Challenge

Twenty years ago, three software developers recognized that continuous technology learning was an important ingredient for success. They launched Pluralsight, a bootstrapped tech training company that offered in-person classes. Soon, when they found themselves unable to meet the intense demand for the classes, they transitioned to an online-only education model. Pluralsight’s educational quality and ease of use rapidly fueled organic growth, earned an impressive list of industry awards, and gained 70% of Fortune 500 companies as clientele.

While Pluralsight was helping more organizations and individuals advance and innovate, fast expansion and acquisitions had resulted in a complex web of technologies, including different payment vendors and redundant vendor accounts. As a result, finance and technology teams were spending too much time managing payments and related processes. For example, the monthly book-closing process was largely manual and inefficient. Accountants had to run separate reports for each day in that month, compile the data, and use Excel functions to highlight cells and manually calculate if transactions, payments, and banking deposits reconciled. Subscription management was challenging because it was difficult to see whether customers’ payments matched their subscription terms.

Existing payment solutions were hindering Pluralsight’s growth and revenue in other ways. Because the systems were unable to easily comply with India’s regulatory requirements, Pluralsight was unable to meet increasing—and potentially significant—demand in that country.

Pluralsight wanted to consolidate its payment solutions. However, doing so would introduce significant business risk, and Pluralsight’s technology teams were already managing other priority projects.

Solution

Pluralsight decided to standardize on Stripe Payments, a unified global payments platform, to process customers’ credit card transactions. To expedite its migration project and minimize business risk, Pluralsight engaged Stripe partner Myers-Holum. “Our third-party technology advisor recommended Myers-Holum, and we were impressed with Myers-Holum’s plan that would help us achieve everything we wanted to do,” said Jimmy Wing, senior vice president of accounting at Pluralsight.

Working with Myers-Holum, Pluralsight’s finance and technology teams migrated accounts from two payment processors to Stripe Payments, and they consolidated six Stripe accounts that Pluralsight had inherited via acquisition. They then used the Stripe API to integrate Pluralsight’s billing system with its Payments account, so that transaction data instantly flowed into the billing system. Even though Pluralsight worked on this initial project part-time with Myers-Holum, it took just four months to complete.

After establishing one central Payments account, Pluralsight collaborated with Myers-Holum to create a legal billing entity in India with a dedicated Payments account that processes transactions in Indian rupees. Developers used the Stripe API to integrate this second account with Pluralsight’s billing system and create a process that automatically routes customers’ payments to the appropriate Pluralsight account. If the customer is in India, Payments processes their transaction through the India account. If the customer is outside of India, Payments processes their transaction with Pluralsight’s US account.

Pluralsight also worked with Myers-Holum to enable Stripe Radar, a built-in, no-code fraud prevention solution. Trained with data from billions of payments processed by Stripe and third-party banks each year, Radar immediately assigns a risk-assessment score to credit cards and blocks payments made with high-risk cards.

“Myers-Holum was a great partner in helping us with our Stripe migration project, and we would absolutely work with them again to help with complex projects,” said Wing.

Results

Accountants complete month-end close faster with Payments

By standardizing on Stripe Payments, Pluralsight improves finance efficiency in month-end close processes. “Stripe makes our job easier,” said Wing. “Instead of running lots of reports and then performing Excel wizardry, we run one consolidated monthly report with Stripe that draws a clear line between payment batches, transaction IDs, and bank deposits so we can quickly reconcile our records and be sure everything is accurate.”

Because Stripe seamlessly integrates with Pluralsight’s billing system, finance teams can now save time by instantly see up-to-date billing, subscription, and payment data for customers on demand, without having to manually pull information from different sources.

Pluralsight’s technology teams are also benefiting. By managing payments with Stripe, they save about eight hours of manual effort every week.

Customers in India complete twice as many transactions with Payments

In just two months after it launched its Payments account in India, Pluralsight doubled the number of transactions it processes there. “We've unlocked a business blocker with Payments and simplified growth in a country where there’s a ton of demand and potential for us,” said Wing.

Pluralsight reduces fraud by 20% with Radar

By using Radar, Pluralsight decreased fraud by 20% and chargebacks by a significant value. Pluralsight has also seen an overall decrease in fraudulent credit cards entering the system. This, in turn, has put Pluralsight in good standing with the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program, which was a risk prior to implementing Stripe. “Instead of just detecting a problem, Radar helps prevent fraud by proactively identifying concerns and addressing them before they become problems,” said Wing.

Pluralsight is now looking to accelerate its global growth. “With Stripe, we can easily adapt our payments solution to meet our future needs,” said Wing. “That includes being able to support other payment methods that might be regionally specific, so we can make it even easier for more companies and technologists to acquire the skills they need to stay relevant as technology constantly evolves.”

About Partner

Myers-Holum is a privately held enterprise systems and data integration consulting firm based in New York, New York. An award-winning leader in Stripe, NetSuite, Boomi, and Google Cloud solutions, Myers-Holum helps organizations of all sizes streamline operations, financials, and business processes. Learn more about Myers-Holum.