2017 highlights from GoCardless

A year is a long time in the life of a fintech startup!

This year, we secured round D funding from our incredible investors, processed more than £4bn worth of transactions for our customers (all 35,000 of them), and the number of people in GoCardless grew by more than 150%.

Our UK and EU growth has continued this year, resulting in a no.11 listing in the Times Tech Track 100 and a mention in the CB Insights Fintech 250. We also ranked 8th in the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 and 54th in Deloitte’s EMEA 500, for our 2097% growth rate.

We were also delighted this year to be named one of LinkedIn’s Top 25 startups (from a global list of 25,000) and the best place for developers to work at the techies 2017.

Of course, numbers and awards only tell part of the story, so here are some members of the GoCardless team to share their 2017 highlights.

Seeing our customers thrive

“It has been great to see so many of our customers succeed this year! One great example is UK renewable energy supplier Bulb, which has grown its customer base by 4000% in 18 months. 90% of Bulb's members now pay by Direct Debit through GoCardless, and we've gone from taking 10,000 payments a month for them in January to 100,000 payments in December. We're proud to have supported their growth and ambitions in that time and we're excited to work with them, and all of our fantastic customers, in 2018.”

-- Stevie, Customer Success

Becoming an international business

“Launching our dashboard in French, German and Spanish for our merchants, as well as ten languages for our customers. This required us to overhaul every bit of wording in the product and set up an automatic process for our translation partners to work seamlessly with our development team. We're now able to quickly and easily launch new languages and support the languages we already have - a huge benefit to our international and local merchants (and a big step to being a truly international company).”

-- Ben, Product Management

Getting serious on privacy

“2017 has seen us undertaking a lot of 'under the hood' preparation work for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enters into effect on 25 May 2018. Privacy is a critical part of our business and we know it matters to our customers (and their customers!) too. This work has included the introduction of a company-wide privacy programme aimed at education and compliance, a substantial internal data mapping exercise, product tweaks, not to mention the review of many contracts. We look forward to sharing more on our approach to GDPR with you in the coming months."

-- Ahmed, Legal

Developing our partnerships

“Our customers get the best experience of GoCardless when they integrate us into their existing software, so our partnerships with business software providers have been a real focus for us in 2017. We launched a partnership with Sage, were named Xero App Partner of the Year and brought onboard our first partner in Germany, Magicline. We also introduced a new and simple way for customers to sign up to GoCardless through partner software.”

-- Josh, Partnerships

213 volunteering hours with Benefacto

“Volunteering with Benefacto at the Brixton Banardo's shop and at Islington Food bank. This year GoCardless people have spent 213 hours volunteering.”

-- Sally, Marketing

Releasing a .NET client library for the new API

"This year, we released a .NET client library for the new API. Client libraries make it easier and faster to integrate with an API. This much-requested new client library helps .NET developers build amazing Direct Debit integrations with ease and reduces the amount of code they need to write. It's already helped plenty of businesses to implement GoCardless and empowered many of our existing legacy API integrators to upgrade painlessly – now they all benefit from the new tools and features we regularly add to our API!"

-- Jacob, Engineering

Improving our customer support

“Winning at the Best Self-Service Initiative award at the ECCCSAs for the work we’ve done to halve customer response times and help customers find answers to their answers more quickly!”

-- Jess, Customer Support

Growing the team

"The most exciting part of 2017 has been watching the GoCardless team grow. We welcomed 107 people into the business this year and grew from 2 to 12 in the People team. It's been an amazing time getting to know everyone and helping our new joiners to learn about our culture (and threatening people about a potential name quiz!)."

-- Gabriela, People Operations

Our customers say it better

“My highlight has been creating some fab new videos of our customers, talking about why and how they use Gocardless - like the one below from Vax.”

-- Paul, Marketing