Accelerating Growth: Finding a Sales Strategy for ich.app

Location: Starting on 21 February 2025 at 19:40

Winter Semester 2024 / PSA

Executive Summary

Launched in the beginning of July 2023, ich.app is a venture of Payment Services Austria (PSA), Austria's largest competence center for card-based payment transactions. The ich.app is a digital identity service for the Austrian market and an all-in-one solution for accessing online services. For the user, it offers a more convenient login process, while it enables B2B partners to achieve higher security standards, resulting in higher conversion rates, verified data, more convenience for the user and less fraud.

Goal

The primary goal of this project was to develop a sales strategy and provide the ich.app team with recommendations on how and through which channels to grow and scale in Austria. We saw the acquisition of additional B2B partners as a particular focus of our sales strategy, as the expansion of ich.app's areas of application represents an increased benefit for users. Therefore, it was an important deliverable to identify the most attractive target markets for ich.app and come up with a comprehensive strategy for the market rollout.

Methodology

In order to achieve this goal, we have prequalified a number of attractive target markets on the basis of secondary research. By conducting qualitative interviews with existing and potential partners from the target markets, carrying out a quantitative B2C survey and analyzing competitors in the respective sectors, we were able to evaluate the prequalified partners according to a ranking system developed by us and make a well-founded recommendation to PSA.

Results

Our findings during the course of the project led us to recommend a market rollout via the beachhead strategy to PSA. A niche market should be penetrated first to establish the brand and from there expand to larger markets. For this plan, we developed extensive measures such as a "Test and Trust" campaign, an account-based marketing (ABM) concept and an ambassador program. Three strong focus points that have emerged for us are Trust, user-friendliness and secure identity solutions.

Cooperation Partner

  • Payment Service Austria GmbH (PSA)
    Handelskai 92, Gate 2
    1200 Wien

Contact Person

Student Team

  • Bianca Hornegg
    Katharina Rautschka
    Linda Pötzl
    Lorenz Wolf
    Minko Minkov

Project Manager

  • Diana Lauer

  • Viktor Penzinger

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