Challenge

For over 25 years, AJ Bell has provided award-winning products and services to make investing easy and affordable. But with its previous payment provider, the company had to set up separate payment processing accounts and merchant arrangements that resulted in fragmented user experiences, especially for investors and advisors using mobile. Director of digital strategy at AJ Bell and a developer at heart, Tim Huckle explained that “one of our goals is to be the easiest investment platform to use.” With this goal in mind, AJ Bell set out to find a new provider that would enable the company to offer a better mobile experience for its customers, reduce settlement times, and automate payment reconciliation more effectively.

Solution

AJ Bell chose to leverage Stripe for its payments expertise and suite of APIs to deploy an enterprise-ready payments platform. Using Stripe Connect, AJ Bell had the ability to settle funds automatically into different accounts, ultimately reducing friction for AJ Bell’s mobile customers. Additionally, Stripe Connect paved the way for the “ability to rapidly enforce Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements and also integrate Apple Pay and Google Pay with just a few extra lines of code,” stated Huckle. AJ Bell also built robust custom reports using Stripe Sigma to ensure accurate reporting of fund transferring.

Results

The integration took only a few weeks, after which AJ Bell’s 432,000 customers benefited from a faster, better mobile experience that allowed them to move money into their accounts in a matter of seconds. Additionally, its team had streamlined internal processes to make handoffs between the engineering and sales teams more seamless than ever. Today, the company has managed over £68 billion in assets on their revamped platform with Stripe.