Why we've been nominated as UK FinTech of the year

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Last editedAug 20202 min read

We're a proud bunch of people here at GoCardless. But when we heard we've been nominated as UK Fintech of the year, our first thought was our customers. The nomination is a little piece of validation of the value we provide for the 50,000 businesses worldwide - from SMBs to multinational corporations - that use our platform.

We've grown a lot since we launched nearly 10 years ago. But our vision remains singularly focussed on providing businesses with the best way to collect recurring payments, wherever they and their customers are in the world. Here are some of the ways we help our customers, and why we've been shortlisted.

Helping businesses get paid on time has a profound impact on improving their cash-flow and reducing their payment administration efforts. In turn, this allows customers to redirect investments and resources to core business activities that impact growth.

With cards, recurring payments fail 5 -15% of the time. Direct Debit averages a 3% failure rate. More than half of our customers have a 100% payment success rate, and on average businesses using GoCardless can reduce failed payments to as low as 0.5%. And in 2019 we successfully beta-tested a new automatic payment scheduling feature. By using data to predict when a payment retry is most likely to be successful, we can further reduce overall payment failures by 10-20%. All this helps eradicate the burden of chasing failed payments; and the immediate and future lost revenue from churn created by a failed payment.

GoCardless integrates seamlessly with more than 200 of the best CRMs, subscription billing platforms, and invoicing software providers. If a customer is already using one of our partners, it’s simple to add GoCardless to their existing technology stack, therefore hugely reducing the onboarding burden.

Businesses use GoCardless not simply as a payment processing platform, but as a customer acquisition tool. Recent research by YouGov into almost 5,000 businesses across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the USA, Canada and Australia showed Direct Debit is the most commonly preferred payment method, being most preferred 42% of the time. And in the corresponding consumer report, in 90% of the markets surveyed, around a third of consumers said they were likely to choose Direct Debit to pay for online subscriptions. Because of this, some of our customers are increasing conversion just by adding Direct Debit as a payment option.

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In 2019 GoCardless launched the first global network for recurring payments. By bringing together individual Direct Debit schemes around the world in one platform, including Bacs (UK), ACH (US), SEPA (Eurozone), BECS (Australia), Autogiro (Sweden), Betalingsservice (Denmark), BECS NZ (New Zealand), and PAD (Canada), we created the only truly international recurring payments network.

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For enterprise businesses, compliance and security is paramount. GoCardless is ISO 27001 certified and takes care of the compliance within each Direct Debit scheme on behalf of the businesses it serves. Additionally, GoCardless’ technology infrastructure and processes are routinely reviewed and updated where and when necessary. The recovery procedures for the most essential components of the GoCardless platform are shaped around best-in-class solutions from multiple cloud providers and best practice protocols. This protects our systems from failures affecting our users, and ensures the reliability of our service.