Fee Sharing
Alma may charge fees to your customers to enable them to pay in installments. You may also choose to cover these fees yourself, offering installment payments with no extra cost to your customers. Covering the fees for your customers, who will then make their purchases in installments without any additional cost, significantly improves the conversion rate.
Local Regulatory Compliance
Alma's billing of fees to customers for payment facilities or credits is regulated by local financial authorities in each country where Alma operates. We closely monitor compliance with applicable usury rates, which represent the maximum equivalent annualized rates that can legally be charged to consumers, as well as compliance with regulations in each country concerning other potential limits (e.g., maximum monthly fees applicable for payment facilities under two months in Belgium, limit set at 1% of the credit granted for payment facilities under three months in Spain...).
Practical consequence: the same percentage of fees for the customer may be authorized in one country and capped in another. The Alma interface automatically reflects these limits.
Check here for the applicable usury and reference rates in France (which are updated every quarter). And here for the decrees related to usury rates applicable in Italy.
Automatic Capping
When the configuration of Alma's financing solution leads to customer fees exceeding the applicable cap, Alma automatically caps these fees at the level of this cap. Any fees that cannot be imposed on customers by Alma are your responsibility as a merchant. This ensures full regulatory compliance while allowing the cost-sharing of financing solutions within legal limits.
In France, consumer credit is regulated by the Consumer Code, specifically Section 9 on tied credit (articles L312-44 to L312-56).