How Headway achieved a 15% lift in payment acceptance with Solidgate's payment orchestration
15%Payment acceptance rate lift
5Local acquiring markets
7 yearsLength of Solidgate partnership
Industry
B2C EdTech — subscription-based mobile appRegion
Global: US, EU, LATAM, IndiaUse case
B2C subscription payments, multi-acquirer expansion into new marketsFeatures used
Local acquiring, payment orchestration, network tokenization, dispute management, location-specific APMsAt a glance
by is a daily growth app that offers bite-sized insights from bestselling nonfiction books.
Headway Inc, the company behind Headway app, creates digital products that make lifelong learning accessible, personalized, and impactful. Headway Inc is the creator of Headway, the world's most downloaded book summary app, Impulse, the world's most downloaded brain training app, Nibble, the all-around knowledge app, AddMile, a coaching platform, and Skillsta, a soft skills trainer. In 2025, Headway Inc ranked 4th in the list of the World's Top EdTech companies by TIME magazine.
Headway app, the company’s flagship, makes self-growth simple and fun with 2,000+ book summaries in text and audio, daily insights, and gamified challenges. The team carefully studies users’ behaviors and needs and thoughtfully adapts to make learning more convenient, enjoyable, and intuitive.
Recognized by Apple as the Editors’ Choice and featured as the App of the Day more than 100 times, the app also regularly ranks among the top apps in the Education category on the App Store and Google Play and was named a 2025 Webby Honoree by the Webby Awards, described by The New York Times as "the Internet's highest honor."
As Headway app's user base scaled, the team set its sights on expanding in high-growth international markets: Latin America (LATAM) and India. These regions represented major growth opportunities – but turning user acquisition spend into recovered revenue required a payment infrastructure that could actually convert.
The problem was structural. Headway was processing all transactions through a single cross-border acquirer, with no local Merchant IDs (MIDs) in its target markets. Every dollar spent on customer acquisition in LATAM and India was not reaching its full potential due to limitations in the payment infrastructure.
Solidgate and Headway have worked together for over seven years – a partnership that evolved from foundational payment processing into a full-stack orchestration layer built for global scale.
Two roadblocks between Headway and scalable international revenue
Headway's payment challenges weren't isolated – they were interconnected, each one compounding the others.
Low payment acceptance from absent local acquiring
Before partnering with Solidgate for local acquiring, Headway operated without MIDs in its most important growth markets. All transactions, regardless of where the user was, were routed through a single cross-border acquirer.
For markets like LATAM and India, this was a structural mismatch: local issuing banks routinely declined foreign card-not-present transactions at higher rates than domestic ones.
The consequence was direct revenue loss. Every new user Headway acquired in these regions had a lower chance of completing their first subscription payment. Marketing teams were spending to drive installs that the payment infrastructure couldn't convert.
Scaling gross merchandise volume (GMV) in high-priority markets was capped by the payment stack itself.
No infrastructure to recover failed transactions
As Headway scaled into new markets, standard payment recovery infrastructure couldn't keep pace with the complexity. Generic retry rules leave money on the table when you're processing across multiple geographies with different billing behaviors and card issuer patterns. For a subscription business, involuntary churn from payment failures is a silent revenue killer, and the difference between acceptable and excellent recovery rates comes down to how precisely your logic is tuned.
Solidgate worked with Headway's team to build custom recovery configurations based on real transaction analytics, including separate retry rules developed at Headway's request and calibrated to their specific billing cycles and user behavior. Every adjustment was data-driven, not off-the-shelf.
Headway partnered with Solidgate to address all these challenges in a single, unified integration – replacing a fragmented, single-acquirer setup with a full-stack layer built for global scale.
Building the payment stack that could keep up
Solidgate built Headway's payment infrastructure from the ground up – adding local acquiring in new markets, deploying full payment orchestration, and redesigning the checkout experience around user location.
Local acquiring across five regions
Solidgate established local acquiring for Headway in the US, EU, LATAM, India, and other strategic markets – adding multiple international banks to the payment cascade. For the first time, Headway had MIDs that matched the geographic location of its users, enabling transactions to process as domestic rather than cross-border payments.
Solidgate handled all KYB/KYC compliance requirements with US and EU acquiring banks end-to-end. This removed a substantial operational burden from Headway's team – the complexity of multi-market regulatory onboarding that would otherwise have required months of internal effort.
Payment orchestration: smart routing, cascading, and custom retries
On top of local , Solidgate deployed a full orchestration layer:
- to direct each transaction through the most efficient processor
- Cascading logic that automatically reroutes declined transactions through an alternative channel
- Custom retry rules that give failed payments a second chance before they become lost revenue
The unified Solidgate API gave Headway access to every card brand and payment method through a single integration, eliminating the need to maintain relationships with multiple processors or manage separate technical connections.
Payment tests were also configured to continuously test and improve the payment flow based on real performance data.
Location-specific alternative payment methods
Solidgate's unified API enabled Headway to surface the right payment methods to the right users – dynamically, based on their IP address. PayPal, Amex, Discover, and Diners were made available in the checkout flow, alongside digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay) and market-specific including PIX for Brazil, RuPay for India, and JCB for Japan. The page itself was customized by location to surface the most relevant options for each market.
This was a targeted, data-informed redesign of the checkout experience for each geography. Users in target markets now saw a native-feeling checkout with familiar options, removing a key conversion barrier that had been suppressing LTV.
Network tokenization and card updater
To protect subscription revenue at the renewal stage, Solidgate deployed – Visa Token Service (VTS) and Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES) – alongside an automated . Tokenized transactions are treated as lower-risk by issuing banks, improving authorization rates. And when a customer's card details change, the system updates them automatically before the next billing cycle, preventing involuntary churn.
"With Solidgate, we can process payments in multiple countries without compromising performance. They make it possible by connecting us with local banks and payment methods. What sets Solidgate apart is its approach to customization. They analyze our data to create tailored solutions, helping us optimize our operations and boost revenue." – Anton Pavlovsky, Founder and CEO of Headway Inc
What changed
The impact was immediate and measurable across every dimension of payment performance.
- Up to 15% lift in payment acceptance rate, achieved through local acquiring and orchestration across the US, EU, LATAM, and India. Headway now processes through multiple acquirers, routed for performance and cost.
- Local presence in two new strategic markets. Headway established acquiring infrastructure in LATAM and India for the first time – validating the orchestration model for further geographic expansion.
- Operational consolidation. Multiple acquirers, APMs, tokenization, card updating, and dispute management – all managed through a single Solidgate integration and relationship, with compliance handled by Solidgate's team.
"The 15% acceptance lift is the number we point to externally, but the bigger shift is strategic: we can plan international expansion knowing payments won't be the bottleneck. That wasn't true seven years ago, and it's why we've kept building with Solidgate." – Yelizaveta Kaminska, Payments Lead at Headway Inc
With local payment infrastructure now in place across five major regions, Headway is positioned to continue geographic expansion without the payment constraints that once capped its GMV growth. The orchestration model has been validated, with further market entries, new APMs, and increased GMV targets are all on the roadmap.
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