Challenge

Copenhagen-based Female Invest was founded in 2020 by Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, Emma Bitz, and Camilla Falkenberg, who started their investment journeys as teenagers without access to a community or educational tools on money and investing. Their shared experiences with navigating the financial gender gap, coupled with a passion for investing, inspired them to build a subscription-based educational platform for women that offers content on everything from basic personal finance to sophisticated investment approaches.

As Female Invest’s customer base grew beyond Denmark, the company’s payments team added separate integrations with local payment methods such as MobilePay and PayPal to help drive conversion. Over time, Female Invest’s tech stack became overly complicated, and the team found it labour-intensive to enter new markets, add new payment methods, and investigate failed payments. The platform also lacked flexible subscription options, forcing it to renew all subscriptions at the start of the year, resulting in operational challenges, involuntary churn, and lost revenue. Finally, as the company worked to expand into more regions, it needed a system for mitigating increasing fraud concerns.

Solution

Female Invest had used Stripe alongside other payment solutions since its inception, but in 2022 the company decided to condense its payment stack by expanding its use of Stripe. With global support for payments and access to more than 100 payment methods, Stripe made it significantly easier for Female Invest to enter new markets.

“There is a ton of disparity between preferred payment solutions in the 111 countries [where] we have customers. Together with Stripe we’ve been able to automate a seamless checkout experience with relevant payment methods,” said Matias Voldby Drejer, head of operations at Female Invest.

To reduce churn, the company added Stripe’s card account updater which detects and updates card information ahead of expiry, helping to mitigate failed payments and improve customer lifetime value.

For flexible subscription offerings, Female Invest implemented Stripe Billing to automate monthly and yearly payments via credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, and offer a variety of pricing models, including monthly or annual options. Billing includes Smart Retries, which helps recover revenue by automatically retrying failed payments.

And with Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams, the Female Invest team was able to begin reviewing automatic reports for suspicious transactions and lean on Stripe’s machine learning for enhanced fraud detection. They can also write custom fraud rules to suit specific needs, test rules to see how they’ll perform, and measure their impact with performance monitoring.

Results

Female Invest reaches subscribers in 111 countries and reduces churn by 39%

By using Stripe, Female Invest's global subscribers could automatically have their preferred currency and payment methods surfaced at checkout. These payment optimisations helped boost conversion and enabled the platform to hit a milestone of adding subscribers in more than 100 countries by the end of 2023.

Involuntary churn drops 39% with Stripe’s card account updater

Female Invest reduced churn by introducing more flexible pricing models with Billing and using card account updater to automatically update payment details. With these tools, Female Invest saw a 39% reduction in involuntary churn.

Advanced fraud protection helps Female Invest increases authorization rates 10% and grow revenue 82%

With Radar for Fraud Teams in place to combat fraud attacks, the Female Invest team has been able to shift their focus to optimizing for conversion, with built-in 3D Secure 2 (3DS2) customer authentication. The result has been a 10% increase in authorisation rates. The team increased revenue growth 82% in 2023 – and set ambitious new growth goals for the year to come.

“Radar enables us to refocus our attention from costly fraud attacks to boosting revenue streams instead,” said Drejer. “We’ve also expanded to new business areas and already authored three books on how to start investing, and we are now looking to build our own trading platform.”