AJ Bell is one of the UK’s leading investment platforms, administering over £48 billion of assets for 262,000 customers. A member of the FTSE 250 on the London stock exchange, the company’s investment platform gives financial advisers and direct retail investors low cost access to an extensive range of shares, funds and bonds via pensions, ISAs and dealing accounts. As well as providing access to external investment options, AJ Bell also offers a range of its own investment products to meet the needs of both advised and direct customers.

AJ Bell partnered with Stripe in order to provide a better mobile experience for its customers, reduce settlement times and automate payment reconciliation more effectively.

A developer-led approach to improving the mobile customer experience

Tim Huckle, Director of Digital Strategy at AJ Bell and a developer at heart, explains that “one of our goals is to be the easiest investment platform to use.” As part of this AJ Bell wanted to build a new, simpler process for their customers looking to invest on mobile. The end result is significantly reduced friction for AJ Bell’s mobile customers who can now more easily move money into their accounts in seconds.

Speed of integration and enterprise-ready deployment

The integration was completed quickly in just a few weeks with a smooth handover between pre-sales and account deployment teams. “The Stripe APIs and developer tools are widely regarded as being the best in the industry,’ Tim says, adding he liked the “ability to rapidly enforce Strong Customer Authentication requirements and also integrate Apple Pay and Google Pay with just a few extra lines of code”.

Segregating client funds and automating reconciliation

AJ Bell uses Stripe Connect to split and segregate funds across different account types. With their previous provider, they had to set up separate payment processing accounts and merchant arrangements. With Connect, AJ Bell has a single relationship with Stripe that allows funds to settle into different internal accounts programmatically. Additionally, AJ Bell uses Stripe to automate their reconciliation process, using APIs for programmatic payment matching and reporting requirements.