How Alma built a payment infrastructure for growth
Alma's business model couldn't keep pace with its rapid growth. By switching to a direct SEPA setup with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas, they cut costs by 30%, automated merchant payouts, and unlocked strategic capabilities like instant payments and their own IBANs.
- merchants
- faster migration, from corporate to SEPA indirect participation
- cost per payment
Alma
About the customer
Founded in 2018, Alma is a leading buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider in France and a major player in the European market. The retail tech's mission is to simplify commerce by enabling merchants to sell better and consumers to buy better.
Alma provides merchants and their clients with the best offers possible, delivering a wide portfolio of BNPL solutions.
- Processing payments in 10 European countries
- More than 22,000 active merchants
- Serving more than 8 million consumers
The challenge
A payment infrastructure to support Alma’s growth
With payments being the core way that Alma delivers value to its merchants and their clients, they manage two key payment flows:
- Collecting payments and loan instalments from buyers, mostly through card payments.
- Paying out merchants through bank transfers for orders processed through Alma.
Initially, like many successful fintechs, Alma managed its payments by partnering with a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider. This enabled them to launch and scale rapidly, leveraging the BaaS provider’s technology and license for payment and account services.
However, this model was not sustainable for long-term growth, and to continue scaling efficiently, Alma needed to move towards its own payment license and away from paying a third-party for access and associated regulatory services.
In addition to the limitations of its previous model, Alma faced operational challenges with its payouts.
These included daily manual tasks related to the manual validation of merchant payouts, a lack of tools for teams to investigate payment issues autonomously, and an excessive investment of time and resources required to resolve critical payment issues impacting customers.
The solution
The best of technology, fintech and banking
To design its new payment infrastructure, Alma decided that working directly with a bank would be the best fit for its current and future needs. Its goal was to start as a corporate customer and then become a SEPA indirect participant for its merchant payouts.
To achieve this, it explored two main options: partnering with a challenger bank that offered complete, modern APIs, or working with a leading bank that had a more comprehensive offering but was more complex to integrate.
By integrating Mambu Payments, Alma gained access to the best-of-breed offerings of BNP Paribas through a modern API infrastructure and dashboard. The ease of this integration was a key factor in Alma's decision to partner with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas.
“With Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas, we benefit from the best of both worlds. We use a fintech to connect to a major bank for its banking services.”
- Simon Shohet, Finance and Strategy Senior Manager at Alma
The result
"Merchant payouts is now a topic fully automated and optimised", what's next?
Faster time-to-market and reduced payment costs
After the successful integration of Mambu Payments, Alma achieved unparalleled time to market. In just one week, Alma integrated Mambu Payments into its backend and was able to operate as a corporate customer with BNP Paribas in only three weeks.
The pre-built integration between Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas for SEPA indirect participation enabled a seamless transition from a corporate customer to a SEPA indirect participant without any additional development. This streamlined process reduced the project timeline from nine months to just three, largely due to the accelerated certification process facilitated by the pre-built solution.
To achieve reliability, scalability, and automation, Alma became a SEPA indirect participant. This new infrastructure also reduced its cost per payment by 30%.
From efficiency gains to new strategic opportunities
Mambu Payments unlocked additional efficiencies for Alma's finance and operations teams.
The dashboard now empowers them to monitor payments autonomously and investigate anomalies when necessary.
Becoming a SEPA indirect participant gave Alma access to more payment data and greater control over its transactions. Mambu Payments simplified this operational transition, eliminating the need for complex SQL queries or unsuitable tools to manage the new data landscape.
By connecting its multiple bank accounts to a single dashboard and API, Alma's teams can now access balances and transactions and move money between accounts, saving valuable time. Alma is also able to utilise Mambu Payments' approval workflows and audit trail features to manage large, one-time payments.
By becoming a SEPA indirect participant with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas, Alma has fully automated merchant payouts and drastically simplified its payment operations, unlocking various new opportunities, including the ability to offer accounts with its own IBANs to merchants, and easily implementing and launching instant merchant payouts and direct debit payment methods.
“If you value your relationship with your main banks and want to integrate deeper with them to scale your payments, Mambu Payments is the best way to extract that value. ”
- Simon Shohet, Finance and Strategy Senior Manager at Alma
About Mambu Payments
Mambu Payments is a modern payments hub with native straight-through processing, orchestration, liquidity, and reconciliation. It delivers real-time, compliant payment flows into any core system. With managed connectivity to local and global schemes and composable payment workflows, financial institutions can launch faster, reduce costs and stay compliant at scale.
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