Alma is a retail tech founded in 2018 and already a buy now, pay later (BNPL) market leader in France and one of the biggest players in Europe. Alma’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 14,000 active merchants

• Serving more than 3.6 million consumers

Simon Shohet is Finance and Strategy Senior Manager at Alma. Among many responsibilities, Simon is in charge of designing, implementing, and optimising merchant payouts. Simon describes payments as the main way Alma delivers value to merchants and their clients.

Alma manages two main payment flows:

• Collecting payments and loan instalments from buyers, mostly through card payments.

• Paying out merchants through bank transfers for orders processed through Alma.

Alma’s need for a new approach to payments

Like many successful fintechs, Alma initially managed its payments by working with a BaaS provider.

It enabled Alma to rapidly launch and scale by benefiting from their BaaS provider’s technology and licence for payment and account services.

Since payments can be offered through its own license instead of paying a third-party for access and associated regulatory services, this model was no longer sustainable.

Automating merchant payouts at scale

In addition to the limits of their previous model, Alma also faced operational challenges with their payouts. Challenges included daily manual tasks related to manual validation of merchant payouts, the lack of tools for business teams to investigate payment issues autonomously, and the excessive time and resources it needed to invest to fix critical payment issues impacting customers.

When designing their new payment infrastructure, Alma decided that working directly with a bank for their merchant payouts, first as a corporate customer and then as a SEPA indirect participant would be the best fit for their current needs and future ones.

Alma explored two main options to deliver on this solution: working with a challenger bank that offered complete, modern APIs to integrate with or working with a leading bank of their choice, which had a more comprehensive banking offering but was more complex to integrate with.

By integrating Mambu Payments, Alma can now access the superior banking offerings of BNP Paribas through a modern API infrastructure and dashboard. This ease of integration was a key factor in Alma's decision to partner with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas.

Unparalleled time-to-market

Alma integrated Mambu Payments into their backend in only a week and was able to start operating as a corporate customer with BNP Paribas in only 3 weeks.

Mambu Payments’ pre-built integration with BNP Paribas for SEPA indirect participation allowed Alma to migrate from a corporate customer to a SEPA indirect participant without 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.

Cutting payment costs by 30%

In need of reliability, scalability, and automation, Alma further optimised its merchant payouts by becoming a SEPA indirect participant with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas.

The new setup also achieved its objective of reduced cost per payment. “With this new infrastructure, we cut our cost per payment by 30%,” says Simon Shohet, Finance and Strategy Senior Manager at Alma.

More efficient finance and operations teams

With Mambu Payments, Alma unlocked additional efficiencies for its finance and operations teams. The dashboard now empowers these teams to autonomously monitor payments and investigate anomalies when necessary.

Becoming a SEPA indirect participant gave Alma access to a greater volume of payments data and more control over their transactions, which can be challenging to manage without the proper tools. Mambu Payments simplified this operational transition, eliminating the need for complex SQL queries or unsuitable tools to explore and manage the new, more complex data landscape.

Alma also unlocked benefits from using Mambu Payments outside of the initial merchant payouts scope. As any fintech, Alma manages various bank accounts at multiple banks. By connecting all these different bank accounts to Mambu Payments, Alma teams can access balances and transactions of all the different accounts and move money from and to these accounts through a single dashboard and API, saving precious time.

Finally, Alma leveraged Mambu Payments’ approval workflows and audit trail features to implement a proper process for large one-time payments initiated by the finance team when required.

Unlocking new strategic opportunities for Alma

Becoming a SEPA indirect participant with Mambu Payments and BNP Paribas, Alma has now fully automated merchant payouts and drastically simplified its payment operations.

But this new infrastructure unlocks various new opportunities for Alma.

“Being a SEPA participant through Mambu Payments unlocks strategic advantages including offering accounts with our own IBANs to our merchants or easily implementing and launching instant merchant payouts and direct debits payment methods, which will create significant value for our customers. This new infrastructure opens up many possibilities for Alma”

- Simon Shohet, Finance and Strategy Senior Manager at Alma.

Finally, we asked Simon if he had any advice to share with fintechs looking to revamp their payment infrastructure and evaluate Mambu Payments.