Mindbody was founded more than 20 years ago in San Luis Obispo, CA, with a mission to use technology to transform wellness experiences around the world. Since then, it has built a platform that delivers industry-leading tools for wellness businesses for scheduling, marketing, analytics and client engagement.

As one of the most established technology platforms for the fitness, wellness, and beauty industry, Mindbody provides integrated software for businesses in 40 countries. Mindbody’s payment infrastructure has evolved as the company has grown. New capabilities have included processing multicurrency transactions across borders and offering subscription-based services after the 2021 acquisition of ClassPass, a monthly online fitness, wellness, and beauty subscription service.

Originally, Mindbody and ClassPass relied on Stripe as one of several payments providers. However, Mindbody saw an opportunity to deepen its relationship with Stripe significantly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as its digital transactions surged. In 2020, Mindbody began consolidating its payments systems onto Stripe and developing Mindbody Payments, a fully integrated and embedded payments solution now at the core of Mindbody’s platform.

With Mindbody Payments, Mindbody created a foundation to deliver new payments capabilities and revenue opportunities to its users faster and more efficiently.

Building Mindbody Payments with Stripe

As Mindbody began envisioning its own payment service, it knew it would need a system that could manage complex payment flows for a diverse network of clients. The platform would also need the ability to accept online, in-person, and recurring payments to serve the multiple revenue streams of clients, including monthly memberships, drop-in classes, in-app purchases, and retail items at the front counter.

Mindbody chose to build Mindbody Payments on Stripe Connect, Stripe’s solution for platform payments. With Connect, Mindbody can easily onboard and ensure timely payouts to ClassPass partners, individual instructors, and multilocation fitness franchises. Connect also integrates payment data into the broader Mindbody platform so users can manage transactions, track income, and consolidate financial workflows. A comprehensive payment portal acts as a hub for financial management, allowing users to control every aspect of their organization’s finances, no matter if they have one location or hundreds.

Through its integration with Stripe, Mindbody Payments users can accept payments from clients in-person, in-app, and online using a variety of payment methods, including contactless payments, credit and debit cards, mobile wallets, and local payment methods such as BECS in Australia, SEPA and iDEAL in Europe, Alipay in Asia, and Klarna as a buy now, pay later offering.

With Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams, Mindbody can proactively protect its clients from business impersonation scams, merchant abuse, and chargebacks. Custom rules help protect businesses from targeted fraud attempts while enabling them to better manage risk.

Unifying online and in-person payments

Because many Mindbody users process a significant portion of their transactions in person, improving the point-of-sale payment experience was a top priority. Earlier iterations of Mindbody Payments featured a magnetic swiper terminal that customers found expensive and difficult to use. Some customers used third-party POS hardware, which made it hard to reconcile in-person payments with online and subscription revenue streams.

To resolve these challenges, Mindbody implemented Stripe Terminal to unify payments across online, in-app, and in-person payments. Terminal allowed Mindbody Payments to expand its contactless payment options, including the ability to accept contactless in-person payments using Tap to Pay on iPhone. It was simple for Mindbody’s engineers to integrate into the company’s homegrown POS system thanks to Stripe’s developer tools and extensive documentation.

With support from Stripe partner Happy Cog, Mindbody automated the hardware ordering process using Stripe’s cloud-based ordering and management tools, removing its payments team as a bottleneck while freeing admins to focus on other customer support initiatives.

Mindbody turns to Stripe's professional services team for guidance and expertise as the company continues to create new solutions with Stripe. The team partnered with Mindbody through the design and implementation of both its online and in-person payment solutions, along with its global expansion. This strategy included identifying ideal markets for expansion, local and international payment methods, and establishing best practices. The team also provided hands-on support during Mindbody's expansion to Terminal, including enabling the company and its studios with Stripe's device ordering API.

New insights and capabilities

As more volume flows through Mindbody Payments, the company has been able to build new capabilities to deliver additional value and insight for its users.

For example, Mindbody used Stripe Data Pipeline to centralize payment data from across channels. They then built a dashboard to provide users visibility into key revenue streams, monitor subscription churn, and identify growth opportunities more effectively. By integrating Data Pipeline, Mindbody eliminated the need for manual data exports and third-party ETL tools, ensuring data accuracy and reducing operational overhead.

“With Stripe Data Pipeline we're able to provide customers with insights they’ve never had before, which helps them better manage their business,” said Kurtis Moyer, lead product manager, payments at Mindbody.

Thanks to this process of continual improvement, Mindbody Payments has had a growing impact on customers’ revenues and operational efficiency—as well as Mindbody’s own success. US-based customers using Mindbody Payments achieve a 97.4% average authorization rate and 96.8% success rate. The platform maintains a dispute rate of just 0.1% and a fraud rate of only 0.04%, helping its customers capture more revenue while minimizing operational risk.

This close collaboration with Stripe is likely to continue as Mindbody continues to expand the features of Mindbody Payments and pursue its original mission: delivering even more powerful technology so users worldwide can continue to grow their businesses.

“One of the things I appreciate most is that whenever we need to collaborate, we can pick up the phone, and Stripe is always there. Whether it’s product development, marketing, or customer experience, that level of accessibility is invaluable,” Moyer said.