Lightspeed

Standardized payments, anywhere in the world 

Lightspeed Commerce is a unified point of sale and financial services platform serving retailers and hospitality merchants worldwide.

“Our cloud-based solution centrally manages all the ‘boring’ aspects of business – payments, inventory, repairs, and employee and order management,” said Daniel Keresteci, Director of Business Transformation for Financial Services, Lightspeed. “That leaves them free to focus on delighting customers and growing their business.”

Lightspeed also provides a cash advance service: Lightspeed Capital. By analyzing its data on merchants’ businesses it can offer bespoke, competitive short-term financing of up to a hundred thousand dollars in as little as two days. Repayments are made daily and calculated based on a pre-agreed percentage of daily sales.

That amounts to thousands of daily repayments, all of which are collected seamlessly and automatically using GoCardless.

Manual, inefficient – and risky

Before GoCardless, Lighspeed’s collections process was a manual affair, inefficient and fraught with risk.

“We had to manually upload transactions every day to our bank’s system, which was not set up well to scale,” said Daniel. “The inflexibility of their systems limited innovation and automation, and we couldn’t be as transparent or responsive for customers as we wanted. It also created space for mistakes, which is the last thing you want when automatically pulling money from merchant accounts.”

As it grew, Lightspeed needed to simplify these processes – especially given its global growth ambitions.

“We wanted an efficient process that provided a consistent merchant experience in the US and wherever we expanded internationally,” said Daniel. “We have that and more today thanks to GoCardless.

3,000 daily transactions with almost no human intervention

Using GoCardless, Lightspeed collects thousands of merchant repayments every day. “We’ve automated the collection of over 3,000 transactions a day, totaling up to half a million dollars, across 10 global markets – all through a single provider,” said Daniel.

This has transformed the role of the operations team.

“Instead of focusing on day-to-day problem solving, payments are now almost a no-touch process, so our operations team can focus on delivering a great merchant experience,” said Daniel. “They have more time to speak with customers directly, explaining the product and working to resolve any issues.”

“The implementation of GoCardless has made our lives easier and we can use our time more wisely,” agreed Sangeeth Mahendran, Senior Analyst, Capital Operations. 

Accelerated global growth

GoCardless’s global capabilities allow Lightspeed to navigate new international banking and payment systems with ease, accelerating its international growth.

“We're not a huge organization with lots of resources to invest in meeting the unique requirements of every market, but with GoCardless’s support we’ve grown rapidly from the US, into New Zealand, Australia, the UK and mainland Europe,” said Daniel.

“Over two years, we were able to launch in a new market almost every couple of months because GoCardless provides one standardized service to connect into. There are some markets we couldn’t have gone into without them, because dealing with the banking and regulatory requirements would be too complex to justify the investment.”

Data-driven automation

In fact, the GoCardless API mean launching into new markets is just a case of adjusting a few lines of code. These APIs have also enabled Lightspeed to deeply embed payments automation within its wider systems and workflows.

“The APIs let us bring GoCardless data directly into our systems, which drives automations like payment history and status reporting via Looker. And as soon as a payment is canceled or fails, our internal team is alerted in a dedicated Slack channel so we can respond proactively. Merchants also get a call to action in their systems and automated emails.”

Eduardo Montesdeoca, Senior Coordinator, Capital Operations added: “This all helps us have a better relationship with merchants because we're able to provide more transparent information.”

All set to grow further, faster

With an efficient payments process in place and the support of an expert partner, Lightspeed is gearing up to grow further and faster, looking to serve a new class of customer.

“GoCardless have been great partners since day one, from building out our API connections to dealing with international payment schemes,” said Daniel.

“The goal right now is to grow our cash advance product with larger merchants that have greater financing needs by offering more flexible products. And we can feel more assured of success because GoCardless means we no longer have to worry about payments at all.”