Capital on Tap

Billions collected, hassle free

For more than a decade Capital on Tap has been providing small businesses with simple and painless access to funding. Today, their services enable 200,000 small business customers to put their focus back into running their business.

“What that looks like is a business credit card and spend management platform where you can apply in two minutes, get an instant decision, get access to funding immediately, be able to manage spend limits, add supplementary cards for free - all with no annual fees or FX or ATM fees,” explained Hugh Acland, Commercial Director at Capital on Tap.

Cheaper and quicker than cards

Capital on Tap has been collecting monthly repayments from customers using GoCardless ever since a period of rapid growth showed card payments to be inefficient and expensive.

“As we grew and the number of repayments we were taking each month increased, it quickly became unscalable,” said Chief Operating Officer Damian Brychcy. “We knew that taking payments by direct bank payment would be easier for our customers, and it was also clear that GoCardless shared our commitment to making life easier for small businesses.”

GoCardless allows Capital on Tap’s customers to set up their monthly payments just once. Then they can relax knowing their repayments will happen on time, every time, and they’ll never fall behind. Meanwhile, Capital on Tap dodges costly card networks.

“Our small business customers know exactly how much they are paying back and when it comes out each month, while we can substantially reduce the overhead and cost of managing these repayments,” said Damian.

In that time, GoCardless has also helped Capital on Tap scale both at home and internationally, explained Neel Sapat, Senior Growth Manager: “We've expanded our geographical base to the US, where we now have 13,000 new customers using our product, and we've increased our headcount in the UK. GoCardless has been a massive part of our journey and the way we support customers.”

Protection in the “wild west” of chargebacks

Being the world’s best credit card for small businesses naturally opens Capital on Tap to challenges around fraud. On the direct bank payment side that means chargeback fraud, and the team has turned to GoCardless Protect+ to challenge unfair chargebacks and recover lost revenue.

“It's quite difficult to dispute chargebacks directly with banks,” said Clare Bennett, Product Manager. “Since piloting Protect+ from GoCardless, we've successfully retrieved about £34,000 of chargebacks that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to get back.”

“Chargebacks and disputes in the direct debit world is the wild, wild west,” added Damian.

The customer view

Capital on Tap’s customers love the simplicity and trackability of its offering and payment collection process.

“Capital on Tap helps our business because it's simple,” said Adam Cozens, Managing Director and Co-founder of Perky Blenders – and another GoCardless customer himself. “I like the fact that it's easy for our staff to use and I really enjoy the fact that it's easy to track our payments across multiple cards. Both Capital on Tap and GoCardless have been very useful to us and it's something that I can't see us moving from in the future.”

Payments innovation. And inspiration.

The Capital on Tap team are certain that, with a long history of success and plenty of overlap in outlook and purpose, there’s lots more scope for the two companies to keep bringing the best out of each other.

One aspect of upcoming payments innovation has particularly inspired Capital on Tap: Variable Recurring Payments, which are powered by Open Banking.

“Open Banking has the possibility of making payments faster and easier, which is the North Star for our payments experience,” said Damian. “We're super excited to partner with someone like GoCardless to offer Variable Recurring Payments as soon as they become available, so customers can pay us more quickly and simply than they can with Direct Debit.”

Damian concluded by saying that there was little doubt GoCardless could continue supporting Capital on Tap’s growth: “I'm confident that GoCardless can support our future aspirations because they've proved themselves for nine straight years. We partnered with them in 2013 when we had 1,000 customers doing a million in revenue. Now we have over 100,000 customers doing more than 250 million in revenue and GoCardless has been there every step of the way.”