We told a client to only pay us when the account got funded

Most agency contracts are built around activity. Impressions delivered. Clicks generated. Leads passed along. The agency gets paid whether or not any of it turned into a customer, and the client is left holding the risk.

When we started working with Axis Securities, we did something most agencies would call reckless: we agreed to be paid only when a demat account was actually opened and funded. Not per click. Not per lead. Per verified outcome.

That one structural choice changed everything about how we worked.

When you only get paid for outcomes, you stop lying to yourself about vanity metrics. A campaign pulling huge impressions means nothing if nobody funds an account. We had to obsess over the part of the funnel most agencies hand back to the client: the messy middle between interest and a funded account. We rebuilt email journeys for each stage of that funnel, rewrote finance jargon into plain language a first-time investor could trust, and optimised creative against conversion data in real time — not against engagement.

Accountability changes the conversation with the client too. When your fee is tied to their result, you are no longer a vendor defending a media plan. You are a partner arguing about the same number they care about.

The result was around 10,000 funded accounts in six months, at a sustained 5%-plus account-to-deposit ratio, and roughly three times the lead-to-conversion efficiency typical for financial services. But the number I care about more is the one that does not show up in a deck: we never once had a conversation about whether the spend was "working." It either funded accounts or it did not.

Not every engagement can be billed this way. But every engagement can be *thought about* this way. If you would not bet your own fee on the outcome, you should ask why you are asking the client to.