GoCardless & Recurly offer subscription businesses improved coverage for recurring payments
Last editedNov 20203 min read
We’re excited to announce that GoCardless and Recurly now offer today’s fastest growing businesses the flexibility to accept ACH and SEPA debits from subscribers in the US and European Union. Our mission at GoCardless is to help all recurring payments businesses reduce churn and grow customer acquisition through bank debit as a payment method. From growing startups to the Fortune 500, Recurly powers a sophisticated subscription management solution for leading companies around the world.
As a result of our combined partnership, businesses will enjoy a new level of success from the bank debit payment method.
What are ACH and SEPA?
ACH, a system for moving money electronically between bank accounts in the US, includes business-to-business, government, and consumer transactions (both domestic and international). Payment processing via ACH has existed since the 1970s and accounted for more than $51 trillion in 2018. Learn more in our guide to ACH.
SEPA (the Single Euro Payments Area) is a Europe-wide direct debit system that allows merchants to collect Euro-denominated payments from accounts in the 34 SEPA countries and associated territories. SEPA direct debit has now been implemented in all eurozone and non-eurozone SEPA countries. More than 520 million people live in countries covered by the SEPA, and those customers make more than 122 billion electronic payments per year.
Recurly: Powering Subscription Commerce
The GoCardless and Recurly integration expands on a shared mission to help businesses lower churn and grow internationally through efficient payment solutions and their subscription management platform.
Recurly’s subscription management tool allows a maximum of flexibility for merchants to create subscription plans and billing models. Businesses also benefit from world-class product solutions that provide more choice for billing and accounting, actionable analytics and the payment method coverage subscribers prefer.
Using machine learning to inform retry logic, Recurly’s Revenue Optimization Engine improves billing continuity by leveraging hundreds of millions of successful transactions. This technology helps businesses efficiently lower credit card declines (mitigating churn) and increase revenue by an average of 12% each month when combined with other decline management strategies.
“Global companies realize that through recurring payments they can ramp acquisition and improve the customer experience by catering to their customer’s payment preference. GoCardless is very excited to partner with Recurly and extend our reach even further. Together we’ll offer a sophisticated and holistic solution for subscription management and payments.”
-Andrew Gilboy, GM North America at GoCardless
Helping more businesses maximize payments success
Every business strives to be customer-centric and that shouldn’t change when it comes to payments. For years, Recurly has helped their merchants maximize their success by making the complexities of subscription management simple, and this includes supporting the payment method subscribers prefer.
By integrating with the GoCardless global direct debit network Recurly will offer subscription businesses two related and actionable benefits:
Coverage: By covering 70% of the world’s recurring payment volume, and with a higher percentage of penetration - meaning more customers have bank accounts than other forms of payment - merchants can increase their customer acquisition by making themselves available to more of the business and consumer population.
Customer Payment Preference: For SEPA countries, the clear preferred payment method for B2B digital subscriptions is bank debit. In the US, credit cards are preferred almost out of habit, however ACH debit is often the second most preferred payment method among US companies - when it comes to subscriptions, 38% of US businesses prefer to pay via ACH debit. Moreover, ACH debit has a lower churn rate compared to cards (2-3% vs. as much as 15%), and lower processing costs, whether borne by the processor (meaning higher direct costs) or the customer (higher indirect costs through more expense and a less satisfactory customer experience).
By increasing coverage and catering to customer payer preference with Recurly, merchants directly enable higher revenue growth and a more technologically and cost efficient Accounts Receivables process.
"Recurly’s fastest-growing merchants understand that global expansion is a corridor to new subscriber acquisition and revenue growth. To turbocharge that growth we are continually adding new payment options. By enabling the most popular payment methods that subscribers use, both domestically and around the world, we can properly support our merchants' global expansion. Global payments are made easier because of our integration with GoCardless, the industry leader in direct debit payment support across the globe. Together, we streamline the complexity that comes with adding new payment methods making it easier and more efficient while providing you with a robust, localized subscription billing solution."
-Jenna Wyer, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at Recurly
The GoCardless integration with Recurly helps our efforts to solve the problem of getting paid around the world.
