All roads pointed to GoCardless – and it hasn’t disappointed

Here at BizCover, we’ve managed to keep hold of some of the best characteristics of being a small company, even while amassing a customer base of more than 200,000.

One of those features is that we’ve stayed agile. We’re constantly asking, “how do we do better?” And it’s this ethos that is driving a major transformation project to rebuild our billing and payment processes, using Chargify for billing and GoCardless for collecting Direct Debits.

Our goal is to develop a frictionless global payment journey, offering customers a wide range of payment options and a simplified experience whatever their preference.

We’re happy to leave payments to the experts

BizCover is a business insurance comparison platform, used by customers directly or white labelled by most of the major insurance comparison sites. Our mission is to simplify business insurance by offering an end-to-end solution, from getting a quote to issuing documentation and handling claims.

Billing and payments are not our core offering. So, when the time came to refresh our billing platform, we figured why reinvent the wheel and create extra work building and maintaining our solutions? Let's go out and get an experienced partner that can do that for us.

GoCardless just made sense

On the payments side, we need a provider that's global and can connect with payment schemes in the markets we’re currently operating in: Australia, New Zealand and the US. GoCardless ticked that box right away.

We also needed a partner with a strong reputation. Direct Debits are about 10% of our payments, so they’re strategically important. Especially so because some customers will only pay by Direct Debit.

Pretty much all the billing platforms we looked at only integrated with GoCardless on the Direct Debit side. And as if that wasn’t endorsement enough, many of our existing partners also recommended GoCardless.

So with global coverage, a strong reputation, years of experience and a proven integration with our Chargify billing platform, it quickly became clear that GoCardless was the only choice for our Direct Debits.

Frictionless payments

We’re expecting to enable Direct Debit on our new platform in a few months, for new customers only at first. Initially we will be adding a few customers a day to GoCardless, but this will soon ramp up to around 60 per day. And we’ll also eventually migrate the rest of our customer base onto the new platform, a sizeable chunk of which will also move over to GoCardless.

At that scale and at such a critical moment in the customer journey, we don’t want to create any points of friction. GoCardless will enable us to provide a simple portal for customers to quickly enter their payments and keep moving through the buying process.

Customer satisfaction is a major success measure for us and we’re proud of our NPS scores, which are very high for the insurance industry. We certainly expect our new billing and payment set up to help maintain those high levels of satisfaction, by giving customers the payment options they want and making that experience simple for them.

Looking forward to PayTo

Working with Chargify and GoCardless will accelerate our innovation, both in terms of payments but also our core offering. Letting these two experts in their field handle billing and Direct Debits means our team has more time to focus on simplifying business insurance for customers.

Chargify and GoCardless will also be investing in their own innovation efforts, which will benefit us too. We’re particularly excited about GoCardless’ integration with the PayTo payments service in Australia. 

PayTo is similar to Direct Debits, but funds are settled in real-time – no more waiting to get paid – and at a much lower cost than card payments. Once we’re up and running with our new processes, PayTo will be high on our “what’s next” list. Benefits would include being able to pass the lower fees on to customers, and immediate settlement of funds will enable us to issue insurance documentation to customers quicker.

GoCardless believes in our potential

Working with GoCardless throughout the project has been a great experience. As customers of the Enhanced Customer Success Package we’ve had direct access to key technical experts throughout the integration, which means we’ve been able to work a lot faster than we would be able to on our own. I can’t imagine how things would’ve gone without their support.

We plan to ramp up our payment traffic in the very near future, and throughout the process it’s been clear that they believe in our potential. All this leaves me excited about what we can achieve together next.