Challenge

Understanding the challenges of getting to a doctor’s office to receive medical advice, Eucalyptus has been working to deliver a range of medical services via telehealth, improving access and outcomes for four key needs: men’s health, women’s fertility, dermatology, and obesity. Eucalyptus connects patients with doctors and pharmacies through the company’s digital healthcare platforms, offering consultations, medications, and ongoing support to more than 250,000 patients in Australia alone.

But offering health services online requires the right payment tools—not only to supply medication access to verified patients approved for treatment, but also to ensure patient confidence by making Eucalyptus’ subscription services as simple as possible.

When the company looked to expand beyond Australia’s borders, it needed to undertake careful research and fulfill important legal obligations to meet health service standards in other countries.

“The biggest challenge that we’re facing is breaking into new markets,” says Karina Fowler, head of finance at Eucalyptus. “Seeing where the next big market is that we can be the first mover into, or be the challenger in that market, is tough. We’ve done all the research, we’ve scoped the market, and we’ve done all the labels—but until we are actually live in that market, it’s hard to know how it’s going to perform.”

Choosing a payments platform that is as borderless as possible—and ready to adapt to differences in local payment preferences—makes the financial process of global expansion easier.

For companies based in Australia, international expansion can often mean work on the ground is happening half a world away. For the leadership team, that means the financial data is your source of truth on how the expansion is performing. Maintaining high levels of visibility on the numbers can deliver confidence and help stakeholders make fast decisions to keep pushing the business in the right direction.

Solution

With its eyes on achieving global scale since inception, Eucalyptus chose Stripe as its payments platform at the very beginning. The company uses Stripe Payments and Billing to manage one-off purchases and subscription services and Stripe Radar for fraud and risk management automation.

Opting for a single, centralised platform for billing and payments ensures transactions flow correctly from patients to Eucalyptus, and from Eucalyptus to doctors and pharmacies—all with clear reports and dashboards that give executives accessible insights into daily business performance.

“Previous places I have worked have used other payment gateways,” says Fowler. “You didn’t think too much about it. It was just there. It was very transactional. But with Stripe, the insights we can gather and the speed at which we can respond to issues are really impactful.”

Results

Eucalyptus has found Stripe to be a bedrock for the ongoing growth of its business. From efficient management of fraud detection and dispute resolution, to the fast, seamless integration of international accounts across its four brands, the company has the confidence to scale knowing its healthcare platform is supported by the right financial infrastructure.

“Stripe helped us prepare for Strong Customer Authentication, which is required in EU and UK markets,” says Fowler. “It wasn’t something we had to do previously, so it was really important to get this right. Having someone partner with our tech team helped us keep moving forward. It’s made things really simple for us.”

Maximising payment acceptance rates

With an emphasis on subscription services, it’s important for Eucalyptus to ensure transactions execute as efficiently as possible. Stripe Radar lets Eucalyptus set its own rules around how certain transactions should be reviewed or rejected, adding some customisation to Stripe’s machine learning risk management systems.

Features like Adaptive Acceptance and card account updater are also active on Eucalyptus accounts, helping to get more transactions to validate that may have otherwise failed. During the 2022 calendar year under its Kin Fertility brand, Eucalyptus achieved a more than 4.83% uplift in transaction acceptance, thanks to Stripe’s Adaptive Acceptance, card account updater, network tokens, and Smart Retries features. Under its Pilot brand, the company saw a 2.45% uplift in authorisation rates.

Business intelligence integrations

Eucalyptus has integrated data feeds from Stripe into a range of other services to achieve seamless access to key intelligence where and when it is needed—from live views of customer accounts in Zendesk, enabling fast and effective patient support, to insights arriving in Tableau and Metabase, so the right teams and leaders get the reports they need each day.

The company is very interested in the growth rate from Stripe’s payments and billing data, especially from a marketing perspective. “We invest a lot of time and money into our marketing and ad spend. Being able to see the correlation when we see a big spike is great. We link our Stripe daily billings into our Slack. We see daily what we’ve collected, and we are able to attribute that back to performance,” says Fowler.

In healthcare, privacy and confidentiality are extremely important, so Stripe also gives Eucalyptus the control it needs to share performance data without compromising patient information.

Flexible payment integrations

As Eucalyptus has entered new markets, different payment options are required to meet the needs of local patients. People in Australia and the UK prefer credit card payments, while those in Germany prefer bank transfers. All can integrate with Stripe, giving the business confidence in the road ahead.

“Stripe almost feels like a safety net,” says Fowler. “There are many things that are unpredictable during our international expansion, but Stripe is the one thing that always feels stable for us.”