What can bank payments be used for?

Bank payments can set your business free from the constraints of traditional payment methods.

Imagine a world where businesses are not encumbered by crippling card charges, where payments are made quickly, securely, and with a positive impact on customer experience. 

It seems like a pipe dream. But that’s because existing payment systems for many people and organisations are rooted in ways of working that were constructed for an offline world and which are simply not compatible with the demands of the digital age we live in.

However, our customer community knows different. 

More than 75,000 organisations of all sizes, from the one-person micro business to multinational corporations employing thousands of people across the globe, are already utilising our platform and tools to make their payments faster, more secure, more efficient, and infinitely better for their customers.

Whether it’s using existing Direct Debit systems or applying our cutting-edge and ever-growing open banking APIs, these organisations are able to better execute any payment use case you can imagine.

What can bank payments be used for?

Bank payments can be used to send payments or collect them, whether that payment is a one-off or a recurring payment, an instant payment or a payment scheduled for a defined date.

Collecting and making payments is at the heart of what businesses of all sizes do. For example, an organisation may want to collect one-off payments on its e-commerce store, or collect recurring subscriptions for a service it provides, or need to pay its supplier invoices regularly. All of this is possible with our global bank payment network.

How bank payments can power your business

The possibilities with bank pay are vast. For many businesses, the de facto default way of getting paid is to invoice a customer and receive payment via a manual bank transfer 30 days later. 

This brings with it the problem of late payment - and it’s not a small or isolated problem. According to a report from The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), each year the late payment problem costs the UK economy alone £2.5 billion, and kills 50,000 small businesses.

However, with bank payments businesses are able to get paid on time and remove the pain from payments. This can give businesses:

• Improved cash flow

• Efficiency of not having to waste time chasing late payments

• Visibility over which customers have and haven’t paid

• An improved rate of successful payments

• The benefit of less manual work required to reconcile payments

But speed of payment for businesses isn’t the only benefit of bank payments. The adoption of open banking-powered payments will mean a shift away from cards, and this has a number of benefits. In a wider economic sense, card payments should be viewed as a tax on the economy. The excessive transaction fees, terminal charges, chargeback fees and so on are the price businesses pay simply to do business – and it’s needless.

By providing more direct ways to get paid from one bank account to another, we are lowering these costs to businesses and improving their profitability. That means more money for them and greater freedom for them to invest and grow, create more jobs, and dedicate more resources to understanding and providing for their customers.

Bank payments also mean greater convenience and security for consumers, where expired cards and all of the inconvenience that comes with having to re-input card details across all your payments or wallets becomes a thing of the past.

And, finally, bank pay will provide an environmental benefit too. An economy without plastic cards is an economy that uses less plastic that will eventually find its way into landfill. Not to mention the oil and energy that goes into producing them, the paper with which they’re mailed to users, and so on.

The future of bank payments

GoCardless is a collaborative innovator. We love to work with our customers to develop the next generation of payment products that not only help our customers overcome their challenges, but also help them accelerate their growth journey. We believe bank payments are the best vehicle to achieve this – and the most exciting step forward. 

If you want to come on this journey with us and help us define what the future of payments looks like, get in touch here.