Product-Led Growth in Financial Institutions: A Roadmap for Adoption in Traditional Banking
Abstract
As the financial services industry undergoes accelerated digital disruption, traditional banks are under growing pressure to deliver seamless, customer-centric experiences. This paper explores Product-Led Growth (PLG) as a transformative framework for rethinking how banks attract, engage, and retain users in a digital-first economy. Unlike sales-led or marketing-led models that rely on outbound push strategies, PLG emphasizes value realization through the product itself, prioritizing intuitive onboarding, self-service functionality, and embedded growth loops driven by behavioral data. Through case analyses of leading fintechs, the study demonstrates how PLG strategies, rooted in modular infrastructure, embedded analytics, and agile experimentation, can be adapted to banking environments despite legacy constraints. The paper also identifies systemic barriers including hierarchical structures, compliance rigidity, and cultural inertia, offering a roadmap for institutional transformation via API modernization, KPI realignment, and cross-functional capability building. Strategic recommendations emphasize the importance of executive vision, product-led leadership, customer success as a growth lever, and design-led compliance frameworks. Lastly, this paper argues that PLG goes beyond growth strategy, it is also a structural blueprint for modern banking, where product management modifies into a core leadership function and the user journey becomes the engine of scalable, sustainable value creation.
Keywords
Product-Led Growth (PLG), Digital Transformation, Financial Institutions, User Experience, Embedded Analytics, Fintech Strategy, Onboarding Optimization, Cross-Functional Alignment, Legacy Banking, Product Management.
Citations
IRE Journals:
Adedeji Agbelemoge
"Product-Led Growth in Financial Institutions: A Roadmap for Adoption in Traditional Banking" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 2 2025 Page 654-669
IEEE:
Adedeji Agbelemoge
"Product-Led Growth in Financial Institutions: A Roadmap for Adoption in Traditional Banking" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(2)
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