Challenge

Hapana launched in 2014 as a SaaS platform to help personal trainers attract and retain customers, but it quickly evolved into a full-service membership management platform for boutique gym owners. In 2016, the company integrated Stripe Connect into its platform to allow gyms to collect fees from their members online.

By 2023, Hapana had expanded its target customer base beyond boutique gyms to enterprise size, multisite, global fitness franchises. To better serve those customers, Hapana needed to scale its payment processing and improve the way it routed funds between accounts. The company’s top priority was managing the complex fund flows between members, individual gyms, and parent companies—for example, processing royalty payments and rebates on a global scale. Large gym customers also wanted to leverage their size and payment volume to secure more favorable terms for payment processing fees.

Because large franchises often operate in multiple countries, Hapana needed a solution to manage onboarding and ensure compliance with different regulatory requirements depending on the customer’s location. The company also wanted to help gyms convert more customers by adding more payment methods for collecting membership fees, such as digital wallets and direct bank debits that would work in different countries.

“Multiunit and global franchise brands are coming to Hapana to access international markets through a single, consolidated software partner,” said Jarron Aizen, CEO and founder of Hapana. “They need the ability to unlock advanced fund flow capabilities and offer a wide range of localized payment methods—while securing competitive buy rates across territories.”

Finally, Hapana was seeing demand for a higher level of customer support for its enterprise-level customers. The company wanted to ensure its technology partners provided exceptionally strong support for Hapana’s team to ensure they could deliver that level of customer service.

Solution

In 2023, Hapana adapted its existing Connect integration to better support its growing multisite customer base.

Working with Stripe professional services, Hapana’s development team mapped the complex fund flows of Hapana’s larger, multisite franchise businesses and developed rules to ensure that funds were split properly across the parent business, the franchise operator, and Hapana.

Hapana also selected a new pricing model within its Connect integration. In 2016, Hapana had offloaded payments pricing and collection to Stripe to help monetize payments quickly—without the need for a dedicated pricing team. By 2023, the company had evolved to the point where it needed to, and could, take more control over its pricing. Hapana flexibly moved to a new monetization model and started to set and collect its own processing fees. This change allowed Hapana to set different fees for customers on its platform, accommodating larger businesses’ demand for volume discounts.

Hapana was able to continue using Stripe-hosted onboarding, with its built-in input validation, formatting, and error handling. With Stripe’s conversion-optimized onboarding flows, Hapana could present customers with an automated series of questions appropriate for their geographic region and unique regulatory and compliance requirements.

The company also adopted Stripe’s Payment Element to help gym owners enter new markets and convert more members by offering the most popular payment methods in their region. With a single integration, Hapana added digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay and direct debit options for different countries, such as the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) in Australia and New Zealand, Automated Clearing House (ACH) debits in the US, and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debits in Europe. The company also added Link, a wallet built by Stripe, to speed up checkout.

To improve its customer service capabilities, Hapana also elected to use a Stripe paid support plan. The company selected the Premium Support tier, which included a dedicated technical account manager on top of 24x7 phone, email, and chat support.

Results

43.2% increase in fitness locations on the platform and $300 million payments processed annually

Connect gave Hapana a flexible, scalable, and reliable payments infrastructure it could easily integrate into its platform and adjust over time to accommodate a changing customer base and growing payment volume. Since partnering with Stripe, Hapana has seen a 43.2% increase in the number of fitness locations on its platform, and it’s on track to process $300 million in payments annually.

87% of Hapana customers are now multisite franchises

With advanced funds flow capabilities and custom pricing, Hapana was able to win and retain more customers in its target segment of multisite gyms. Now, these multisite businesses represent 87% of the company’s customer base.

Hapana expands from 8 to 17 countries

Since adding the Payment Element to easily enable local payment methods in 2023, Hapana has quickly expanded into nine new countries, including the UK, Ireland, Singapore, and Canada.

Stripe-hosted onboarding accelerates new customer activation and simplifies compliance

Prior to using Stripe-hosted onboarding, Hapana relied on a fragmented application process that required customers to navigate multiple steps across different systems. The multistep workflow often resulted in a three- to four-day turnaround time before Hapana could activate new customers on its platform. Using Stripe-hosted onboarding’s optimized flows eliminated offline, manual steps and their potential for errors. The system also now dynamically adjusts to any changes in payment regulations, so Hapana’s team does not have to monitor multiple country’s regulations and update its onboarding whenever there is a change.

“We were confident about our global expansion, knowing that compliance was taken care of and that Stripe provided strong risk and protection mechanisms,” said Aizen.

Paid support plan provides peace of mind

Upgrading to a paid support plan provided the increased responsiveness that Hapana needed to accommodate the demands of larger customers, but the company said Stripe technology is so reliable that its developers have rarely had to use technical support.
“It was a breath of fresh air knowing there was a team of people on the other side to support us, not only during implementation, but on an ongoing basis,” said Aizen.