The 99.99% payment success rate that Fuse gets with GoCardless helps it deliver cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant energy to hundreds of thousands of customers — and counting.
Fuse is building the future of energy from source to socket with cheaper tariffs, better service, and greater efficiency. In two years it has scaled from zero to over 200,000 customers.
“We have our own UK-based solar and wind assets, a trading desk and retail operation, and an elite tech team,” said Manuel Ayllon, Head of Finance, Fuse. “This integrated setup is proving our thesis: that energy can be more abundant, affordable and greener, so people can use more of it to improve their lives.”
Fuse uses GoCardless to collect customers’ monthly bills, which are calculated every 30 minutes and displayed live in its custom-built app.
GoCardless works for us on every level, the competitive fee structure helps us keep bills down. Its flexibility, accuracy and reliability means we can provide an exceptional billing experience to our customers. And, overall, it’s helped us scale monthly collections by more than 10x without needing to change our set up.
Rock-solid reliability
Beyond the usual cashflow pressures that come with being a fast-growing start up, Fuse has to comply with strictly regulated payments to energy network and infrastructure operators. Collecting payments on time and efficiently is super important to maintaining healthy working capital and ensuring it can meet these obligations.
As it grew, this meant the unpredictable performance of its previous Direct Debit system quickly became unscalable.
“They took up to three weeks to send the cash, charged the wrong amount or missed some collections entirely,” said Manuel. “We compared three alternative solutions and GoCardless’ collection time was shortest, its accuracy highest and fees the most competitive.”
Now its payment success rate is sky high, giving the team some welcome headspace to focus on its mission.
Our payment success rate with GoCardless is 99.99%, and days sales outstanding is just 10, so we can manage all our regulated payments on time, no problem
said Manuel. “GoCardless’ reliability means we can provide that up-to-the-minute billing experience our customers love. And we can focus on launching new products and optimising the business, instead of spending precious time managing payments.”
The three words you want to hear from your engineers
“It just works” — three words every business wants to hear from their engineering lead when onboarding a new payments system. And the exact words of Ioan Vevera, Software Engineer at Fuse.
“All the API documentation was fantastic and it only took one developer a single week to implement all the features we need,” he added. “That’s insane for such an impactful solution. To highlight how dependable GoCardless is, we’ve since only had two interactions with their team on the technical side.”
Whenever anyone at Fuse does need to speak with GoCardless, their dedicated Customer Success Manager is always just a phone call or email away.
“We always get a response within 24 hours,” said Manuel. “We also get together every six months to review performance, and the GoCardless team comes prepped with killer insights into innovation opportunities based on their analysis of our actual usage. On the back of conversations like these, we’re exploring how Variable Recurring Payments from GoCardless could be a cheaper alternative to the card payments we accept in other parts of the business. And how Protect+ can help us limit chargebacks as our customer base grows.”
Scale, scale, and more scale
Because its customer base is growing so fast, scalability is always top of mind for Fuse.
We’re adding up to 50% more customers every month and GoCardless helps us scale with ease
“It already has no trouble handling over 160,000 payments every month, and we know it will keep on working exactly the same as we add hundreds of thousands more. The pricing structure also improves as we increase volume, so it becomes even more cost-effective as we grow. Plus, we’re expanding into Ireland, the US and Spain, and GoCardless’ global coverage means we can just replicate our existing processes in these new markets.”
Manuel is looking forward to payments staying predictable and painless as the company’s growth accelerates.
“The biggest surprise about working with GoCardless is that there’s been no surprises at all,” he said. “I always feel calm knowing GoCardless is taking care of our payments, which might be my favourite performance metric of all.”
