Challenge

Togetherwork's payments platform was a homegrown solution combining multiple processors. The solution worked, but Togetherwork began outgrowing its platform as the business expanded.

In addition to needing a more modern payments solution to support its rapid growth, Togetherwork also needed guidance on how to technically and operationally consolidate 20+ payment processors across its portfolio of product lines.

Solution

After much research, Togetherwork chose Stripe for its technology, reliability, and extensive services that could support and grow its business. Togetherwork used Stripe implementation services, Enterprise Support, and advisory services to go to market with its solution faster, minimise risk, and find more opportunities to monetise and optimise costs as it expanded its global footprint quickly.

“We were outgrowing our platform and needed a larger geographical footprint. We needed someone in the 21st century. Stripe was the best candidate out there.”
– Karen Gil, Vice President of Payments, Togetherwork

Accelerated time to value with implementation services

To kick off the partnership, Togetherwork used implementation services to minimise risk and to ensure the new solution would launch on time and scale as the business grew.

The first phase of the implementation engagement focused on defining the right architectural approach for consolidating the 20+ payments processors across Togetherwork’s multiple product lines. To do this, Stripe conducted discovery interviews with stakeholders to define key outcomes and mapped technical requirements across the various business types.

The next phase involved integrating Togetherwork’s existing businesses with the new Stripe solution. The teams decided to integrate in phases, prioritising those with more challenging integrations and heavier requirements. These initial implementations established the overall strategy and solution, focusing on new monetisation opportunities, improved funds flow, and increased acceptance rates and margins. As a result, the teams designed two integration paths for Togetherwork products.

Leveraging Stripe’s proven methodology, best practices, and learnings from the earlier implementations, the teams designed a self-serve playbook for the remaining and future Togetherwork products. The playbook provides technical and business onboarding guidance and ensures consistent direction and alignment across Togetherwork’s portfolio of products during the transition to Togetherwork’s Stripe payment platform.

Finally, Stripe professional services worked with the Togetherwork team to ensure the entire organisation was operationally ready to adopt the new solution. Using a train-the-trainer model, Stripe taught Togetherwork how to implement and operationalise Stripe. Through several workshops, such as funds flow, fraud risks, and merchant risk, Togetherwork prepared for the risk, compliance, and legal responsibilities it would take on in building a new in-house payments operations team and consolidating payments processors.

“We had a great implementation experience with Stripe professional services. The team provided guidance and expertise at every step while we were still learning. We’re always treated with such respect by Stripe, and this started with Stripe professional services.”
– Karen Gil, Vice President of Payments, Togetherwork

Operational optimisations with Enterprise Support

Following Togetherwork’s successful integrations with its initial phase of businesses, Stripe Enterprise Support took over to provide ongoing guidance and support as Togetherwork continued to transition more of its products onto Stripe.

During a time of transitions and launches, Stripe’s SLAs and dedicated technical account manager were critical to Togetherwork’s success, providing the fastest path to resolution as questions or issues arose.

“Stripe Enterprise Support stepped in while we were getting our feet wet and have continued to be there as we’ve grown and optimised the business. Looking back at all the things we accomplished together, we can’t imagine not having had this team.”
– Karen Gil, Vice President of Payments, Togetherwork

Stripe Enterprise Support also designed custom operational optimisations for Togetherwork post-launch, including:

• Enterprise migration flow and dashboard to support Togetherwork's migrations from legacy payments processors. To meet its needs for frequent migrations with high SLAs, Enterprise Support built templated requests for Togetherwork to initiate migration support within the dashboard from migration specialists who know its integrations' intricacies. The flow and dashboard are now used across all Stripe enterprise migrations.
  
• New process to correctly assign merchant category codes (MCCs) based on Togetherwork’s distinct requirements while not altering them during routine Stripe audits.
  

Stripe Enterprise Support also provides Togetherwork with proactive reporting, insights, and recommendations of how Stripe products work and can further benefit its various lines of business. The Enterprise Support team meets weekly with Togetherwork to provide continuous Stripe product education, field technical and business questions, and strategise solutions and opportunities.

Embedding financial services with Advisory Services

Stripe’s Enterprise Support team provided education on Stripe banking-as-a-service product suite to Togetherwork’s team, which was looking to enhance the customer experience beyond payments. As a result, Togetherwork started enabling additional financial services for its merchants, including payments, accounts, cards, and lending.

“With Stripe banking infrastructure products, we can create these awesome customer experiences, making the customers much more sticky.”
– Karen Gil, Vice President of Payments, Togetherwork

Professional services helped Togetherwork with key technical, architectural, and operational components critical to the integration, such as:

• Determining the Treasury account architecture and funds flows to fund the accounts.
  
• Creating an integration plan to operationalise its pricing strategy by helping Togetherwork understand the mapping and build the logic to monetise merchant events and transactions.
  
• Mapping critical webhooks to reconcile Togetherwork systems with Stripe, keep track of account balances in real time, and determine when to pass fees to merchants.
  

The integration of Stripe banking-as-a-service products has enabled Togetherwork to launch new financial services offerings. A few examples include:

• OmegaFi, a financial management product line for Greek organisations, employs Treasury and Issuing to provide fraternities and sororities with the ability to create cards and financial accounts to access funds. Due to these organisations’ national by-laws, the groups often cannot open local bank accounts, so OmegaFi provides these organisations with greater financial flexibility.
  
• Dance Studio Pro, a leading dance studio software product, uses Capital to provide its studios with access to financing solutions. Due to its success, Togetherwork has enabled four other businesses with Capital within three months following Dance Studio Pro’s June 2022 launch.
  

Results

Since 2019, Togetherwork has transitioned 15+ products to Stripe. The partnership continues to grow as Togetherwork expands its payments and financing capabilities and partners with Stripe experts in professional services and Enterprise Support to run its businesses more efficiently.

With Stripe technology and services, Togetherwork has achieved several critical business priorities:

• Faster onboarding and conversion for newly-acquired products with Connect, leveraging efficient digital onboarding workflows to replace outdated physical paperwork.
  
• Improved monetisation of funds flows, leading to increased margins where previous solutions were lacking.
  
• Optimised operational costs by working directly with Stripe and reducing outsourcing via cross-border vendors.
  
• Increased efficiencies across businesses by expanding financial capabilities with new products, geographies, and faster onboarding.