Challenge

In 2020, Unobravo launched in Italy with a mission to make it easier for individuals to seek mental health services from qualified providers. Patients visiting the site fill out a short questionnaire to identify their treatment needs and preferences, and Unobravo uses that information to match them with therapists on the platform. In just 3 years, Unobravo has attracted more than 6,000 mental health professionals to its platform, which manages back-office tasks such as scheduling and payments for those providers.

Unobravo’s goal to provide patients and therapists with a frictionless experience extended to other features of its platform. For example, the company wanted to make it easy for patients to pay their therapists online. That meant finding a payments partner that offered a simple way to integrate online payment processing into the Unobravo platform along with regular payouts to providers.

That technology needed to be easy to set up and activate to help launch the business in 2020, but Unobravo also wanted infrastructure that could help the business scale to serve more therapists and patients, including in markets outside of Italy. “Our first challenge was to create an international business model and make our therapy service accessible on a large scale,” said Tiziana Cannone, Unobravo’s head of finance.

Unobravo also wanted its platform to respond to the changing needs of its therapists and their patients. That included choosing a payment solution that offered a range of payment methods, as well additional tools to help optimize the platform.

Solution

Unobravo evaluated several major billing and payments providers before launch. The company ultimately decided that Stripe products offered the range of capabilities needed to create a flexible and scalable marketplace for therapists and patients using the platform.

Unobravo used Stripe Connect to provide the infrastructure that allows the platform to collect payments from patients and pay out the proceeds to therapists. Stripe’s licensing in Italy and other European Union countries made it easy for Unobravo to begin accepting payments and supported the company’s future expansion potential. Connect also provided Unobravo with hosted onboarding services that streamlined the process for adding therapists to the platform and performing the necessary customer checks and other compliance tasks required to issue payouts.

To continue streamlining the transaction process and offer more payment methods, Unobravo implemented Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite. That suite of tools includes Stripe Elements, a set of secure, embeddable UI components that improves the checkout flow and helps increase conversion. It also includes Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout solution that securely saves and autofills customers’ payment details for a quicker transaction. In addition, Unobravo began using the A/B testing feature of the Optimized Checkout Suite to rigorously measure the impact of offering new payment methods.

With the Payment Element, Unobravo could easily choose and activate additional payment methods without any additional coding or development time. That enabled Unobravo to respond quickly to requests from therapists and patients for new payment methods, including digital wallets such as Apple Pay.

Results

Connect supports fast expansion into two international markets

Connect has allowed Unobravo to expand into France and Spain with a seamless onboarding process and the ability to easily accept payments and distribute payouts to therapists in those countries. “Connect has significantly streamlined and accelerated our market expansion process,” said Cannone. “By automating key workflows, simplifying compliance management, and centralizing resources, we were able to reduce operational complexities and focus more on strategic growth.”

A/B testing makes it easy to choose the right payment methods

The Optimized Checkout Suite’s no-code payment method A/B testing tool gives Unobravo an efficient and data-based way to determine which payment methods to add to their checkout process. For instance, Unobravo tested one type of payment method to see if it would lead to higher conversion rates. As Unobravo continues to evolve and expand, this kind of testing will provide key insights that can guide the company’s future growth plans.

Two-thirds less time spent on customer care

As Unobravo continued to optimize its use of Connect, it began to see reductions in the amount of time its Italian customer success team spent assisting therapists with billing and payment issues. “Thirty percent of our customer success team’s time was spent supporting therapists,” said Cannone. Now, that team devotes just 10% of its time to these tasks. “And because of Stripe Connect, we don’t worry about setting up manual and operational customer care processes in the countries where we expand to on payment issues because the processes are very automated, which creates incredible synergies in terms of time and efficiency.”