Cash App + Rival at Quirk’s New York: How AI and community are accelerating insights

Quirk’s New York 2025 featured so many great sessions, but one standout presentation is from Cash App. 

The session, led by Ashmeed Ali, Market Insights Lead at Cash App, explored how this fintech leader is using research communities and AI tools to capture richer insights, move faster, and connect with customers in more meaningful ways. Rival Technologies CEO & Founder Andrew Reid joined Ash as a co-presenter. 

Cash App’s insight function is robust, impressive and impactful — and the session (titled “How Cash App taps into AI and communities to accelerate insights into ideas”) provided a glimpse into how they do things. It also highlighted how a conversational, mobile-first approach delivers impact across the business, from marketing and product to design, comms, finance, and strategy.

If you missed the session, a full recording is available here. We also highlighted some notable key takeaways below.

Building a high-engagement insight community

One of Cash App’s branded customer panel, the Cash App Insiders community, now boasts 27,641 members and an impressive 91% completion rate. By using conversational surveys that feel like natural chats, the team gathers both qualitative and quantitative feedback, plus videos and photos, all in a single touchpoint. This approach provides a steady flow of customer feedback to internal teams.

Powered by Rival’s mobile-first platform, the Cash App Insiders community engages members in a chat-style environment that feels more like messaging a friend than taking a survey. This conversational approach increases completion rates and encourages richer, more candid responses, while seamlessly combining quantitative, qualitative, and multimedia inputs in one touchpoint.

“Rival gives us a lot of the ‘why’ and the quick insights that we need,” Ashmeed told the Quirk’s audience. “We’re supporting a wide variety of stakeholders across Cash App, and having a community that we can engage in the moment helps us move faster, get richer context, and connect those insights directly to marketing, product, and design decisions.”

Driving impact across use cases

The flexibility of Rival’s platform means Cash App can pivot quickly between foundational research, campaign testing, product design feedback, and storytelling initiatives, without needing separate tools or long lead times.

Ashmeed shared several examples of how Cash App Insiders is helping answer critical business questions:

• Understanding churn and winback: By mixing qual and quant questions with lapsed customers, Cash App uncovered why users leave, why they return, and which competitors they use in between. This research was used by different teams to enhance customer retention strategies.
• Capturing the value of Cash App in daily life: A study of 4,700 members collected open-ended and video stories about customers’ financial goals and how Cash App supports them. The comms team recontacted select participants for interviews, testimonials, and quotes.
• Testing new card concepts: Feedback on mood boards for the “Tortoise Card” design helped shape the launch strategy and supported a campaign featuring Shaboozey.

Layering in AI for richer insights

The presentation also showcased how Cash App and Rival are leveraging AI to boost research efficiency and storytelling. Rival’s Unstructured Data Agent uses Thoughtfulness Scoring to trigger smart follow-up questions, summarizes large volumes of unstructured data, and creates dynamic video reels that bring customer voices to life.

In a campaign test featuring Timothée Chalamet, Smart AI Probe and Thoughtfulness Scoring helped uncover deeper insights, while AI-generated summaries and reels helped the team package insights in a format that captured internal attention.

A model for agile, modern research

By combining an engaged customer community with AI-enhanced analysis, Cash App is able to act faster, support a wide variety of internal stakeholders, and deliver insights that go beyond the “what” to uncover the “why.”

Want to build a robust customer panel like Cash App did? Looking to deliver real-time insights to the most important stakeholders in your organization? Request a demo of Rival Technologies to see if we’re a good fit.