ROI Projection.
The language every approver speaks: dollars, timeline, payback. ROI Projection models a specific partnership's revenue trajectory, onboarding and ongoing cost, time-to-payback, and sensitivity to assumption changes — across conservative, base, and upside scenarios — so your investment committee can decide on numbers, not vibes.
Output: three-scenario 3-year projection with revenue, cost, payback, sensitivity, and peer benchmark comparison.
Latency: 10-18 seconds via Claude Sonnet + CORTEX benchmark join.
Use case: the number your partnership committee sees before saying yes or no.
What the projection contains
Every ROI Projection produces eight structured sections:
Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 revenue attributed specifically to this partnership. Shown under three scenarios: conservative (70% of base, accounting for typical slippage), base (the model's central estimate), and upside (140% of base, accounting for accelerated adoption). Each year includes a confidence band.
One-time cost to get to first-revenue. Includes: integration engineering (days × loaded rate), legal review (standard partnership contract + any bespoke structures), compliance review (KYB re-verification cost if needed, internal risk review, any required examination-adjacent preparation), initial marketing collateral.
Partnership success manager time, technical support, quarterly review cadence, compliance monitoring contribution, incremental marketing. Scales with revenue per the deal structure.
Number of months until cumulative revenue surpasses cumulative cost. Computed separately per scenario. Anything over 36 months flags for scenario-planning review.
Which single assumption most affects the outcome, and what happens if it moves 20% in either direction. Typical most-sensitive assumptions: customer acquisition rate, average deal size per end customer, integration timeline (longer integration = later revenue = worse NPV).
How this projection compares to equivalent partnerships in the CORTEX industry benchmarks — is the base case at the peer median, lagging, or leading? If you're claiming top-quartile revenue per partnership from this deal, the model flags the assumption as aggressive.
Every number in the projection is backed by an explicit assumption — rate × volume × duration — which can be inspected and overridden. The register shows source ("CORTEX benchmark", "your historical average", "user-supplied"), value, and a confidence level.
Factors that warrant discount: deal-stage risk (Series A partner = higher execution risk), regulatory risk (partnership type with recent enforcement action), concentration risk (overweight reliance on a single partner channel).
What TECH uses to seed the model
The projection is not generated from the air. Inputs:
- Your own partnership history — if your org has previously-completed partnerships in TECH's Pipeline, their actual revenue and cost are the strongest priors.
- CORTEX industry benchmarks — peer medians for revenue per partnership, deal size, integration time, compliance cost in your cohort.
- Structural information about the target — their size, sector, stage, publicly-reported customer counts, typical deal shape for partners like them.
- Your overrides — any assumption in the register can be overridden before the projection is regenerated.
When to run it
ROI Projection has a clear place in the partnership lifecycle:
- After Fit Analysis, before the first commercial discussion. The Fit tells you whether the partnership makes sense; the ROI tells you what it's worth if it does.
- When sizing the pilot budget. The onboarding cost section is designed to be ported directly into your pilot budget line item.
- Before a committee presentation. The PDF export is designed for committee consumption: one page per scenario with the base-case as the primary slide.
- When re-forecasting mid-pilot. Update the assumptions with observed pilot performance, regenerate — compare to the original projection.
Worked example structure
An ROI Projection for a mid-sized fintech pursuing a co-brand card partnership with a regional bank might look like:
Export
ROI Projections export as a PDF in an executive-ready format: cover page, one page per scenario, sensitivity analysis, assumptions register, and an appendix with the peer benchmark visuals. Designed to drop into a committee deck without reformatting.