Challenge

Podium’s mission since its founding in 2014 has been to empower local businesses by helping to improve their reputations, generating growth through public reviews, website leads, and text campaigns. Local businesses in a variety of verticals – from dentists to car repair garages – use Podium to increase their visibility. The communications company noticed that many of its customers used legacy payment solutions or offered only in-store payments. Another challenge was that businesses could not provide flexible payment methods to consumers for high-value goods and services. To enable its customers to accept secure and flexible digital payments, Podium developed its own payments offering.

“There are some third-party consumer financing providers with somewhat predatory practices, and smaller businesses that aren’t big enough to partner with banks have limited options. Some merchants can offer their own in-house, but that carries risk, especially if you are a locally based business,” says Thomas Lowe, product operations manager at Podium. “Being able to offer a modern all-in-one payment processing and financing solution to local brick-and-mortar businesses is critical.”

Podium saw an opportunity to include payment options in its platform to help customers increase revenue and profitability. Mindful of its internal bandwidth as it began mapping out its payments platform strategy, Podium decided to look for a payment solutions provider to help bring Podium Payments to life.

Solution

Podium chose to partner with Stripe because it offered a wide range of turnkey payment products they could integrate into their platform with ease and address several of its needs at once. With Stripe, Podium Payments offers businesses a payments solution that’s easy to implement, thanks to simplified onboarding and integration.

Today, Podium is using multiple Stripe products that support its customers’ everyday needs. Podium was able to easily use Stripe to power Podium Payments and offer other Stripe products and capabilities to its customers with Stripe Connect. During that onboarding process, Podium uses Stripe Identity to verify the customers’ identities. Once a customer is set up, Stripe Payments sits under the hood of Podium Payments and allows customers to accept online payments (using six payment methods). Stripe Terminal helps handle in-person transactions, Stripe Radar protects customers with security and fraud detection, and Stripe Capital allows Podium customers to receive flexible financing.

The Podium team also uses Stripe to find new ways to improve the payment process for customers with internal reporting and Stripe Data Pipeline via Snowflake for data and business insights.

As the payments platform gained traction with its customers, Podium recognised a greater need for payment flexibility by offering more payment methods, such as buy now, pay later options. Working with Stripe, Podium became the first white-label platform to launch and scale Affirm, which delivers personalised payment options, tailored to each purchase. Podium worked with Affirm and Stripe to embed Affirm’s pre-qualification messaging in existing Podium campaigns, driving greater awareness that Affirm is available to consumers looking for flexible ways to pay.

“With Podium payments, we’re giving merchants a secure, convenient platform that offers flexible payment methods, including buy now, pay later through Affirm, whether in-store or remote,” says Thomas Mancuso, director of global product partnerships at Podium. “They can also use the same processor to capture those card-present payments, to take payments from deposits, and estimates. It’s now a full-stack solution.”

Results

Providing access and increased revenue to local businesses through a convenient platform

Podium provides its customers with a simplified payment experience with Stripe, enabling them to increase revenue. Since integrating Stripe and Affirm, Podium clients have collectively experienced an uplift of over $3 million in transaction volume on Podium Payments.

Podium has seen increased customer retention thanks to these significant gains. In fact, customers using Podium Payments are 75% less likely to churn than Podium customers not using Podium Payments.

Secured transactions and fraud protection with Radar

In addition to capturing payments, Podium customers can securely manage transactions with protection from Radar. “Stripe helps us detect fraud early,” says Lowe. “Through machine learning, we now have indicators on how people are spending money. If something is fraudulent behaviour, then we can help prevent merchants from losing money or exposing themselves to risk.”

With a full-stack payments platform, Podium is focused on helping its customers grow, which in turn grows its platform.