Challenge

When Alma launched in 2018, it set out to make its buy now, pay later service as seamless as possible for businesses and their customers. While buy now, pay later has become an increasingly popular payment method, it's a complex process behind-the-scenes evaluating the customer's credit score before deciding whether to accept the request – all before the customer clicks "buy." Not charging late fees is the reason why Alma needed to be exceptionally good at evaluating the lendability criteria and resolving payment issues quickly.

"99% of people just want to pay back what they purchased in instalments," said Simon Shohet, Alma's head of strategic finance. "So we needed a payment partner to make the purchasing spend as simple and as smooth as possible for everyone, and avoid being blocked by fraudsters."

Solution

Right from the start, Alma worked with Stripe as its payment provider. As the company grew, Alma chose to work with a dedicated team, including a technical support team available to answer questions Alma's team had.

"It works amazingly well for us," said Shohet. "The engineering and product teams enjoy working with Stripe because it's simpler. They find like-minded people. It's easy to implement, and it's easy to work with them."

According to Shohet, Alma's working relationship with Stripe feels like a real partnership. As a finance company, Alma works with many payment service providers (PSPs), but Stripe remains one of Alma's main payment partners due to its technical excellence and financial expertise.

Stripe's enterprise support team delivered a high-touch, collaborative solution through proactive engagement and technical expertise. By partnering closely with Alma, they conducted dedicated workshops and provided personalised insights, enabling continuous optimisation of its integration. This hands-on approach, guided by a technical account manager, ensured that potential issues were identified early and addressed effectively through strategic recommendations.

Results

Alma chose Stripe to increase its footprint: by integrating on Stripe, merchants can easily switch on Alma in the Stripe Dashboard to offer a seamless experience with buy now, pay later for their customers.

The impact on merchants has been strong. Merchants offering Alma as a payment method demonstrate a markedly higher average order value (AOV) when customers choose to pay with Alma compared to other one-off payment methods. Specifically, the data reveals that the AOV increases, on average, by over 262% when using Alma, showcasing a substantial lift in transaction value. Furthermore, the conversion rate for these merchants surpasses 90%, highlighting the effectiveness of Alma in driving customer engagement and completed purchases. These results underscore the considerable commercial value Alma contributes to Stripe's merchant network through its third-party distribution model.

New markets

Stripe has helped smooth Alma's European expansion – to Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg – with minimal effort. "We didn't even have to build anything specific," said Shohet. "We just plugged in different businesses and it worked."

Scaling quickly

Alma has grown rapidly in the five years since it launched – in particular, tripling its acquiring volume between 2021 and 2022, and signing major companies such as Maisons du Monde and train operator SNCF – and Shohet knows Stripe can deliver. "We can be serene and calm, because we know that the payment side at least is being handled," said Shohet.

Tangible impact through enterprise support

With Stripe's enterprise support, Alma achieved substantial performance improvements and cost savings. Targeted recommendations significantly reduced excessive retries, resulting in increased revenue and annualised processing cost savings exceeding €300,000. This was evident in the analysis of Alma's scheme costs, which dropped from a range of €45,000–€50,000 monthly to approximately €20,000 after implementing Stripe's recommendations on retries at the beginning of 2024.

Additionally, proactive integration monitoring – following the integration analysis conducted for Alma and the fixes implemented by a business's tech team – produced a remarkable 53% decrease in API errors. Monitoring confirmed this outcome, with monthly API errors decreasing from 1,053 in January 2024 to 485 by January 2025. These results highlight the measurable value delivered through Stripe’s high-touch enterprise support, securing thousands of recovered transactions across multiple payment methods.