Deel

Global growth drives Deel to maximize payments choice

Fast-growing FinTech Deel has taken the world of work global by enabling friction-free hiring of contractors or employees from anywhere in the world. Customers pay into its platform in a single currency and Deel takes care of the rest by compliantly paying out all their employees and contractors in line with any local employment laws and tax regulations.

This has made hiring an international workforce possible for companies of any size, greatly increasing the available talent pool and creating new opportunities for workers. “Without Deel, companies would have to create legal entities wherever they wanted to hire and be across any compliance or regulatory requirements – that is a hugely onerous process,” said Courtney Chin, Director of FinTech Ops, Deel.

To swap those potential headaches for a single seamless process, Deel has created a platform with a world-class UX to simplify and automate employee and contractor payments across 150+ countries. A key pillar of this experience is offering a choice of payment options for customers, but those options must also be reliable in order to support the company’s own business model.

That’s why Deel chose GoCardless as its global partner for Direct Debit payments.

Prompt and error-free payment critical to Deel’s business model

When companies embraced remote working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Deel began a journey of very high growth that still shows no signs of slowing.

“Month-on-month growth has been insane,” said Courtney. “As the pandemic has continued, the way companies think about remote work has evolved and Deel enables them to tap into workforces they hadn’t previously been able to access.”

As Deel has also expanded the number of markets it operates in, its drive to support customers’ payment preferences while also collecting funds in a timely and reliable fashion increased the need for partners with dependable, robust and automated solutions – all boxes ticked by GoCardless.

“Prompt and error-free payment into the platform is vital to guaranteeing people are paid on time,” said Courtney. “GoCardless enables customers to authorize us to pull money from their accounts, so we can schedule payments at the optimum time. This is key to our popular autopay feature, which allows customers to save time by not having to manually approve and review all their invoices.”

This is a markedly better experience compared to other payment channels, such as customer-initiated bank transfers.

Courtney said: “Bank transfers are definitely less preferable. They require manual initiation and data entry via customers’ banking platforms, which leaves a lot of scope for error. GoCardless is much more predictable than bank transfers, with the API connection pulling payments also providing 100% visibility into status and the customer invoice against which they should be allocated. It’s a better experience for Deel and our customers too."

“When doing some analysis on our failure rates, GoCardless has a much lower failure rate than our average across all of our different methods. We're expecting that with more customer adoption of GoCardless, our overall failure rates as a company will decrease. With GoCardless, cash flow is more predictable too. Less late payments mean we don’t have to fill the gaps which is enabling us to invest our time and money in our continued global growth."

The majority of Deel’s clients prefer to pay by USD via ACH Debit, which is just one of the dozens of global payment schemes GoCardless supports to enable and accelerate the company’s worldwide expansion.

Music to the ears of Deel’s ops teams

The Deel platform is optimized for efficiency, reduced friction, predictability and reliability. Courtney appreciates the way GoCardless aligns with these company-level requirements, while also showing a particular quality prized by all operations teams – being a dependable partner. 

“GoCardless payments match the seamless customer experience model we’re looking for and the team is attentive to our needs, but if I were to summarize the value that it brings to Deel, it would be that it just works,” she said.

“We can self-serve most issues but have access to a Customer Success Manager for added peace of mind. Compared to some of our other payment processors we don't have any significant issues. GoCardless is very low-touch, which is music to the ears of any operations team.”