Perk is an all-in-one platform for booking corporate flights, hotels, trains and cars, and for managing travel expenses.
“We make travel for work simpler and smarter,” said Iñigo Odériz Itúrbide, Senior Director, AR & Treasury. “Our mission is to give customers centralised access to the market’s best inventory, and a single platform from which to manage travel costs, policies and expenses.”
Providing hassle free, seamless travel for customers depends on reliably processing payments. Perk is growing fast, so it needs to combine strong cashflow management with cost-effective and scalable payments and processes.
“Smooth payments equals smooth travel for customers” said Iñigo. “We need to stay efficient to keep our costs down, too, and knowing exactly when payments are coming means we can allocate capital more efficiently. Considering all these factors, billing customers with GoCardless offers the optimum combination of speed, cost and convenience.”
Payments that almost never fail
The payments that Perk processes with GoCardless almost never fail, providing it with an ultra dependable stream of cash. It also gets to keep more of the money that comes in because Direct Debit is so much cheaper than card.
“Our payment failure rate with GoCardless is just 0.7%, which gives us incredible certainty around cashflow,” said Iñigo. “On an average transaction, GoCardless payments are also up to 5x cheaper than cards.”
This winning formula of performance plus price is all the incentive Perk needs to try to collect more payments through GoCardless, to scale these benefits and exploit further efficiencies as it grows.
“Around 20% of payments already go through GoCardless and we want that to grow,” said Iñigo.
We’re building a big company with thousands of customers. The automation we get from GoCardless means we could triple our customer base — or more — without increasing headcount to handle Direct Debits.
Marginal gains, big benefits
There are several small details that will also add up to big improvements as Perk scales its use of GoCardless. The multi-account function, for example, enables Perk to link multiple GoCardless accounts in a parent-child structure — no more manually managing multiple accounts and logins.
“With other payment solutions it’s painful logging in and out of different accounts to get financial reports for our various entities,” he said. “Multi-account makes it much quicker to get reports for all our legal entities, making my monthly reporting more convenient.”
From Europe to the US, via the rest of the world
Perk is based in Europe and the US, but its customers have subsidiaries all over the world, so it must be able to accept payments globally.
“GoCardless lets us collect in local currencies and, so far, it has been able to support us wherever in the world we’ve needed to collect a payment,” said Iñigo.
For a market like the US, where businesses reach for the credit card almost by default, it also means we can offer an alternative payment method with much lower fees.
Cool, calm and collected
“GoCardless makes us feel relaxed because, in the best possible way, we almost don’t need to care about Direct Debit collections,” said Iñigo.
Everything works perfectly and whenever we need any support our Customer Success Manager is always on the end of the phone — I wish I had support like that from other vendors.
"We trust GoCardless as a partner that can help us expand our travel and expense management businesses, and we feel there’s a huge opportunity ahead for us to grow together,” he added.
