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What are the advantages of paperless mandates for SEPA Direct Debit?

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As the Global Payment Partnership Lead for SEPA Laura and her team manage the relationship with GoCardless' partner banks for the European SEPA scheme, ensuring current and future banking partners can deliver what GoCardless needs to serve merchants in the best way possible. As the Global Payment Partnerships Lead Laura has developed in-depth knowledge of SEPA and how GoCardless works with the scheme, becoming the resident expert on SEPA. ConnectSee full bio

Last editedMay 20221 min read

Paperless mandates have several advantages over paper mandates and can provide potential cost and efficiency benefits.

At GoCardless we believe the key to unlocking the full potential of SEPA and Direct Debits more generally, particularly for online merchants, is currently the paperless mandate.

Paperless mandates have several advantages over paper mandates and can provide potential cost and efficiency benefits:

Fewer manual entry processes - paper mandates require physical transfer, storage and details to be keyed in manually by merchants. The paperless mandate process is therefore inherently more efficient and less open to error.
Automated processes – paperless mandates allow automatic storage and retrieval of mandate data.
No printing, signing and returning effort – Paperless mandates avoid the inconvenience of printing, signing and mailing a paper form by using a fully electronic process. This means that there are no printing and postage costs. It also reduces paper files and archiving.

GoCardless provides a simple online system for creating and managing SEPA Direct Debits mandates.