Note: This is a hypothetical scenario I built to apply my Customer Success frameworks to a realistic enterprise fintech context — not an account I managed. I use it to demonstrate how I'd approach retention and expansion in a B2B fintech setting.
Company: FinEdge AI — an AI-powered underwriting and risk-insights platform sold to regional banks and mid-market lending institutions.
Product: An API and dashboard layer that plugs into a lender's existing loan approval workflow, using AI to assess credit risk faster and more accurately than manual underwriting.
Client profile: A mid-sized regional bank or credit union, digitizing its lending operations. Multi-year enterprise contract. Multiple internal stakeholders — a champion in operations, a compliance/risk team, and an executive sponsor.
The core challenge: Six months post-implementation, the client has fully adopted FinEdge AI for personal loans. But usage has plateaued. The original champion who drove the deal has moved to a different team. Compliance still reviews AI-flagged applications manually "just to be safe." And the renewal conversation is six months away with no expansion story yet.
This is a familiar shape of problem across enterprise fintech, SaaS, and infrastructure sales globally — not specific to any one market.
Step 1 — Diagnose before prescribing (The Mirror Principle)
Rather than opening the renewal cycle with a feature pitch, I'd start with a discovery conversation — not with the original champion, but with the compliance lead who's been quietly slowing adoption. The goal is to reflect their own stated concern back to them clearly: "You mentioned your team still double-checks every AI-flagged application manually — what would it take for your team to trust the model's output on routine cases?"
This does two things: it surfaces the real blocker (trust, not technical capability), and it positions me as someone diagnosing their problem, not selling a renewal.
Step 2 — Map the account, not just the contact (Predictive Health Mapping)
The stakeholder turnover risk here is structural, not incidental — enterprise accounts are always one resignation away from instability if the relationship is single-threaded. I'd build a stakeholder map covering:
I'd track engagement across all three as a leading indicator — not just login/API usage, but meeting attendance, response times, and sentiment in QBRs. A drop in any one of these should trigger proactive outreach months before renewal, not during it.
Step 3 — Prove the business case in their language (CS as a Revenue Function)