Scale your business without scaling your payment costs

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Sam has been with GoCardless since Jan 2020. Within the business Sam specialises in writing, curating and editing content for large and enterprise businesses. The UK-based marketer boasts over 5 years of content marketing experience in B2B SaaS start-ups working with global enterprise retailers and merchants. She is also a BSc psychology graduate bringing a fresh perspective to the GoCardless team. See full bio

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As a Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoCardless, Coral is focused on Top of Funnel and ensuring that customer-facing teams have the correct positioning, messaging, and understanding of pain points to deliver payment solutions to SMEs. Before GoCardless Coral worked as a Product Marketing Manager at PayPal and has experience in the travel industry as an entrepreneur. She is also a certified attorney. Coral completed an MBA at the London Business School.ConnectSee full bio

Last editedJun 20232 min read

If you’re growing and scaling your business, collecting payments is mission-critical to keeping cash flowing. Collecting payments quickly and efficiently can accelerate your growth.

The cost of growth

Many aspiring and growing businesses have taken the mentality of “growth at all costs” in order to scale their businesses. But in the uncertain economy of 2023, and with venture capital investment dropping by as much as 66%, being more tactical about how you scale your business could help you grow more efficiently and sustainably.

When it comes to aligning your payments strategy to your company goals you need to consider the opportunity your payment collection gives you vs the cost of collecting those payments. Consider not just the transaction fees of collecting and processing more payments, but how the indirect costs of collecting more payments will scale too.

The strategy you choose to grow your payments will have a wide and long-reaching impact on your business.

For a deep dive into all the costs associated with collecting payments and how to streamline and mitigate them, check out our ebook: “The costs of collecting payments”.

Preventing payment growing pains

When you’re looking at increasing the volumes of payments you collect or even expanding into new markets or regions, you need to ask yourself:

“Does my current payment solution help drive my business, or hinder it?”

You’ll need to consider every cost connected to growing the volume of payments you collect. You won’t want to be caught out by unexpected costs that grow as your business does. Many growing businesses face scaling their personnel and infrastructure to accelerate growth and by doing so, they take on unnecessary extra costs. According to Forrester, most businesses have over 20 full-time employees to handle payments.

Growing your payment volume doesn’t mean your headcount has to grow.

By choosing a scalable and automated payment solution, like bank payments via GoCardless, you can collect more payments without the need to hire more headcount. Automation reduces the manual admin burden on your finance teams and makes them 21% more efficient while reducing staff costs by 59%.

“Reconciliation takes less than ten minutes instead of days. Because of this, if we scaled another 100 times we wouldn’t need to add another finance person – they wouldn't have anything to do!” Christian van der Westhuizen, Co-founder, Spot On.

Are inefficient payments holding you back?

Many businesses underestimate how much payments actually cost them. Transaction fees are just the start. There are many ways payments can become a source of cost and the payment methods you choose to offer will have an impact.

To maximise your return on investment (ROI), you need to understand and address the total cost of ownership (TCO) of payments, including the costs of payment inefficiencies.

Payment inefficiencies are costing your business:

Late and failed payments: 11-15% of failed payments result in bad debt or churn.
Fraud: 1.46%¹ of annual revenue is lost to fraudulent payments and 3.34%² of revenue is spent dealing with and recovering fraudulent payments after they occur.
Payment preference: 67% of consumers will abandon an online purchase if the checkout process doesn’t offer their preferred payment method.

Don’t let payment inefficiencies hold you back.

We’ve seen that beyond transaction fees, choosing undesirable and inefficient payments can have financial repercussions. Facilitate your business to scale and collect more payments by implementing a strategy that gets you paid faster, more reliably and more securely.

Say goodbye to wasting valuable time and money chasing payments, fighting fraud and losing potential customers. GoCardless bank payments use automation to get you paid securely and on time.

Collect automated recurring payments. Without the chasing, stress or expensive fees.

Are you ready to take control of your payment collection costs?

Get your copy of the “The costs of collecting payments” ebook.

Market research conducted on behalf of GoCardless, to 1800 merchants across the UK, US, France, Aus & Spain, February 2021
Market research conducted on behalf of GoCardless, to 1446 merchants across the UK, US, France, Germany & Aus, November 2021