Mollie Recurring Payments for Small Businesses

Did you know that the Dutch payment processing company Mollie was only able to raise $100 million in 2020 as its growth tech investment? This same company was able to raise a whopping $800 million only 4 years later in 2024.

So what happened?

The short answer is COVID. During Covid-19, when almost all of Europe was under a strict lockdown, Mollie’s market share across the continent exploded as its founder and then CEO, Adriaan Mol, capitalized on the wealthy continent’s rapidly changing buying habits. What Mol did was identify how badly traditional banks’ online payment processing worked for small European businesses, before offering Mollie recurring payments as an alternative to these businesses that were nearing bankruptcy during the lockdown.

Lo and behold, in no time Mollie became the third largest European payment processor (after the fellow Dutch company Adyen and the London-based Checkout.com).

What makes Mollie such an attractive option for many Europeans?

Mollie became successful because it understood that in today’s saturated $2 trillion market for payment processing, the surest way of breaking through is by tapping into a niche market and catering completely to their demands.

For Mollie, this niche market is that of small European businesses. Be it Berry Boards, a customized electric scooters selling company in Europe with 35 employees, or Decoflora, an artificial silk flowers-selling company with 8 employees, Mollie catering to these companies and about 200,000 similarly sized more companies has resulted in its market value rising to more than $6.5 billion in 2024.

Here are a list of reasons why small European businesses like Mollie so much:

Diversity of Payment Methods

One thing that distinguishes the European market with its North American counterpart is its sheer diversity. This diversity of language, geography, and political and economic systems translates into the world of fintech as a marketplace where only those actors can survive who are able to navigate this diverse terrain with ease.

Mollie does that quite brilliantly by offering the following payment methods:

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1. Pass-through wallets and E-wallets: These two payment methods have become increasingly popular in the affluent Scandinavian region (especially among its younger populations). Any business wishing to expand into either Norway, Sweden, Finland, or Denmark will be well advised to use Mollie as their payment processor for this very reason.

2. Bank transfers like iDEAL and SEPA: Since Mollie was offered to Europeans as an alternative to traditional banks and their clunky payment processing system it only makes sense for it to be adept at processing bank-to-bank transfers with ease.

3. Credit/debit cards and other local payment methods: Keeping in mind that Mollie’s raison d’être is to cater to small European businesses, its support of local payment methods (like the Swedish company, Klarna) form the robust backbone of its fintech offerings to Europeans looking for efficient payment solutions for their B2B and B2C dealings.

High Integrability

Integration is the name of the game today, which is why Mollie offers in-built integration capabilities with more than 120 companies. The most popular amongst these integrations are eCommerce giants like Shopify, customer care software like Freshdesk, and marketing software like ActiveCampaign.

Not only that, to improve your workflow automation, Mollie also integrates with more than 5000 applications on Zapier to ensure that you are only working with the best of the best for your business’s wellbeing.

Lastly, on top of being extremely user-friendly and having a helpful customer support system to help you with figuring out these integrations, Mollie even offers detailed documentation for each of its various integrations to ensure that you are able to work out everything on your own.

Scalability

Till now we have mostly covered Mollie’s advantages for a European business. Now, let us complicate the matter by understanding its advantages for a small European business.

By not demanding any minimum cost to process payments, Mollie ensures that those small businesses which sell particularly cheap items are able to also get a foot inside the door without having to pay disproportionately expensive payment processes costs that usually come up by way of hidden fees.

Security

Mollie ascertains the safety of all your transactions by keeping in line with PCI DSS standards. It also uses various fraud detection tools like AI-tools, and statistical tools like data collection and user behavior analysis to strongly ward off against fraudulent activity.

How to handle Mollie recurring payments?

Till now we have mostly discussed Mollie and its suitability for small businesses selling in the European market. While Mollie is great at processing one-time payments (as shown above) it is equally adept at processing recurring payments. All it needs to do this is to be integrated with a robust recurring billing software like SubscriptionFlow that allows for timely invoicing, billing and recurring payment collection.

Setting up Mollie for recurring payments via PayPal and credit cards

For these two payment options, you will need to ensure that you have ticked the option of zero amount in Mollie’s API. Doing this will ensure that your customer is not charged any fee for their first month of usage, and will only be billed by the subscription-management software at the end/beginning of the first/second month.

Setting up Mollie for recurring payments for bank transfers

For bank transfers, you will need to set the sequence typeset to the option of accepting recurring payments. Doing this will ensure that Mollie is able to process payments made by your customers from services like SEPA or iDEAL.

Using a subscription-management software to set up recurring payments with Mollie

A subscription-management software like SubscriptionFlow offers endless options for you to manage your recurring payments. While using Mollie to process these recurring payments, you can use SubscriptionFlow to access transaction logs, have access to customer data, and have cards on record. Doing this will ensure that you will not only be able to keep track of what your customers are spending on and how much, but more importantly it will allow you to improve your product by focusing on the bestselling ones.

Furthermore, since Mollie and SubscriptionFlow both offer multicurrency support, it will be quite easy for you to accept payments in a variety of currencies. This is important because countries use different currencies even within Europe—the UK has its own pound sterling, Turkey uses the Turkish lira, and Russia uses the ruble. Even within the seemingly homogenous European Union, seven countries use currencies besides the Euro (namely, Romania, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Sweden).

This is where a global subscription-management software like SubscriptionFlow can be of assistance. With both its multicurrency support and integration capabilities with multiple payment gateways in addition to Mollie, you can offer your product to peoples from all over the world rather than restricting yourself to any one geography simply because you are a small business.

Bottom line

One thing has become clear. European businesses are flocking to Mollie and for good reason. With its payment processing capabilities designed specifically to suit small businesses in Europe, the Mollie payment gateway is the ideal candidate for small businesses on the lookout for efficient payment processing.

If, however, you want to expand your business model beyond accepting just one-time payments to also accept recurring payments, integrating Mollie with subscription-management software like SubscriptionFlow is the way to go.

Book a demo with SubscriptionFlow now and see for yourself how your small business booms big time!