Finix & CharityStack: Empowering Nonprofits By Streamlining Their Back-Office Operations

• Lower processing costs

• Easy integration and onboarding

• Flexible merchant payouts

• Streamlined customer experiences

Our mission is to make money movement easier for nonprofits. CharityStack is a technology company that is building the impact infrastructure of the internet. Nonprofits from around the globe, both big and small, can accept donations and manage their organization online.

Most charities and nonprofit organizations are continuously bogged down with tedious administrative work and office overhead. The true expense of daily operations can come as a shock, especially when hiring for a back office role or an entire team becomes a necessity. Co-founders Mubarrat Choudhury (CEO) and Abrahim Javed (COO) understand these pains all too well, as they both have professional backgrounds working with seven-figure nonprofits. This led them to develop their software, CharityStack.

Mubarrat and Abrahim’s ultimate goal is to completely eliminate any operational overhead for non-profits so they can focus on solving the world’s toughest problems. One of the major components needed to meet this goal was to embed payments into CharityStack, which would help grow their business and help nonprofits dedicate more of their funds toward their mission. This is how their partnership with Finix fits into the picture.

As CharityStack is as much a passion to its team as it is a business, it was crucial to Mubarrat and Abrahim to find a payments solution that was not only reliable and flexible, but one that could also provide them the support they needed to bring their goals to fruition. As Abrahim Javed put it, they were looking for a payments platform that was built differently than most—one that would help them stand out from their competitors. Out of all the providers they considered, Finix was best positioned to do this.

Mubarrat and Abrahim noticed most of their competitors tended to do the same thing—including using Stripe or Paypal as their payment solution. From their previous experiences in the nonprofit sector, they knew hiring or outsourcing resources to build a foundational technology on top of those payments systems eats away at the bottom line by adding to expenses, rather than helping to alleviate them. This doesn’t leave much wiggle room when it comes to funding and doesn’t scale well for these businesses. CharityStack’s mission is to change that.

1. Lowering the cost for nonprofits and charities

Outside of administrative overhead, the biggest cost center for nonprofits and charities is payments. As Mubarrat explains, this is because most SaaS platforms in the impact industry charge a fee of around 2.9% + 30 cents + 3%, as they have to try and make a profit in some way—but this tends to disincentive growth. With Finix, CharityStack has been able to use interchange as a revenue multiplier for itself, but even more importantly to Mubarrat and Abrahim, they’ve been able to drive down the percentage-based costs so common in their industry. This puts CharityStack at a highly competitive advantage and is a way for the company to “give back” to its customers.

2. More streamlined customer experiences

Because Finix’s technology acts as a natural extension of CharityStack rather than as a separate solution, Mubarrat believes they offer a cleaner, more streamlined experience than their competitors. He explains the reason for this is that nonprofits relying on other payment solutions are typically required to manage and organize data from several different sources. But with Finix, CharityStack is able to provide its customers with all their data, including finances, all in one place.

3. Ease of integration and onboarding

Getting Finix integrated with CharityStack was simple, straightforward, and, most importantly, easy. But it’s the onboarding process that showcased the amazing partnership the Finix team provides CharityStack and its customers. When it comes to something as complex as payments, Mubarrat and Abrahim wanted a support team that was knowledgeable enough to answer payments questions, technical enough to QA webhook queries, and had the ability to answer simple questions about things like failure codes at a moment's notice. Abrahim found Finix more than lived up to this, considering his own team’s experiences, and from the constant positive feedback he receives from CharityStack’s customers. Having such a solid relationship with the Finix support team enables Abrahim to educate his sales team and answer customer questions with ease.

4. Merchant payouts to different bank accounts

CharityStack co-founders have found it helpful that Finix provides the ability to payout merchants via different bank accounts. According to Abrahim and Mubarrat, this makes a major impact for CharityStack and its customers because most nonprofits have restricted funds flows. An example Abrahim provided is that people can donate to “campaign 1” or “campaign 2,” but nonprofits can’t intermingle funds between campaigns. One way to reconcile this problem is to have multiple bank accounts under one merchant.

According to Mubarrat, one of the best benefits of partnering with Finix is that it gives CharityStack the ability to be a single source of truth for its customers. Being able to provide the technology platform and the added layer of payments in one place is key. It’s been a noticeable improvement over having to require their customers to manage CharityStack’s platform in addition to a third-party Stripe dashboard they have to log into separately. Finix enables a much cleaner and more seamless experience for nonprofits.

CharityStack has also been able to reduce overhead and administrative costs for its customers and create better customer experiences with better onboarding, the ability to choose how to payout merchants, and Finix’s responsive customer support.

Since partnering with Finix, CharityStack has been able to propel its customers’ growth by removing hours of accounting work. By automating this process, these nonprofits have saved as much as 20-30 working hours each week and lowered overall staffing costs.

Above all, by choosing Finix, Mubarrat and Abrahim can put more money back into the hands of nonprofits and help fuel their missions to drive major changes in the world.