Alma Brand Guidelines: A 2018 French Fintech That Splits Payments for Merchants

A merchant tool for paying in instalments.

Alma is a French payments company that lets shoppers split or defer the cost of a purchase. It was founded in 2018 by Louis Chatriot and Guillaume Desloges; FrenchWeb reported in March 2020 that Chatriot, a former Stripe manager, had left that company early in 2018 to co-found it. French Wikipedia places its head office at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western edge of Paris, and describes the company as unlisted.

The first idea was narrow. Retailers could offer payment in three or four instalments, online and in store; the merchant was paid at once and the customer then repaid Alma, FrenchWeb explained in 2020, when the company had around 1,000 business clients and 17 staff. In the same interview Chatriot described a market long served by banks and consumer-credit firms, in which large chains had offered instalments for years while younger and smaller retailers were only starting to.

Growth came through merchants rather than through a consumer brand. By October 2022 Alma said it had 7,500 partner retailers in Europe, among them Etam and Maisons du Monde, and 350 staff, BFM Business reported. French Wikipedia gives 6,000 partner shops in 2022 and 21,000 in 2024, and says Alma expanded into Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium in 2021. Its investors have included Idinvest, ISAI, Cathay Innovation, Eurazeo and Bpifrance, according to the same article.

Two large contracts and a long list of shops.

Two contracts made headlines in 2022. That summer Alma handled instalment payments for Apple’s French online store, including a two-year plan for the iPhone 14 described by BFM Business. French Wikipedia says the arrangement began in July and ended in October 2022, and Presse-citron reported in November 2022 that the option had disappeared from Apple’s site on 18 October, with neither company commenting.

The second was rail travel. In October 2022 BFM Business reported that Alma had won a tender from SNCF, the French national railway, to let travellers pay for train tickets in several instalments, with the service planned for mid-2023. Chatriot told the broadcaster that split payment does not add to anyone’s purchasing power and is better seen as a budgeting tool, and that SNCF had picked Alma mainly for its customer experience, with as few form fields as possible. He also described how approvals work: for three or four instalments Alma relies mainly on fraud checks that confirm a customer is genuine, while longer plans such as the two-year iPhone offer add a credit assessment of whether the customer can repay.

By 2026 the merchant list had grown. BFM reported in March 2026 that 23,000 merchants used Alma and that La Redoute, LDLC and ManoMano had joined SNCF and Maisons du Monde among its clients. Alma’s own website, read in November 2026, says it is “trusted by 26,000 merchants” across Europe.

The range is set out on that website: payment in two, three or four instalments; longer plans of 10 or 12 instalments for larger purchases; and a pay-later option of 15 or 30 days. It is offered on e-commerce sites, at shop tills through a payment link or a payment terminal, and through call centres and home sales, and the company has added a consumer app. The site lists France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal as its markets, and says customers can pay with most European cards and with local methods such as iDEAL and Bancontact.

How instalment brands present themselves.

Buy now, pay later providers sell a way of paying rather than a product, so most of their design work happens on other companies’ pages. A shopper meets the brand as a small wordmark beside a price, a badge in a row of card logos, or a button at the end of a checkout. Many of these marks are short, rounded names set in bright mint, pink, purple or plain black, and several providers publish kits for merchants with approved logos, lockups and banners in light and dark versions.

The second surface is the app. Providers show purchases as instalment schedules: a row of dates and amounts, a progress marker for payments made, and reminders of what is due next. Many also run shopping directories of participating merchants, with categories, deals and store pages, which turn the payment brand into a place to browse.

The third surface is explanation. Providers typically keep a page on how payments work, usually a sequence of three or four steps, and most carry dense small print: who the lender is, which licences apply, what fees and rates can be charged and where to go for help with hardship. In several markets these disclosures are set by regulators, and merchant kits often spell out which phrases need a full disclaimer and which claims may not be made at all.

The last surface is the investor page. Several providers are listed companies, in Sydney, New York or both, and publish results, presentations and announcements alongside their consumer sites. This guide sets out what can be checked about each provider — who founded it, who owns it, where it operates and how regulators have treated it — and gives company statements as the company’s own.

Profit, Europe and new rules.

In March 2026 BFM reported that Alma had been profitable for the first time in 2025, seven years after its launch, a milestone French Wikipedia also records. The company, by then with about 400 employees, planned to push further into Europe from 2026, especially Germany, the report said; in the Netherlands, where most online purchases are paid through iDEAL, it added that method to its options. Chatriot told BFM that Alma charges no late fees and presented this as a choice made against the habits of the sector; that is the company’s own account.

The rules around the sector are changing. BFM noted that from 20 November 2026 European rules would treat deferred and split payments as consumer credit, requiring providers such as Alma to assess a buyer’s ability to repay. Alma’s website describes the checks it already runs, including the buyer’s age, the card’s type and expiry date and, depending on the amount, an open-banking query to the customer’s bank. It also says merchants pay a commission on each purchase and may pass part of that cost on to customers.

On its website the brand speaks mostly to merchants: checkout options, payment links for shops, a dashboard with sales figures for retailers and case studies from named clients, with the consumer app announced at the top of the page. The pages lead with plain statements of how instalments work, which cards are accepted and which countries are covered.

For a design guide, Alma shows how a payments brand can be built around another company’s checkout rather than its own storefront. Compare Klarna, the Swedish instalment company, and Scalapay, another European instalment provider. For this guide we use a warm coral, a deep ink and a soft cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Alma’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.