Finix & Beyond Pricing: Powering the Future of Vacation Rentals with Payments

• Revenue sharing business model

• Finix API

• Dispute management

• Transaction log

• Technical documentation

• Failure codes

• Up-front sub-merchant underwriting and onboarding

If ever there was a company that identified a gap in a niche market and filled it, it’s Beyond. Co-founder and CTO David Kelso’s personal experience of renting out a spare bedroom in his San Francisco apartment in 2013 opened his eyes to a unique challenge that affected the short-term rental industry: The inability to set pricing based on comparable properties.

Until listing his own property, David hadn’t realized the amount of work involved in this specific part of the rental process. To list his room, he had to manually scour the internet for similar listings and essentially guess at the value of his rental based on what he found. This time-consuming, tedious, and assumption-based process inspired David to create a better way to set pricing for rental properties. That’s when Beyond Pricing entered the scene—making it the first-ever dynamic pricing solution for short-term rental properties.

Only 18 months after developing his pricing tool, David had captured 20% of the short-term rental market in San Francisco-and only grew from there. In 2019, David’s vision for Beyond Pricing began to evolve. The new company goal was to become the go-to software provider for vacation rental managers by providing booking, management, and analytics along with its dynamic pricing tool. Fast forward to today, and Beyond supports more than 340,000 rental listings in over 7,500 cities around the world.

To complete its offering and provide a true end-to-end solution, Beyond also needed a way to embed payments into its product. And that’s where the Beyond and Finix partnership began.

When Beyond set out on its journey to find a payments solution, payments had already become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley, where payments companies were springing up left and right. Sorting through all the options almost made Beyond want to create a new tool, just to help narrow things down. Luckily, Director of Business Strategy, Kameron Bain was there to lead the charge for determining Beyond's payments approach. With the help of the rest of the Beyond team, Kameron was able to whittle down payment options by carefully vetting how well they would fit within the tech stack of vacation rental managers.

Along with a good technical fit, Kameron was also looking for a payments provider with flexibility, competitive pricing, and excellent customer service. Having heard horror stories from property management companies about how Stripe would cancel their service without notice, he wanted to reduce the chances of this happening to Beyond’s customers. According to Kameron, despite Stripe’s robust API, the unpredictability of its services makes the company a poor fit for the vacation rental vertical.

Other payments providers the Beyond team considered outside of Finix and Stripe were Ascent Payment Solutions, Lynnbrook Group: Vacation Rental Payment Processing, and Vacation Rent Payment. These companies had been around for more than 20 years and were the only real players that specialized in Beyond’s niche market. Kameron found it curious that no one had started a new payment processing company in the vacation rental space within the last decade, given how excited the Beyond team was about the potential of owning this specific space.

To become the leading payment platform for vacation rentals, Beyond realized they needed more than just a way to accept payments. They needed a partner that would allow them to own their customers’ payment experience, without having to build the payments infrastructure themselves. And since no one at Beyond was a payments expert, they also needed a provider that could help them navigate the complexities that come along with managing payment operations.

When the Beyond team was introduced to the idea of becoming a Finix Flex customer, which gave them the ability to start processing within 3 to 6 weeks as opposed to 3 to 6 months, they knew they had found the right partner. Using this payment model was a better option for Beyond, as it came with much lower costs and risks than becoming a payment facilitator (PayFac) themselves. And, unlike other providers, Finix would let them switch payment facilitation models using the same API integrations if Beyond ever chooses to become a PayFac down the road.

Beyond can attest that Finix more than lives up to its “customer first” value, which is huge for its team. According to Kameron, communication from the Finix team has always been stellar. Getting responses to issues in a timely manner is paramount to their business and their customers, as having to wait two or three days to hear back from customer support can harm their business and significantly affect their customers’ happiness. Because Finix’s implementation and support teams are so responsive, the Beyond team can quickly resolve issues and feel confident in their ability to handle all aspects of their payment operations.

Beyond’s one-person payments team and billing analyst, Fiona Darmali, constantly uses the Beyond Pricing dashboard (which is built on top of the Finix API) to help track down questions about disputes and transactions, answer customer questions, and address their concerns.

Finix’s API and developer documentation is another reason Beyond chose Finix as its payment processor and the provider powering their payments solution–Tally. The Beyond team loves how easy the Finix developer docs are to understand, which was especially helpful for integration and has continued to be a go-to resource when building out new features. Finix’s API documentation ensures Beyond knows exactly which data they’re working with–including how and why it applies to specific features.

The Beyond team also values the revenue share model Finix offers. Not only does it give them an opportunity to maximize revenue, but it also demonstrates how invested Finix is in Beyond’s success. If Beyond isn’t making money from processing volume, neither is Finix. With this partnership, both sides can be confident that the other has their best interest in mind.

Beyond is a company that wants to grow its revenue in the vacation rental property space while keeping its customers happy. To achieve this, Beyond needed a powerful and flexible payment solution that fits into its unique tech stack. By partnering with Finix, Beyond was able to embed payments into its billing engine to fully own the payments process for its customers. This evolution created a new revenue stream for Beyond and helped them cut the additional costs typically associated with solutions like Stripe.

With Finix as its partner, Beyond is positioned to grow and become a product leader in the short-term rental industry.