The setting
extends its payments work to individual people with , a mobile wallet app with a virtual Mastercard for paying friends, settling bills and paying businesses.
Paid acquisition is reaching customers who already entered through merchants.
Excluding existing customers protects acquisition spend, while keeping the current audiences protects delivery.
Who you’d be doing this for
“I finished verifying yesterday, then an ad offered me a reward for opening the account again.”
Monika Stankovic · Everyday spender · a character in this brief
Opened an account through a merchant and completed verification, but has not yet funded it.
What is at stake
Paid acquisition is spending 30% of its budget on existing verified customers. You need to weigh precise exclusions against moving the remaining budget into broader prospecting.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- precise exclusions vs reliable delivery
- warm prospects vs cleaner acquisition reach
- platform conversions vs eligible customers
- acquisition offers vs activation clarity
Why SumUp
Merchant touchpoints and direct advertising reach the same consumers, making overlap part of the acquisition economics.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 38 more at SumUp, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at SumUp. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- CRM Manager- Consumer (opens in a new tab)
- The Consumer CRM team turns every new sign-up into an active, engaged customer by designing the journeys that guide people from onboarding through to their first transaction and beyond.
- Comfort working across push, email and in-app messaging, with basic SQL for audience checks and reporting
- Head of Consumer Growth (opens in a new tab)
- From paid acquisition, referrals and lifecycle marketing to receipts, payment screens, merchant communications and in-store experiences, you will determine how SumUp reaches, converts and retains millions of consumers.
- Develop a balanced acquisition model that combines proven consumer growth channels with SumUp’s unique merchant network and consumer touchpoints.
- Growth Marketing Manager, Credit Products (opens in a new tab)
- Define and execute online acquisition strategies across web and app, including Google, Meta and TikTok.
- Manage a significant marketing budget and deliver against acquisition, revenue, CAC, payback, activation and customer-value targets.
- Brand Manager - Marketing Effectiveness (opens in a new tab)
- Central Brand & Marketing builds the campaigns, trackers and insight that show whether SumUp's marketing actually works, across six markets and two very different audiences: consumer and business owners.
- Own upper and mid funnel campaign reporting with the Media team, then share what worked and why with other marketers
- Senior Marketing Manager - B2C (opens in a new tab)
- Plan and execute merchant-to-consumer acquisition campaigns across six markets — owning messaging, creative strategy, localisation, and performance reporting
- As Senior Marketing Manager (Merchant to Consumer) , you'll drive the merchant-to-consumer acquisition engine: the channel that converts SumUp's merchant network and their customers into SumUp personal banking customers.
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these turns on committing to a deal before it checks out.
Paid account openings are rising while too few of those new members set up direct deposit.
You must weigh immediate acquisition volume against a cohort that can become a primary banking relationship.
An electronics merchant spent $3,000 but reached only 360 new shoppers.
You must weigh a more selective placement mix against changing how the merchant pays for acquisition.
One low-cost Google Universal App Campaigns creative is attracting learners who leave before day two.
You have to weigh cheaper installs against the retention signal that proves the ad is finding future learners.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around SumUp’s SumUp Consumer (SumUp Pay), written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Spending signals show recurring low balances before expected outgoings among people already using Spaces.
You must weigh a useful reserve against rules that make consumers unsure what money they can spend.
A network disruption left UK transfer instructions in uncertain states, and some may already have moved.
You must weigh faster access to money against an irreversible risk of duplicate execution.
Duplicate transfer-status notifications reached 4.8% after a deployment, despite correct money movement.
You must weigh a fast idempotency change against preserving retries when an external response is uncertain.