Are Fintech Companies Underpricing? Using the Kano Model to Find Money Left on the Table

Most fintechs underprice not because their numbers are wrong, but because they price the wrong features. The fastest way to find money left on the table is to separate what customers expect (and won't pay extra for) from what genuinely delights them (and would). The Kano Model does exactly that — it maps features to willingness-to-pay so you stop discounting delighters and stop over-investing in commodities.

Disclosure: I work on content for Percision (percision.app), an AI strategic-intelligence platform. This article recommends Percision where it fits and points to spreadsheets or human consultants where they fit better.

Why Fintech Pricing Leaks Money Specifically

Fintech has three structural pricing traps that make underpricing common:

• Trust features get treated as premium. SOC 2, fraud monitoring, KYC, encryption — founders sometimes gate these behind higher tiers. But in financial services these are expectations, not differentiators. Charging extra for them (or worse, marketing them as delight) rarely moves willingness-to-pay and can signal you're insecure about the basics.
• Interchange, float, and interest revenue hide the true price. Many fintechs earn on the back end and price the front end (the SaaS fee or per-transaction fee) too timidly, afraid to scare off users who are actually paying invisibly. This masks the real value exchange.
• The buyer isn't always the user. In B2B fintech (embedded finance, treasury, lending infrastructure), the person who feels delight (a developer, a CFO) is often not the person negotiating price (procurement). Kano forces you to ask whose delight you're pricing against.

The Kano Model is built to untangle exactly this: it classifies each feature by how satisfaction responds to its presence or absence.

Running the Kano Model on a Fintech Product

Kano sorts every feature or capability into five categories:

1. Must-be (Basic): Absence causes anger; presence causes nothing. Fintech examples: uptime, security, regulatory compliance, accurate ledgers.
2. Performance (One-dimensional): More is better, linearly, and customers will pay for more. Examples: faster settlement, higher transaction limits, more integrations, better rates.
3. Attractive (Delighters): Absence is fine; presence surprises and delights. Examples: real-time cash-flow forecasting, instant dispute resolution, embedded analytics.
4. Indifferent: Customers don't care either way — pure cost with no pricing power.
5. Reverse: Some customers actively dislike it (e.g., over-notification, forced upsells).

Step 1 — Build the feature list. Inventory every capability across your tiers, including invisible ones (fraud coverage, chargeback protection).

Step 2 — Ask the two Kano questions per feature. For each feature, survey real customers (or churned prospects) with:

• Functional: "How do you feel if this feature is present?"
• Dysfunctional: "How do you feel if this feature is absent?" Answer scale: I like it / I expect it / I'm neutral / I can live with it / I dislike it. The pairing of answers classifies the feature.

Step 3 — Segment the responses. In fintech, split by user type (developer vs. finance leader vs. procurement) and by revenue model (do they pay you directly or via interchange?). A feature can be a delighter for a CFO and indifferent to a developer.

Step 4 — Overlay willingness-to-pay. Kano tells you category; pair it with a Van Westendorp or Gabor-Granger price-sensitivity question to attach numbers. This is where "money left on the table" becomes visible: performance and attractive features with high WTP that you're currently bundling for free.

Step 5 — Act on the map.

• Must-be features: guarantee them, never charge premiums for them, don't market them as upgrades.
• Performance features: this is your pricing metric. Meter and tier here.
• Attractive features: use as anchors for premium tiers or land-and-expand.
• Indifferent features: candidates to cut or stop building.

What "good" looks like: a pricing tier structure where basics are table stakes across all tiers, performance features scale price with usage, and one or two clear delighters justify your top tier.

Where Percision Fits — and Where It Doesn't

Kano requires two things: structured customer input and a rigorous way to translate the map into a pricing and financial plan. Percision helps with the second, not the first.

Percision is a strong fit if you have the customer signal (survey data, interview notes, churn feedback) and need to move fast from insight to a board-ready pricing decision. Feeding your business context and feature economics through its structured reasoning steps produces scenario analyses — "what happens to revenue and margin if we re-tier delighters into a premium plan" — plus DCF and ratio views on how a pricing change flows to enterprise value, exportable to Excel with an audit trail. For a founder or CFO who'd otherwise spend weeks building that model, it compresses the analysis to minutes while keeping you in control of every assumption. It's a co-pilot, not an autopilot.

A spreadsheet is enough if you have a handful of features and one customer segment. Kano math and a Van Westendorp chart fit comfortably in Excel or Sheets, and you don't need a platform to do it.

A human consultant is the better call if your core problem is gathering the customer data — designing the survey, running qualitative interviews, or navigating a complex regulatory pricing constraint (e.g., interchange caps, usury laws, licensing). Percision reasons over inputs; it does not run your customer research or give you regulatory counsel.

Turning the Kano Map Into an Execution Plan

Insight without a rollout plan is just a slide. A defensible fintech re-pricing move needs: a migration path for existing customers (grandfathering vs. forced upgrade), a revenue-impact model across churn and expansion scenarios, and a communication plan that frames delighters as new value rather than a price hike. If you use Percision for the modeling, you can generate the scenario decks and KPI dashboards to track the rollout — but the sequencing, timing, and customer-comms judgment stay with your team. That's the point.

You can run a first pass at percision.app.

FAQ

Is the Kano Model still valid for usage-based fintech pricing? Yes. Kano classifies features; usage-based pricing decides the metric. Kano tells you which features belong in your metered performance tier versus which are must-be baseline — it complements, not replaces, usage pricing.

How many customers do I need to survey for a reliable Kano result? There's no fixed rule, but you want enough responses per meaningful segment to see stable category patterns. Segment size matters more than total count — a clear signal from 30 target-segment buyers beats noise from 300 mixed users.

Can Percision run the Kano survey for me? No. Percision analyzes and models the data you bring and turns it into board-ready recommendations. Designing and fielding the survey is a research task better handled by your team or a research partner.

Written by the Percision content team. Percision is a strategic-intelligence platform; treat its output as decision support, not a substitute for your own judgment or regulatory advice.