Challenge

Financial data provider Polygon.io offers real-time and historic market data such as stock and cryptocurrency prices, trading volumes, and news feeds. Its customers, which include traders, investors, and financial institutions, use Polygon.io's data to make informed decisions, develop trading strategies, and gain insights into financial markets. Polygon.io's role in the financial industry depends on the accuracy and timeliness of its data, driving the decisions of traders, investors, developers, and businesses.

With many different subscription categories and a range of other products, Polygon.io empowers its users to customise the types of market data they can access, depending on their needs. This requires a payment service provider that can handle data for Polygon.io’s subscriptions. Otherwise, the business risks inaccuracies, delays, and technical glitches that impact the quality of its data and directly affect its customers.

Polygon.io was already working with Salesforce to manage customer interactions and sales data, but it needed a solution to synchronise data across multiple services into Salesforce, ensuring high-quality data delivery without requiring engineers to maintain it. This initiative led to Polygon.io's collaboration with Stripe Apps and the Stripe for Salesforce Platform app in June 2023.

Solution

Polygon.io uses Stripe as its sole payment processor and has worked with Stripe since 2016. Polygon.io selected the Salesforce Platform app for its capabilities in communicating between Stripe and Salesforce via a low- or no-code integration. By integrating its Stripe account with Salesforce, Polygon.io can automatically map Stripe events to Salesforce events and sync data between both platforms. The integration amplifies business analytics, insights, and automation so Polygon.io’s sales, marketing, and customer success teams have easy access to accurate real-time data and can better serve their customers.

Consolidating customers’ conversation history, dataset requests, and current and historical subscriptions in one place empowers Polygon.io’s support team to help customers and helps its sales team upsell products. With hundreds of thousands of users and a wide variety of product offerings, Polygon.io sees thousands of hours of use, and that activity generates information. With Stripe, Polygon.io can use that information to enable cross-functional teams to experiment with package offerings in different ways to see which are the most compelling to customers. And by mapping Stripe events to Salesforce events, Polygon.io can track and manage customer interactions and sales data smoothly.

When a customer subscribes to Polygon.io's services, Stripe Billing tracks payments and ensures that customers get the right access based on their subscriptions. Stripe Payments and Billing help Polygon.io process payments securely and set up recurring payments. Polygon.io also maintains accurate historical records while making sure they’re easily searchable for analysis.

“Of the other providers we tested, none were ready to go out of the box,” says Jonathan Cho, developer advocate at Polygon.io. “They could offer monthly, daily, or even hourly data syncs, but keeping our offer truly real-time was not possible without the out-of-the-box webhook capability we can achieve with Stripe.”

Results

One million Stripe events with zero data gaps

After just two months with the Salesforce Platform app, Polygon.io ingested nearly one million Stripe events into Salesforce without any data gaps. Every event is tracked and assigned a unique identifier on both platforms. The reassurance of complete data eliminates operational hitches and mitigates the labour-intensive process of manual validation.

“Previously, we relied on manual validation when data went missing,” said Cho. “The process of validating everything could take a full day or two to get everything working again. But working with Stripe gives me confidence that everything is accounted for – and processing it all is so much faster.”

20 hours saved per month for engineering teams

Working with Stripe not only takes less time and people, it enables Polygon.io to build webhook connections with just one developer and four weeks for testing and production-ready builds. As Polygon.io broadens its data categories, engineers are saving 20 hours per month using automations through Salesforce Flow and can focus on data quality and aggregation, bolstering the breadth of data from diverse exchanges. The integration also fortifies Polygon.io's future use cases.

“We no longer worry about syncing issues when it comes to collecting high-quality data and aggregating accurately from different exchanges, and I was able to manage this massive integration without any extra developer support. Because of that, our engineering team was able to focus on rolling out new datasets for our customers that directly helped grow our business,” said Cho.

Customisable solutions for hundreds of thousands of customers

As Polygon.io continues to expand exponentially across markets, it needs scalability and flexibility. Stripe’s versatile CLIs and APIs offer flexibility, inspiring constant refinement of automation and integrations. For example, with Stripe, Polygon.io can tailor customers’ 30-day trials to specific data categories, offer extensions, send automatic invoices, or ensure that a trial ends without charging the customer. Using Stripe Apps to support Polygon.io's support team's workflow also facilitates manual management where needed.

“There’s so much you can do with Stripe. Its CLIs are so flexible and customisable, and the clarity of its APIs give us more ideas on how to constantly improve our automation or integrations,” said Cho. “With Stripe, we can do basically anything we think of.”