Last editedJul 20233 min read
Collecting recurring payments should be easy, for you and your customers. You shouldn’t spend time worrying about getting paid. Instead, you want to focus on growing your business. But payment collection can be complicated and resource-intensive, especially if your Payment Service Provider (PSP) isn’t up to the job.
In this article we’ll explore how recurring payment collection can be confusing and hard to navigate, and how using GoCardless for your recurring payment collection will ease or eliminate this complexity.
1. It’s difficult to see which payments have been successful and which have failed.
In another guide, we discuss in detail the importance of reducing payment failures. Every failed payment negatively impacts your cash flow, creates the potential for a customer to churn, and requires input from your team to rectify it.
But what if you can’t even see which payments have failed, and which customer that failure is tied to? Depending on both the payment methods and the specific PSP you use to collect payments, the visibility over payment collection can differ dramatically.
With many traditional Direct Debit bureaus, payment failure reports are only provided weekly or even monthly.
How GoCardless fixes the pain
GoCardless provides a range of automatic notifications, to both your business and your customers, on all aspects of the recurring payment collection process, including mandate setup, payment failures, payment retries and more. The full list of GoCardless notifications can be found here.
“With previous providers, I only found out that a member had left me once I did a monthly audit, 2 months after the fact. I was the last person to know if a payment date had changed or if a member had left me!” - Lee Drayton, Managing Director, LD Fitness
2. I have to manage my payments across multiple systems.
Whether you collect invoice payments, subscriptions or instalments, accessing your PSP via another platform (such as billing, accounting or CRM software) can make the process much smoother.
But if there’s no integration between your PSP and other finance platforms you run, you will need to manually transfer data between those systems regularly. This requires additional human resources, and the stress of having to deal with a lot of compliance and data protection issues yourself.
How GoCardless fixes the pain
GoCardless integrates seamlessly with more than 200 of the best CRMs, subscription billing platforms, and invoicing software providers.
If you’re already using one of our partners, it’s simple to add GoCardless to your existing technology stack.
“We wanted a solution that would integrate easily into our existing workflows and that could provide solid reporting – GoCardless ticks all of those boxes.” - Ju-Vern, Compliance Finance Manager, Receipt Bank.
3. I’m worried about compliance and data security
Keeping your customers safe should be paramount when collecting recurring payments. When you work with a PSP, you put a lot of faith in that provider and their approach to compliance.
Do they have ISO27001 certification? Are they fully GDPR compliant? Are they SCA compliant (in a way that won’t harm your conversion rates)? These are just a few of the questions you should be asking your PSP.
How GoCardless fixes the pain
GoCardless is trusted by over 50,000 businesses across the globe.
Strong encryption protocols keep our customers safe, while being ISO27001 provides extra reassurance. Our global data risk management programme is built to strict GDPR standards to ensure we protect and respect personal data. GoCardless is also fully SCA compliant.
“We’ve gone from a small startup to a medium-sized corporate in just a few years. From a compliance perspective, we’re constantly having to evolve and it’s really important that our chosen partners can support us in this.” - Chris Latchford, Global Head of Payments Strategy, Funding Circle
4. Expanding beyond my domestic market is too complicated
For some businesses, expanding into new markets becomes the only way to keep growing at a sustainable rate. 73% of decision-makers think their business would be more successful if it had greater access to international markets.
However, 39% think the complexity of global payments is holding their business back from expanding internationally*. Part of the reason is down to FX.
Traditionally, FX conversion comes with hidden fees that make taking payments across borders more expensive, while the need to open bank accounts in every new market makes further expansion even more complex.
These frustrations can be addressed with the right PSP by your side.
How GoCardless fixes the pain
GoCardless has launched the first global network for recurring payments. Whether you’ve already expanded to new markets or have ambitions to, we’ve created a simple way to collect payments globally.
Our international transaction fee includes the cost of currency exchange into your home bank account, using the real exchange rate powered by our friends at Wise.
Discover how GoCardless can remove payment complexity for your business.
Every business faces its own unique payment challenges. Talk to our sales team about the payment complexity holding back your business. They’ll explain how GoCardless can help make recurring payment collection simpler and more straightforward.
*All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 741 adults (senior decision-makers in private businesses of 50 or more employees). Fieldwork was undertaken between 14th - 30th October 2019. The survey was carried out online.
