Clay

Moving money faster with Outbound Payments

Clay’s AI-driven credit and debit-as-a-service solutions enable customers to launch and fund their own fully-compliant, branded lending programmes for their own customers.

“It’s hard to build a lending product if it’s not your core business,” said Andrés Castaño, Clay’s Founder and CTO. “With our solution, any company can go live with a fully integrated lending offering in weeks — not years — and save millions in the process. We can handle everything for them, from underwriting and funding through to managing collections, marketing, and customer service.”

As a fintech that’s blazing through its scale-up phase, Clay must be able to move money quickly, efficiently and accurately, so it chose GoCardless Outbound Payments for disbursing loans and GoCardless Direct Debit for collecting repayments.

Go fast, go API first

The GoCardless API means it integrates seamlessly with Clay’s systems, so the company gets the best of both worlds: the agility to move at the speed of a start-up combined with enterprise-grade, scalable payments.

“It takes a couple of clicks for our system to make an API call to Outbound Payments to disburse a loan once it’s approved," said Andrés. "And in a couple more clicks, all future repayments can be scheduled for automatic collection by Direct Debit. No CSV files or FTP uploads, and no swapping between systems. GoCardless even takes care of all the communications borrowers need to receive from a compliance point of view.”

Unified payments

Unifying outbound and inbound payments in a single platform makes Clay’s payment operations relentlessly efficient, so the team can stay lean. Borrowers get their money more quickly and there are fewer mistakes, too.

“There’s no way we could be as lean as we are without Outbound Payments,” said Andrés. “We have one person handling outbound payments instead of three or four, and we’ve still been able to reduce disbursement processing from a couple of days to just minutes. There’s less opportunity for human errors, and borrowers get their funds in three to five seconds.”

Ultimately, these elite levels of efficiency mean more time for the leadership to focus on innovation and growth.

“In this phase of our growth, we all have to chip in all over the business,” said Andrés. “But instead of worrying about payments I can focus on building a better business, because I know our payment infrastructure is reliable, efficient and scalable.”

Up and running in days

Clay was up and running with Outbound Payments in a matter of days because GoCardless’ API is so clear and easy to use.

“What you see is what you get from the documentation,” said Andrés. “Everything is clearly explained, and the sandbox environment is almost identical to the production environment. But the webhooks are actually my favourite technical feature, because they enable real-time data synchronisation between our systems and the GoCardless platform.”

This technical excellence has set the stage for Clay’s next round of payments innovation: using GoCardless’s open banking features to accelerate and add further flexibility to its operations.

“We’ll be able to see from the dashboard that borrowers have received their money, and check they have available balance before collecting," added Andrés. "With the better data that comes with open banking, we’ll even be able to predict the optimum time for collection to protect against defaults. All this will help us get closer to customers.”

One payments provider to rule them all

The benefits of having one provider to handle all its payments — disbursements, Direct Debit, open banking — will only compound as Clay puts its foot down to grow further and faster.

“Our ambition is to scale our operations and deploy significant capital into responsible lending,” said Andrés. “Having a payment partner that is there when we need them, for any type of payment, will help us to go as fast as we can. I’m relieved and happy to have GoCardless on our team.”