Global fitness franchise Anytime Fitness leverages Revio’s Payment Orchestration API to accelerate their expansion across Africa.

‍Context: Anytime Fitness saw an opportunity to enter multiple emerging markets, but was confronted with the significant fragmentation in the payments landscape. Understanding local payment cultures and integrating with multiple PSPs in each country would be costly and time consuming, slowing their expansion plan.

Outcome: Through partnering with Revio, Anytime Fitness can accept payments and settle in each of their target markets, enabling the business to scale quickly across the continent. The team has saved hours of negotiation, integration, and reconciliation, and can seamlessly allocate funds among their franchise operating model.

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Anytime Fitness is a franchise of 24-hour health and fitness clubs with more than 5,000 locations in 35 countries, on all seven continents. The company offers a destination experience, with access to convenient state of the art facilities, with premium fitness equipment and reciprocal access as standard.

Critical to the group’s success is its franchise model, where clubs are run by ambitious entrepreneurs. These franchisees are responsible for all club operations, but benefit from the support of the global organization.

Anytime Fitness launched in South Africa in February 2022 and is rapidly opening new gyms across the country and continent. Members pay a monthly membership fee, either through an annual subscription or month-to-month contract, and can sign up online or in the clubs.

Anytime Fitness x Revio: Accept payments locally and settle globally

Anytime Fitness needed a way to collect recurring payments from members, with the ability to add, pause, and cancel subscriptions seamlessly. From experience, Anytime Fitness knew that the payment methods needed to be locally relevant to ensure membership uptake.

With Revio’s Payments API, Anytime Fitness can offer locally-relevant payment methods to its customers in each of its African operating markets with only one integration point. For recurring billing, the team can offer card, debit order, and instant EFT payments, all securely tokenized and reconciled automatically to the linked customer account, providing real-time visibility of the payment status. This ensures payment processes are secure and compliant, while mitigating integration effort and manual reconciliation effort for Anytime Fitness.

“Partnering with Revio has enabled us to focus on getting our clubs up and running, knowing that payments, collections, and settlements are taken care of – no matter where we expand,” said Lindsey Norton, Director of Global Markets at Self Esteem Brands, the holding company of Anytime Fitness.

For card and debit order payments, Revio can also automatically split the recurring transaction and settle into multiple accounts – in multiple countries and currencies. This has eliminated hours of manual reconciliation effort and complex transaction flows between franchisees, franchisors, and the US-based headquarters.

“For any business, managing cash flow is critical,” said Anytime Fitness South Africa Director, Charl Mynhardt. “Revio’s automated split settlement capabilities means that we can streamline our cash flow management across our multiple entities.”

Today, Anytime Fitness uses Revio to accept recurring payments for their South African clubs and will soon be launching in Morocco.

The Result: Accelerated market expansion

Payment cultures vary significantly from country to country in Africa. In South Africa, debit order is still the primary method used for recurring billing, with more than 70 million recurring debit order payments processed each month. In Nigeria, debit card payments are more prevalent, and mobile money has become increasingly popular in many African markets.

Through partnering with Revio, Anytime Fitness can accelerate their expansion across the continent without worrying about how they are going to get paid or manage settlements to their multiple international accounts.

“With one API, we can accept payments in all our target markets, localized to that country and currency. Integrating with Revio has been seamless and the team has really helped us to understand the local payments landscape,” Mynhardt said.

Moving forward, Anytime Fitness will activate additional payment methods to offer more ways for customers to pay. The team is also exploring how they can use Revio’s Revenue Recovery solutions to reduce failed payments and automatically follow up with customers in arrears.

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