Challenge

As frequent global travellers, Bounce's founders were familiar with the frustration of being stuck carrying around luggage instead of freely exploring a new city. So, they set out to build a global network of secure luggage drop-off locations: retail shops, convenience stores, shipping depots and more. According to Bounce's co-founder and CEO, Cody Candee, the company partners with "any kind of business that is in a great location, has enough space, has good opening hours and prioritises customer service.”

In a prelaunch trial period in its first market, New York City, Bounce started collecting revenue from users but had no way to transfer funds to its partners digitally. "When we had only a few stores and a small amount of revenue in the first month or two, I would go to an ATM, withdraw cash and then go and give it manually to the stores,” said Candee.

The startup needed a reliable platform for securely accepting payments from customers and making payouts to partners – key elements of its business model. Bounce's payment provider needed to reliably process increasing payment volumes as the company scaled nationally and then globally to cities around the world – such as London, Paris and Tokyo – with support for multiple payment methods and currencies.

Solution

As a two-person team, Bounce's founders did not have the resources to conduct a wide-ranging search of payment providers. Their goal was to get the product live as quickly as possible. "We chose Stripe because it's easy to integrate and it's the most developer-friendly platform,” said Candee. "In addition, it scales really well.”

Bounce used Stripe Connect, a solution for moving money between multiple parties. With Connect, Bounce developed a fast and straightforward onboarding and payout process for new partner locations accepting luggage drop-offs, facilitating the growth of its partner network.

Stripe-hosted onboarding meant that Bounce could offload the burden of managing Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements, enabling Bounce to reduce engineering and operational resources dedicated to global compliance. Then, Stripe Radar provided built-in fraud prevention by employing AI trained on hundreds of billions of data points globally. That approach led to fewer legitimate transactions being blocked, better acceptance rates, more revenue and less work for Bounce to keep transactions secure – freeing the company's small team up to focus on building the core product.

To serve its base of digital-native users making one-time reservations for luggage drop-off – and to convert new customers looking for the flexibility of using their preferred payment methods – Bounce enabled credit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay using Stripe Payments. Bounce also adopted Link, a digital wallet by Stripe that boosts conversion by ensuring a fast, easy and secure checkout.

Results

Bounce grows exponentially since launching with Stripe

After launching on Connect, Bounce's team could scale with confidence – and no more trips to the ATM. With Stripe as the backbone of its financial infrastructure, Bounce has grown its luggage storage network after six years to more than 20,000 locations in 100 countries – all supported by payout flows that remove the need to establish local entities or banking partnerships.

Since launch, Bounce's revenue has increased 6,613x, including an increase of 661,200% resulting from its expansion into Europe and the UK – regions that together now represent half of its revenue.

Bounce saves nearly two months of engineering time on European expansion with Stripe

When Bounce first eyed expansion into Europe in 2020, it estimated an engineering workload of two months to onboard European countries, where Connect was not yet available. Stripe soon launched Connect in several more European countries, making it easy for Bounce to reach those markets in just two weeks and saving the company nearly two months of engineering time.

Customers can now book and pay on Bounce in less than a minute

With Payments, Bounce collects in four payment methods, with access to more than 135 currencies. A traveller can search for luggage storage, find a location nearby on Bounce and book and pay for a reservation in a minute or less – all enabled by Stripe.

Bounce lands new enterprise clients, aided by Stripe's compliance and anti-fraud capabilities

The power of Stripe's integrated product suite means Bounce does not have to dedicate resources to margin reporting, fraud detection or onboarding compliance thanks to Connect margin reports, Radar and Connect onboarding, respectively. The company has inked major deals – including with Virgin Voyages, UPS stores and top global hotel chain Accor – knowing that anti-fraud and regulatory monitoring will be taken care of by Stripe.

"With Stripe checking all the boxes on security, we're able to confidently sign partnerships with companies much larger than we are,” said Candee.

As Bounce's business model evolves, the company expects to adopt more Stripe products to stay ahead of the curve. "We'll be looking to optimise our use of Stripe with features that can help us capture more customers that we wouldn't be able to otherwise,” said Candee.