Sunbit is a fintech on a mission – easing the stress of paying for life’s expenses by giving people more options on how and when they pay. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is among the fastest growing private companies in the US, landing on the Inc. 5000 list four years running, with repeat wins on Deloitte’s Fast 500 Tech list, the Los Angeles Business Journal’s record of leading companies, and the coveted Forbes Fintech 50.
Processing nearly $2B in loans per year at a 30% YoY rate of growth, Sunbit needed to broaden its payment processing and more effectively support future scale. Through its successful engagement with Checkout.com, Sunbit has improved payment efficiency and lowered its cost base. And, due to superior account management and advanced technology, Sunbit has expanded the Checkout.com partnership significantly over the past two years.
Sunbit has built the leading pay over time technology for auto dealership services, and within healthcare markets including dental, as well as a co-branded card for retailers that has no fees. In addition, its technology is embedded in nearly 20 leading SaaS, CRM and market platforms.
To support scaling, Sunbit needed smarter, more cost-efficient payments. That’s where Checkout.com came in. Going live with Intelligent Acceptance, Real-Time Account Updater, and Network Tokens, Sunbit has increased acceptance rates and unlocked additional revenue.
Bill Walsh, Sunbit’s Chief Customer Officer, said, “At Sunbit, we believe in getting to ‘yes.’ We have reached millions of people with financing choices that our customers love and merchant partners value. In order to deliver on our promise of great terms, transparency, and competitive value, we need partners that can help us to squeeze every bit out of the entire payments lifecycle. Checkout.com’s smart technology gave our team an easy and early reason to engage, but their collaborative and consultative approach and hands-on account management is what led us to expand the relationship.”
As a high-growth financial technology company helping consumers, every basis point counts. Consumer demand for BNPL is growing at pace, with global transaction volume set to rise from $349.4bn in 2023 to $565.8bn in 2027, and demand in key verticals is well demonstrated.
Sunbit understands customers need fast, fair access to flexible payment options. The challenge was to continue building out a payments setup with future scale in mind. To accelerate this mission, Sunbit tapped Checkout.com to lift its payments performance.
Payments at scale demand precision. Thanks to a detail-oriented approach, Checkout.com emerged as the ideal partner for Sunbit. Our payment experts took the time to understand Sunbit’s business model, and initiated a more aggressive approach on payment performance and cost optimization.
Here’s what happened next:
Sunbit needed better acceptance rates alongside cost efficiency. By implementing Intelligent Acceptance, Real-Time Account Updater, and Network Tokens, Sunbit improved transaction-level acceptance rate by up to 6%. This is not a temporary spike or an unsustainable win: it’s the collective outcome of a series of carefully-chosen adjustments.
Together, these solutions improve cost efficiency, as retries are reduced, scheme fees can be avoided, and tokenized transactions often benefit from reduced interchange.
Sunbit’s engineers and product team worked closely with Checkout.com payment experts, who monitored payment performance daily to fine-tune processes and spot new opportunities. Sunbit gained granular insights into payment failure points, using decline response codes and Recommendation Codes to recover transactions.
This level of visibility is rare – only 50% of merchants receive raw response codes on failed payments – and it helped Sunbit reclaim revenue that would have otherwise been lost.
By analyzing Sunbit’s business model and identifying areas of waste, Checkout.com found multiple points where greater value could be realized, and spearheaded the negotiation with card networks for more favorable rates. This saved Sunbit significant fees over time.
Nearly 20% of Sunbit’s transactions qualified for an unregulated interchange rate of 1.90% + 0.25 cents, accounting for 80% of Sunbit’s interchange costs. Checkout.com’s Senior Account Manager Cameron Kurtz identified an opportunity: debt repayment interchange programs.
He thoroughly reviewed Sunbit's business model with card networks, and negotiated a more favorable rate. For Sunbit, that meant over 100 basis points in cost savings on certain interchange categories, translating to over a million dollars saved.
With a consultative approach to payment strategy, and a determined attitude to cost optimization, Sunbit and Checkout.com have their eyes on the horizon. Prioritizing innovative technology, Sunbit upgraded its payment stack to aid in building out scalable payment infrastructure.
Sunbit prides itself on never charging origination, late or penalty fees. By managing costs, and creating the right product offerings, Sunbit is able to reach industry high level approval rates, always with transparent terms, and easy repayment options. Pay over time offers access to include 0% options for virtually every approved consumer at qualifying merchants, and credit card rates are competitive with no fees of any kind.
Checkout.com’s proactive management, smart and easy to use technology, and commitment to world-class partnership has made a material difference, and our partnership is a standard that Sunbit uses to measure other engagements. Sunbit achieved a win-win-win with this partnership – at the end of the day, customers save.
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