How Kalshi boosted signup conversion 61.6% on its way to #1 in the App Store
Kalshi went live with 1-Click Signup in a day and a half. Conversion rose at every step of its funnel, ending 61.6% higher, and 19% more applications were approved.
“
At each step... Verified was yielding stronger results, which I thought was incredible.
Noah Zingler-Sternig
Director of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
+61.6%
end-to-end conversion
1.5 days
to implement
>1,000
new users a minute at peak
The challenge
With rapid growth on the horizon, Kalshi needed its signup to keep up. Three problems stood in the way:
High drop-off, especially at sensitive fields like SSN.
Low approval rates, caused by typos and fat-fingered data.
Painful KYC operations. Manual reviews made KYC slower, pricier and harder to scale.
We were getting a lot of bad, invalid information ... really high dropoff ... unnecessary KYC costs.
NZNoah Zingler-SternigDirector of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
The solution
Kalshi asks for a phone number (verified with a code) and a birthday, calls Verified’s API, and autofills the rest of the application for the person to confirm.
Compliance sign-off in an hour. Verified’s SOC 2 report and compliance paperwork were ready to go.
Live in 1.5 days, including new designs, the front end and an A/B test.
Pay only on success. If verified data isn’t returned, there’s no charge.
It took our compliance team an hour to give me the green light here.
NZNoah Zingler-SternigDirector of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
New users noticed right away. One told the team: “I can’t believe how easy it was to sign up on Kalshi. It literally felt like I was making an Instagram account.”
The results
After one week of A/B testing, the lift was clear, and it compounded down the funnel. People who started with 1-Click Signup were more likely to finish every step that followed.
Lift with Verified at each funnel step vs. the control group
Create account0%
Apply and approved19.2%
Bank deposit56.2%
Deposit successful57.8%
Trade successful61.6%
One-week A/B test. Source: Kalshi.
Cleaner data, lighter KYC
Verified data replaced typed data, so fewer good applicants were rejected by mistake. The application approval rate rose from 30.37% to 36.21%, a 19% increase, even as volume peaked above 1,000 new users a minute.
Application approval rate
Without Verified30.37%
With Verified36.21%
Another really big benefit of this is that our KYC flags now are taken a lot more seriously because the data that we’re getting from Verified is a lot more reliable.
NZNoah Zingler-SternigDirector of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
We just spend a lot less time on KYC now, and a lot of common issues are being caught before we see them.
NZNoah Zingler-SternigDirector of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
A signup people trust
The “magic moment” of a form that fills itself also changed how people felt about the product.
People are a lot more confident providing their information when it’s automatically populated — they feel really safe signing up with Kalshi.
NZNoah Zingler-SternigDirector of Operations and Growth, Kalshi
