When I joined the team, the overseas groups were all sharing one MailChimp account, North America, Southeast Asia, and a few legacy teams in between. On paper, it sounded “efficient.” In reality, it was chaos wearing a friendly UI.

No one owned the account. Everyone sent whatever they wanted. Contacts piled up endlessly, which meant the subscription cost climbed every month. And because every region had its own admin preferences and email habits, trying to establish any kind of governance was impossible.

But the bigger problem wasn’t even the tool itself. It was that MailChimp simply wasn’t built for the kind of lifecycle work we needed. There was no real integration into Salesforce, no reliable way to trigger lifecycle-based automations, no way to sync engagement as signals, and no way to align with the tech stack I was building for routing, scoring, and onboarding.

So the first real decision I made was simple: stop trying to fix something that fundamentally couldn’t support the system we needed.

We migrated North America into HubSpot—mainly because it could integrate cleanly with Salesforce and because it fit into the automation engine I was building around the entire revenue workflow. Once HubSpot was in place, I finally had the freedom to design onboarding the way it should function, not the way the old tool forced us to operate.

And that led to the most impactful part of the project: rebuilding our onboarding cadence from the ground up.

How the Cadences Came Together

With 100–300 new registrations a day (Fintech onboarding always has seasonality), the first thing I did was look at where the onboarding process was actually breaking. After talking with Sales, Compliance, Support, and our Content team—and after digging through historical data—the bottlenecks were painfully consistent:

• KYC progression was extremely slow.
• Users had no idea what to do after registration, which meant the first inbound payment often took many days (if it ever happened at all).

So instead of sending generic MailChimp blasts, we designed three lifecycle cadences—each tied directly to a customer’s real-time account status.

Orientation Cadence (Pre-KYC) This one met users the moment they registered. It explained what the platform actually does, what happens next, what documents they’d need later, how to get help, and where the official support channels were. It existed to remove hesitation—and reduce the “I’m confused so I’ll come back later” drop-off.

KYC Progress Cadence Once a user initiated KYC, they automatically flowed into the second cadence. This one was built around compliance realities—common document issues, how review works, why some cases take longer, and what to do when the portal asks for clarification. Every message was written with a single goal: help them finish KYC as fast as possible because nothing else in the onboarding funnel matters until this step is done.

Activation Cadence (Post-KYC) Once compliance approved the account, the tone shifted again. Now the priority became: get them to their first inbound payment.

So this cadence focused on:

• How to create virtual accounts
• How to top up
• How to send payments
• How to schedule a one-on-one with their account manager
• And generally: “Here’s how to start using this platform confidently.”

Each cadence had its own message rhythm, and each served a very specific behavioral milestone. There was nothing random about the timing or the content. Every email existed because of a friction point we had already observed in the data.

What Made the System Actually Work

The real magic wasn’t just the content—it was the integration.

Every interaction fed directly into HubSpot’s scoring, which then synced into Salesforce. Account managers could immediately see:

• who was engaging
• who was stalling
• who clicked support content
• who kept opening the same onboarding guide
• who went silent after KYC submission

For the first time, AMs weren’t working blind. They could finally prioritize accounts based on signals—not gut instinct and not “who emailed back first.”

And because everything was automated, the cadence always responded in real time. A user submits KYC? They jump to the next sequence instantly. A user completes review? They drop out of the old cadence and into the activation flow automatically.

No manual intervention. No delays. No “Did anyone update their status?” conversations.

The Outcomes That Actually Mattered

This is the part I didn’t expect to be as dramatic as it was.

KYC submission rate jumped from ~10% to 35–40%. This alone was a massive shift.

KYC completion time collapsed —from an average of 140 hours → to as fast as 24–48 hours on average.

That kind of improvement directly impacted activation velocity, sales pipeline health, and ultimately revenue. For onboarding teams, this was night and day.

And because the experience was more structured, users felt guided rather than abandoned. Support ticket noise dropped. AMs gained visibility. Marketing finally had meaningful funnel data. Compliance saw cleaner submissions.

It wasn’t just a new email system—it was the foundation for a predictable onboarding lifecycle.

Looking Back

What started as a simple migration away from a shared MailChimp account turned into one of the most foundational infrastructure projects I’ve done. Not because the cadences themselves were complicated, but because the system needed to serve Sales, Marketing, Compliance, Support, and the CRM simultaneously.

And it worked because it finally respected how onboarding really functions in a fintech environment—through stages, through signals, through friction, through human guidance when users need it most.

It’s easy to underestimate what a well-built lifecycle system can do. Until you watch pipeline velocity move from days to hours.