Money plus minutes: one transaction.
Meridian Remit handles $4.2B annually in cross-border transfers, primarily on the US→LATAM corridor. The product insight: senders care about the recipient's experience, not just the wire amount. Bundling data with money turned a one-shot transaction into a recurring relationship.
Meridian operated in a corridor where every competitor was racing the FX spread to zero. Customer acquisition cost had tripled in three years, and customer lifetime value was eroding as senders shopped each transaction. The remittance transaction itself was commoditized; the only differentiator was the relationship around it.
Customer research surfaced a recurring story: senders frequently topped up the recipient's mobile data separately from sending money — sometimes through informal channels, sometimes through local services. Two transactions, two friction points, one relationship the recipient had with a competitor.
Meridian's product team realized: 'The data top-up is part of the same intent as the money send. We're losing it because we don't offer it.' But building carrier integrations across 14 LATAM markets would have been a multi-year project.
Next's API supports airtime credits as a programmable primitive alongside eSIM provisioning. Meridian added one new field to the remittance flow: 'Top up recipient data?' On confirmation, two API calls fire — wallet credit and airtime credit — and both arrive on the recipient's phone within seconds of each other.
The recipient gets two SMS notifications: one from Meridian's wallet partner, one from their carrier confirming the data top-up. Both branded with Meridian. The recipient now has a Meridian-branded relationship that survives between sends, with a real utility delivered every time.
On the back end, OneConnect tracks data usage as a leading indicator of recipient activation. When the data balance runs low, Meridian's CRM nudges the sender — not the recipient — with a personalized 'Send again?' notification. The repeat send rate jumped 24%.
Meridian shipped the bundled flow to its US→Mexico corridor first, then expanded to all 14 LATAM markets within a quarter. Senders who bundled data sent more often, sent larger amounts, and churned at half the rate of money-only senders.
We turned a commodity transaction into a relationship. Bundling data with money was the thing that finally moved retention.
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