A decade and a half ago, small service businesses like beauty salons, gyms, and law offices typically scheduled appointments over the phone or through basic online calendars. Recognizing the inefficiency of that process, the global collaboration solutions provider AnywhereWorks launched Setmore in 2011 to simplify online appointment scheduling.
Setmore’s goal was to help these companies improve productivity, drive growth, and strengthen customer relationships. After initially operating strictly as a scheduling platform, the company soon realised that incorporating payment collection would improve the booking experience for both businesses and their customers. It added Stripe Payments as one of its payment processors.
Expanding the platform’s capabilities has driven substantial growth: today, Setmore operates in more than 130 countries, scheduling 100 million appointments a year. Along the way, the company saw that deepening its relationship with Stripe and enhancing its embedded payments capabilities could further advance its strategic goals.
We don’t see payments as just a feature. They’re a key driver of how our customers convert bookings into relationships, revenue, and growth for their business. That’s why we partnered with Stripe. We found the pace of innovation and global reach allows us to continuously deliver best-in-class payment functionality without adding complexity for our customers.
A modular, flexible base for optimisation
Setmore’s work with Stripe accelerated after Suga Yoganandan, director of business and strategy at Setmore, attended Stripe Sessions in 2022. “I came to Stripe Sessions thinking payments were a feature. I left seeing them as infrastructure we could build on,” said Yoganandan.
From there, Setmore integrated Stripe Connect as the core of its new infrastructure. Connect gave the company the tools to build an advanced embedded payments business in a modular format, allowing Setmore to adapt as its payments needs and capabilities evolved.
For example, Setmore used flexible components like Stripe-hosted onboarding to quickly set up an optimised onboarding flow, while offloading regulatory and compliance requirements like Know Your Customer (KYC) verification to Stripe. Setmore retains the option to build its own custom onboarding flow and manage compliance internally as its payments team grows.
Setmore also used Connect’s flexible payments pricing models as it has scaled. The company initially used Stripe-managed pricing to offer payments quickly. Later, it started managing its own pricing to better monetise certain markets and customer segments. To support that shift, the team used Connect margin reports, which provide detailed data on payment volumes, revenue, and fees—helping Setmore refine its pricing strategy.
Rather than building an internal risk team, Setmore chose to rely on Stripe Managed Risk, with Stripe monitoring risk across the platform and assuming liability for negative balances due to credit or fraud across Setmore’s merchant portfolio.
Setmore also worked with Stripe’s professional services team to build the financial infrastructure it needed to better serve merchants. The team helped Setmore transition from embedded Stripe components to native platform capabilities, and helped prioritise its product and development roadmap.
Delivering customer value through payments
Setmore is also expanding its use of Stripe to improve the front-end payment experience on its platform. In particular, the company has adopted Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes embeddable UIs through Stripe Checkout, access to more than 100 payment methods, and Onelink—a digital wallet built by Stripe.
Setmore used the payment element to enable businesses to build branded checkout pages without requiring any front-end coding from Setmore itself. The company also allows each business to choose which payment methods to offer at checkout based on its location and customer preferences. Setmore is also testing the use of payment links to enable merchants to collect online payments across multiple channels, beyond their websites.
Behind the scenes, Setmore uses Stripe Radar to help merchants prevent fraud, so they can stay focused on serving their customers. These advantages have helped make Stripe the fastest-growing payment gateway on the platform. Stripe adoption has increased 53% year over year, and monthly payment volume through Stripe has grown 32%. Merchants using Stripe on Setmore also see average order volume that is 15% higher than merchants using other payment service providers.
Meanwhile, Setmore is finding new ways to deliver customer value through payments. For example, after realizing that some merchants preferred taking in-person payments, Setmore integrated Stripe Terminal with expertise from Stripe professional services to build a native Tap to Pay feature in its mobile app. Within a year of launching Tap to Pay in 2025, nearly 33% of Setmore’s merchants using Stripe had adopted the feature, processing more than two million contactless payments.
The Tap to Pay integration also created new opportunities for payment innovation. For example, Setmore introduced a feature that allows merchants to take deposits online and then collect the remainder in person, helping reduce the risk of no-shows.
For us, it’s all about having flexibility and allowing for many different styles of businesses to operate as they choose and charge as they choose.
Now, Setmore is exploring several additional ways to help its merchants better manage cash flow, such as enabling Instant Payouts through Connect, offering its merchants financing through Stripe Capital for platforms, and providing charge or spend cards through Stripe Issuing—following AnywhereWorks’s successful internal use of Issuing.
“Building and testing a feature is a lot easier than with any other payment providers because of the visibility we get from Stripe,” said Xenia Garcia, head of financial operations at Setmore.
Improving revenues and driving internal efficiencies
Like its merchants, Setmore is now processing more of its own payments on Stripe. Starting in late 2025, Setmore began migrating its subscription payment processing to Stripe and saw authorisation rates increase by 4%.
Consolidating its financial infrastructure onto Stripe has also helped Setmore optimise its internal operations. For example, Stripe’s detailed transaction data helps Setmore’s marketing teams develop ideal customer profiles and targeted promotions for newer services such as Tap to Pay.
Setmore’s finance team has also gained greater visibility into payment data. With the Stripe Dashboard, the finance team can now identify and address payment issues on their own, often before these issues affect the customer experience.
With benefits for both its merchants and its own business, Setmore’s partnership with Stripe aligns closely with the company’s long-term, strategic approach to growth, one inspired by Berkshire Hathaway. Yoganandan said that choosing Stripe as Setmore’s core financial infrastructure platform—and treating payments as a growth engine—reflects former Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger’s philosophy of taking a simple idea seriously.
“Every appointment carries commercial intent. Stripe gives us the infrastructure to turn that intent into revenue, cash flow, and stronger customer relationships,” said Yoganandan.
We don’t think of payments as something we added to Setmore. We think of Stripe as the ground we build on. That shift—from feature to foundation—is the most important decision we’ve made.
