped the lending roadmap.
Student-loan roundup app. Validated, built, shipped to Google Play; ran live for three months; design effort cut 50%, tech 15%.
Post-launch debt-snowball UX optimization on a shipped Citi product. Onboarding density, alerts, account linkage as a forward experiment backlog.
Two sub-projects testing employer-channel benefits and family-and-friends college funding.
One sub-project testing earned-wage access for paycheck-to-paycheck workers.
Five sub-projects testing identity-as-payment, P2P tipping, trusted-partner monitoring, B2B fintech, and emergency rescue.
Citi-as-identity ecommerce single sign-on. Reshape recommended around identity and card management, not speed.
Baseless-tipping P2P payments using a QR badge. Phase 1 validated four core assumptions; Phase 2 pivoted to enterprise GTM.
Boomer trusted-partner financial monitoring. Four sprints with progressive value-prop narrowing. Final-sprint CPL of $26.
Sole-proprietor pre-accounting with card attach. Primary track validated weakly, an honest read that reshaped the product roadmap.
Rescue-prototype scope: one landing page, one core experience, one decision-grade form-fill. The original kernel of the L1 Diagnostic tier.
One sub-project testing multi-party insurance claims orchestration.
Two sub-projects extending the partnership to Citibanamex Mexico and Peru.
Multi-year MSAs survive executive turnover, and the consultant's job is to be the institutional memory. The Wealth Attacker sub-segmentation, the Lending persona reframe, the Workplace Banking family pivot, and the recurring family-banking thesis all required someone holding cross-engagement memory longer than any single internal sponsor's tenure. That role is the consultant's defensible value in long-MSA enterprise relationships.
Continuous Validation is the retainer-style version of this work. Tell us what you are deciding and we will tell you what the cadence should look like.
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