Challenge

For nearly 20 years, Embrace has been a leader in pet insurance, providing pet parents with high-quality customer service and a user-friendly experience. The company manages premium payments and claims payouts for more than 500,000 insured pets, processing large volumes of monthly payments.

As the business grew, Embrace’s 12-year-old billing system struggled to handle the company’s complex premium management needs. The system’s rigid 32-day billing cycles did not automatically bill each month, resulting in manual tracking to prevent lost revenue and involuntary churn from expiring policies.

Embrace’s existing billing system also lacked a payment method management interface, requiring the company to manage payment methods through the backend, which posed security risks.

Compounding these issues, Embrace’s billing provider announced plans for system-wide upgrades that would shut down key APIs Embrace relied on. This development forced Embrace to decide whether to pursue workarounds during the expected outages or find a new provider altogether. Embrace determined it needed a billing system better suited to recurring premium payments and an experienced partner to ensure a seamless migration of more than 500,000 subscriptions—without loss of coverage, claims, or monthly premium payments during the transition.

Given the ongoing challenges and constraints, the company set an ambitious timeline to implement a new solution and migrate its customers.

Solution

After extensive research, Embrace chose Stripe for its robust, flexible features and ability to manage diverse insurance policy types—varying in length and animal type—with recurring premium payments.

Embrace relied on Stripe’s professional services team to design an implementation plan guided by best practices, ensuring the company could meet its pressing timeline without disrupting coverage, claims, or premiums. Stripe hosted workshops to capture requirements, collaborate on workflows, conduct demos, and optimize value. The team trained Embrace on Stripe Dashboard reporting and launch readiness to maintain momentum toward launch and migration.

Embrace implemented Stripe Billing to automate recurring payments through Billing’s subscription schedules, which manage billing cycles based on each customer’s policy. With Billing, customers can now switch or adjust plans midterm or at renewal—instantly and without operational effort from Embrace—reducing lapses by giving policyholders flexible, low-friction options to stay covered. Embrace also recovers lost revenue with Smart Retries, which pairs AI-powered retry logic with insights from Stripe’s $1.4T+ payment network.

Embrace implemented Stripe Payments for integrated payment processing and Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite with the Payment Element—a secure, embeddable UI component that dynamically surfaces the most relevant payment methods for each transaction. This capability enabled Embrace to add Google Pay and Apple Pay through the Stripe Dashboard. Because most of its customers paid via bank transfers, Embrace used Stripe Financial Connections to verify bank accounts and balances in real time via bank login. Replacing slow micro-deposit account validation, this verification process now reduces drop-off and increases conversion.

Stripe also helped Embrace manage fund routing for its insurance products and Wellness Rewards into separate accounts to meet state Departments of Insurance regulations, ensuring premiums are never used for operating purposes. Through Stripe, Embrace can now maintain fund separation while accessing funds with a single Stripe login, streamlining account management and saving a collective two hours per day across Embrace’s team—who previously spent time switching between multiple accounts.

To better prevent payment-related fraud, Embrace used Radar for Fraud Teams to access more fraud data, including risk scores and zip codes of blocked transactions, giving Embrace more evidence to easily follow up on and counter disputes.

Stripe Sigma also provided Embrace with enhanced business insights, faster troubleshooting, and quick access to policy and payments data across business units. Stripe Sigma has helped Embrace create Amex reports, confirm cards on file, and discover fraud insights.

“Stripe Sigma is amazing; it’s so much more versatile than what we’ve ever had,” said Danielle Bucci, senior financial analyst at Embrace. “When we find a problem, Stripe Sigma helps us find who was affected so we can correct it.”

Embrace worked with Stripe’s data migrations and professional services teams, along with Stripe partner Hiveway, to migrate its customers to Stripe. The teams planned the migration of Embrace’s more than 500,000 subscriptions by mapping payments and customer data from Embrace’s previous provider to Stripe.

Results

Implemented two months faster with Stripe professional services

Stripe’s professional services team guided Embrace to launch its new billing system two months faster than its original timeline. “Without Stripe professional services, the integration would have looked a lot different,” said Bucci. “Their recommendations have really saved us a lot of time.”

Increased revenue and recovered payments with Stripe

Since implementing Billing, Embrace has reduced the number of customers with failed billing by 3,600 per month. For customers who do experience failed billing (roughly 6%), Embrace has used Smart Retries to recover 68% of that revenue.

Increased operational and development efficiencies with Billing

Consolidating billing and payments into one system streamlined Embrace’s data, providing a more holistic dataset that simplified monthly reconciliations. “We used to have pieces missing, making our reconciliations really difficult,” said Bucci. “Now everything is in one place. It’s been a really great, big change.”

Embrace’s development team also gained efficiencies with Billing’s developer-friendly, robust feature set, supported by Stripe’s core documentation and implementation plan, co-created with Stripe’s professional services team.

Migrated more than 500,000 subscriptions in 1 week with 99.9% success rate

Embrace’s partnership with Stripe’s data migrations and professional services teams, along with Stripe partner Hiveway, alleviated Embrace’s concerns about migration following its 12-year relationship with its previous billing system. The teams delivered a smooth migration experience, transferring more than 500,000 subscriptions to Stripe in just 1 week with a 99.9% success rate—only a few records required manual migration.