About Carla

Carla is an ecommerce site for buying, leasing, and selling fully electric and hybrid vehicles online. The company was founded with the vision to make buying a car online as simple as buying a pair of shoes while helping transition away from fossil fuels. Today they are the only online EV-focused player in the Nordics, and they have the ambition to become the leading player for buying and selling electric cars in Northern Europe.

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Payment flows & challenges

Carla’s critical treasury operations: 

• Collecting and reconciling incoming payments from buyers
• Monitoring bank statements for incoming transfers to release cars for delivery

Given Carla’s vision of making buying electric cars as easy as shopping for clothes online, the buying experience of their customers is paramount. However, legacy bank interfaces made accessing transaction data in real time difficult. Carla’s operations team had to manually log into online bank portals and check line by line if specific payments had been credited to their accounts. This cumbersome process often resulted in delayed payment notifications and deliveries, taking extra days for buyers to receive their cars.

Similarly, since Carla’s business model is optimized for margin and not driven by credit, they must maintain a stringent overview of incoming and outgoing money flows across banking partners to optimize inventory. Thus, a treasury solution that enabled them to monitor real-time funds flows on their bank accounts was crucial. 

Because the finance team also had to interface with the bank’s legacy online portals and couldn’t retrieve the data programmatically, they were left with manual processes for reconciliation that were time-consuming and tedious. 

As Carla is a rapidly growing scaleup, they did not want to lock up engineering resources to build direct bank integrations and a supporting back-office platform internally. It was important for Carla to find a single future-proof solution that could be integrated with their internal E-commerce platform. So they set out to find a partner that could solve their current and future treasury requirements.

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Partnering with Atlar

Thanks to Atlar’s pre-integrations with Carla’s preferred banking partners, Carla solved their delivery & customer notification issues by integrating Atlar’s API within two weeks of signing the contract. Using Atlar’s transaction webhooks, Carla can get automatically notified as soon as a payment is credited to their account and tie it back to the underlying order programmatically, instead of having to continuously monitor bank portals for new settlements. 

Thanks to Atlar’s transaction webhooks, Carla built an automated workflow where upon receiving a payment, the car is approved for delivery, and a notification email is sent to the buyer instantly. In practice, this means buyers will always receive payment confirmations on time and can receive cars days faster. 

From the perspective of managing treasury, Carla leverages Atlar’s platform to monitor liquidity across banking partners, having real-time visibility into cash inflows and outflows. 

For reconciliation, as Carla can now retrieve bank data in real-time into their back-office platform, they built internal ledgering logic to reconcile payments and track outstanding balances for partially paid invoices. 

Given Carla’s ambition to build a category leader in Northern Europe, they saw Atlar as a partner that can support them in quickly scaling their treasury infrastructure.