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The Challenge
Alma is a rapidly expanding payments company trusted by 23,000+ merchants across Europe, allowing buy-now-pay-later and installment payment solutions for 9M+ consumers. As a high-growth fintech, Alma needed to make sure its payment and merchant operations could scale effectively, while upholding robust protection for customers from fraudulent or non-compliant sellers.
As the company scaled across European markets, its merchant onboarding teams faced a rising influx of new merchant applications. Meeting this growing demand quickly became a critical challenge, introducing increased operational pressure.
This concern was exacerbated by Alma’s commitment to providing a seamless onboarding experience for its merchant partners. Additional friction or delays threatened to slow growth and frustrate merchants eager to engage with Alma’s payment solutions.
Most importantly, consumer protection remained a top priority. As the merchant base grew, so did exposure to potential bad actors — from sellers of prohibited goods to deliberate fraudsters. Alma needed to ensure that only legitimate, trustworthy merchants were approved, protecting both its customers and its platform.
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The Solution
To meet these challenges, Alma partnered with Diligent in mid-2025.
By embedding AI into its risk and compliance processes, Alma was able to move beyond slow, manual reviews and adopt an approach that could scale with the business. The new system allowed the team to expand risk and compliance capacity without adding headcount, while also ensuring a smoother and faster onboarding experience for legitimate merchants.
Just as importantly, AI-driven checks made it possible for risk analysts to focus on reviewing high-risk cases and complex scenarios.
With Diligent, Alma continued its rapid growth while maintaining rigorous compliance and consumer protection.
The Results
Within the first year, Alma achieved measurable improvements across both efficiency and fraud prevention:
- 20% risk queue reduction due to pre-filtering – cases historically reviewed manually now processed semi-automatically.
- 15% productivity gain for manual review – equating to thousands of operational hours saved annually.
- Translating existing risk policies and analyst analysis guidelines into a structured decision framework.
Looking Ahead
With Diligent supporting its merchant onboarding workflows, Alma has unlocked the next level of scale with confidence.
The partnership enables Alma to sustain rapid growth while preserving consumer trust and maintaining operational efficiency.
