Highlights of 2016 at GoCardless

2016 has been a rollercoaster of a year. Here at GoCardless HQ, we’ve certainly had an exciting time.

In this post, we look back at some of our most memorable moments from the year gone by - including big wins, things we’ve learned, new friends, and fun events - all infused with the usual dynamic GoCardless spirit.

We’ve hit some significant milestones this year, including reaching £1.5 billion of processing volume in July, and helping over 20,000 merchants every month to take payments more effectively. We’ve also ramped up our European operations, enabling even more customers to take payments across the eurozone.

In September, we launched a survey on the burgeoning subscriptions industry in our UK and European markets, aiming to find out what people thought of the various different payment methods. The results showed an outstanding victory for Direct Debit, especially in the UK, which was great news for us too!

A couple of months later we entered the prestigious Deloitte Fast50 Awards - and won first place in the fintech category, and second place overall out of 50 of the UK’s fastest-growing companies. Then, just weeks later, we reached the top ten of the Deloitte Fast 500 EMEA Awards, which have a more global focus - honouring the best innovators in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As well as working hard, here at GoCardless we’ve also been playing hard. We surpassed ourselves by throwing two rounds of the fantastic Quarterly Report bash for our friends in tech and beyond, and also had a very enjoyable time at the GoCardless Christmas party.

So once again it’s time to hand over the spotlight to our amazing people, to let them explain exactly why 2016 at GoCardless was rather awesome.

Cleaning up with Customer Success

We helped Peterborough City Council streamline their recently-introduced garden waste tax, providing easy online payments to make the controversial new charges easier for residents to handle. Residents no longer needed to worry about making payments on time - and the lower processing costs helped the city council to manage their budget more effectively. Everyone’s a winner!

Engineering & Product

Connecting to our Partners

Just recently we launched a one-stop shop for all our partner integrations. This highlights the fantastic range of useful GoCardless integrations currently available - and we’ll regularly update it as we add even more over the coming months.

Improving the Developer Experience

“We launched our new developer site, as we wanted to make the experience for developers getting started with our API as good as possible. We want to guide people through in the language they’re using.

“It was especially great working with users of our API to get feedback on the content we were writing, bringing them into the office and getting them to run through the drafts (and sending them GoCardless swag as a thank you!) We’ve had great feedback and more people than ever are getting started with our API”

-- Tim, Engineering

Diving into DevOps

Back in November we kicked off the new GoCardless DevOps Event Series with our first DevOps event, The Insider Talks. Our very own Chris Sinjakli presented "Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Postgres in Production at GoCardless" and Simon Vans-Colina presented "DevOps at Monzo". The event was a resounding success and we’re hoping to host many more in 2017.

ISO27001 certified

“This year we were awarded ISO 27001 certification, a widely recognised, internationally accepted standard for information security. This will be reassessed annually by an independent auditor. Having ISO 27001 certification helps assure our merchants and their customers that we take security and business continuity management seriously.”

-- Nick, Engineering

Big things happening in Sales

“For me it was launching with Sage. They are one of the biggest tech companies to ever come out of the UK and it's fantastic to add such a big name to our ever growing list of clients.”

-- George, Sales

“We doubled the size of our UK sales team. We also created a useful process for cracking new verticals on a mass scale, focusing on our work with the local government and Peterborough City Council in particular.“

-- Mia, Sales

Newsletters and newborns in Marketing

“My highlights were being involved with the launch of the GoCardless newsletter, plus co-ordinating a successful events calendar for 2016. Also, getting married and having Forrest be one of the GoCardless babies of 2016!”

-- Ross, Marketing

All-new integrations in Partnerships

“For me it had to be launching several new integrations, including GoCardless for Quickbooks, a new version of GoCardless for Xero, along with Chargebee and WooCommerce.”

-- Josh, Partnerships

Success at South Summit in Spain

“Nobody could resist GoCardless swag in our first ever Spanish event. Even the main politicians of Madrid wanted to wear our jackets!”

-- Alfonso, Global

Brand new Customer Support Centre

Mid September saw the launch of the brand new GoCardless Support Centre, offering significant improvement on our previous FAQs page.

"We’re really excited about the potential of our new support centre for making our product and service knowledge base easily accessible and readily available for our merchants and their customers. We’ve got many more great ideas up our sleeves for improvements and will be continuing to add more content throughout 2017."

-- James, Support

Winning at Dodgeball London

“The GoCardless team won the Dodgeball London quarterly tournament!”

-- Steve and Alex

Party Central at GoCardless

Quarterly Report

We invited our friends, partners and customers old and new from London's tech community for a civilised social gathering over cocktails, music, and stacks and stacks of pizza!

Cocktail-making, cookie-baking

2016 was sprinkled with assorted team events, ranging from cocktail-making to cookie baking, proper cooking lessons, white-water rafting, BBQing in the park, zapping each other at laser tag - along with numerous opportunities for the GoCardless team to go out for dinner and drinks together.

Putting on the Ritz with our French team

The folks at Koala Telecom, one of our French merchants, were so delighted with the GoCardless product that they took us out to tea at the Ritz. Well one of us anyway. For the lucky recipient, Côme, in the France inbound sales team, that was definitely his highlight of 2016.

Overall, 2016 has been a successful, productive and, most of all, fun year at GoCardless. Here’s to an even better 2017! We wish everyone a very happy new year.