How Tessitura has mastered seamless embedded payments with Adyen

When did you last hear an aria from La Bohème echo across the magnificent expanse of an opera house? Or have your breath taken away by a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo at a prestigious art gallery?

These are the moments thatTessitura Networkhelps create. As a technology provider they power the success of arts and cultural organizations around the globe by offering ticketing and admissions, fundraising, memberships, marketing functions and more on a unified platform.

Since its initial launch as a tailor-made software solution for The Metropolitan Opera in New York City, Tessitura has evolved into a $50 million company with 300+ employees. Nearly 800 arts and culture organizations in ten countries depend on Tessitura’s platform to handle their ticketing, fundraising, memberships, and customer relationship management.

Tessitura helps organizations like zoos, museums, and concert halls manage sophisticated customer relationships through a robust and elegant enterprise platform to accept payments and receive payouts.

After just a year of using Adyen for Platforms, they have been able to support a staggering amount of payments and subscriptions globally.

Tessitura has always provided embedded payments in some form. As a cooperative organization, their main goal is to provide a valuable service to their members and invest in innovation.

Their fragmented payments setup meant they couldn’t offer frictionless payment experience that would ensure the level of security and privacy they were looking for.

The intricacies of relying on multiple acquirers to accept local payment methods inspired Tessitura to find one global payments platform and build the foundation for a simpler payments infrastructure.

"We've worked with four or five different payment platforms. They were typically gateways that used various acquirers. However, a fragmented payments system meant we couldn't keep up with all payment options," said Chuck Reif, Chief Engineer and Co-Founder of Tessitura.

Supporting customers’ favorite digital wallet options—including PayPal, GooglePay, ApplePay, and Interac—was complex due to the need for multiple payment gateways.

Tessitura's search for a payments solution was further influenced by the need to keep up with emerging payment methods and industry trends. Identifying a consolidated payment partner would pave the way for more effective global expansion for the platform.

Working with many different payment processors also meant that Tessitura had to rely on external partners to resolve support issues or answer questions for its members on a case-by-case basis.

“More than half the time, we would have to refer them back to their payment service provider or their acquirer. We wanted that to stop,” Reif said. “We wanted to handle their support from end to end, from ordering hardware, diagnosing hardware and support problems, and answering any questions they had.”

The need to simplify its product support process was extra motivation for Tessitura to find a unified payments provider. Soon enough, the esteemed CRM platform met the payments partner it was looking for in Adyen.

In 2021, the CRM platform for nonprofits integrated with Adyen for Platforms to take their payments in-house and move away from third-party providers. This allows Tessitura to onboard new non-profit members directly to its platform and streamline their payment experience.

“One of the things that we really liked about Adyen was the ability to have [an out-of-the-box solution.] We knew that we didn’t want to take on all of the infrastructure for payment processing, nor are we small enough to rely on standard payment gateways,” Reif said. “We wanted something right down the center, a sweet spot for us. And that's exactly what we found in Adyen.”

Now, these arts and culture organizations have total visibility of their individual customer journeys, with easy access to their payment info that are just a few clicks away. Tessitura’s members can also access meaningful cross-channel insights they can use to better understand their audience.

“Our members really like the way the Adyen payment components just simply drop into their websites. Their customers love it because they're not redirected somewhere else,” added Reif. “The reporting that our members can get from Adyen’s tools against their payments has been a huge benefit to them.”

Adyen for Platforms consolidates and reconciles all of Tessitura’s global payments for ticketing, membership fees, and donations while processing local and preferred payment methods worldwide.

The power to give end-to-end payment support to hundreds of community members at scale is priceless. Now, Tessitura can answer any payment-related inquiries or fix potential hardware issues for its members directly, instead of referring each organization to multiple providers for resolution.

Giving members a view of the same payment reports that Tessitura’s support team can access helps both parties solve any related complications that may arise together.

“The fact that our members can simply look at the hardware inventory in Adyen’s tools to see where all of their hardware is, which ones are working, and if any have problems—that's been a huge advantage,” Reif emphasized. “It’s something we've never been able to do before.”

Besides that, Tessitura has the capacity to develop fraud and security profiles that are specific to each member as they’re being onboarded. This further ensures its member organizations are fully supported—and protected, too.

"Adyen seemed like the right fit for us," Reif said. "We're incredibly gratified by the level of functionality and support we've been able to get."

Tessitura has been able to use embedded payments as a way to enhance their offering and invest in further innovation.

"Our goal has always been to be a self-sustaining organization with our members' interests at our heart," Reif mentions. "And Adyen for Platforms plays a part because we are able to invest the portion of the fees that we receive back into the product."

Since integrating with Adyen in 2021, Tessitura better upholds its aptitude to process up to 6.6 million membership fees for its members. And because our single financial technology platform is built for scale, Tessitura likely won’t need additional internal resources to manage subscriptions—even as the total number of members on the platform increases.

From launching with Adyen to date, the Tessitura platform has completed over 36.4 million ticket orders and sold 121 million tickets for its participants without any unnecessary complications.

Looking ahead, Tessitura foresees these numbers continue to rise in an upwards trend.

Tessitura’s reimagined financial model is a big success. Before, its members paid processing fees to multiple payment providers. Now, those fees help support innovations that create more software features which are mutually beneficial to the platform and its vibrant community.

With a pre-built dashboard for members, fast go-to-market deployment, and the ability to provide a seamless user experience, Tessitura's integration with Adyen for Platforms continues to help this prestigious technology provider master the art of embedded payments.

And the future is bright. Since getting started with our out-of-the-box embedded payments solution, Tessitura’s ambitions for the future have only grown.

Adyen for Platformsallows you to easily embed payments into your platform or marketplace with our out-of-the-box solution or a fully customizable setup. Our ever-evolving technology helps your users sign-up, sell, and get paid in one place.

With our solution, you can: