With behavior-based journeys on OneSignal, CiNKO turned dormant signups into active users — reducing time to first transaction from 14 days to under 4.
The challenge
CiNKO is an international digital wallet built for freelancers and remittance recipients across Latin America. Users can receive money in any currency, manage crypto, spend with a Visa card in digital dollars, and withdraw to a local bank — all from a single app.
Getting people to sign up was never the issue. CiNKO's funnel was healthy through download and KYC: users uploaded their photos, entered their data, and verified their identity without friction. But then it stalled. They'd finish onboarding and never make a transaction. Time to first cash-in — the metric that mattered most — was averaging 14 days. For a fintech whose value proposition lives entirely on the other side of that first deposit, two weeks of silence is where users disappear for good.
An infrastructure that wasn't keeping up
CiNKO's messaging operation was a patchwork. Mailchimp handled some communications, an internal IT tool handled transactional messages, and the marketing team had unified access to neither. Segmentation was limited to broad country-level groupings, and behavior-based automation simply didn't exist.
It was very cumbersome. We had to combine the two tools without the whole team having access to both, and we had very limited segmentation available. — Mariana Fernández Méndez, Marketing Strategy Specialist, CiNKO
The team knew what to say and roughly when to say it. What they lacked was the infrastructure to act on it.
The solution with Bildung + OneSignal
CiNKO implemented OneSignal with Bildung acting as the official partner. Bildung's role was bridging the marketing and engineering teams: defining the tag taxonomy, designing the user journeys, coordinating the technical integration, and launching flows on a weekly cadence.
Three journeys became the foundation of the new setup:
KYC / Onboarding. Users who stalled mid-verification no longer landed in silence. They now receive automatic, contextual updates at every step — whether they dropped off, hit an error, or need to redo a field. The post-signup silence is gone.
Activation. The highest-impact flow. Using push and email segmented by behavior, CiNKO began reaching users who had completed KYC but hadn't made their first deposit. Messaging is now tailored to where the user is in the funnel, not just which country they're in.
Post-transaction feedback. Once a user transacts, a survey journey kicks off to learn what's working, what's missing, and why they chose CiNKO. For a startup iterating quickly, that signal is as valuable as the transaction itself.
The results
The activation journey delivered the most measurable impact. In the markets where CiNKO focused, time to first transaction dropped from 14 days to 3–4 days — a 75% reduction that directly affects retention and downstream revenue.
Beyond that metric, the move from country-based to behavior-based segmentation unlocked use cases that weren't possible before. CiNKO can now identify and reach users who deposit but never use their card, or users transacting in USD who don't realize they can buy local currency through the app. Each is a reactivation opportunity that used to go unnoticed.
The team also adopted OneSignal's AI copy generator for push notification copy and email subject lines, testing tone variants and optimizing for open rates.
OneSignal has tested so many ways of sending pushes that in this case it really improves open rates. — Mariana Fernández Méndez, Marketing Strategy Specialist, CiNKO
What's next
CiNKO's story is what happens when a lean marketing team gets the right infrastructure underneath them: clearly defined metrics, behavior-based journeys, and a platform that lets them act on what they already know about their users. They're now exploring in-app messaging as the next channel and continuing to refine segmentation as their user base grows across markets.
