Husky

Payments that pull their weight for Husky

Husky Workplace Pensions simplifies the UK government’s pension salary exchange programme, making it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to implement and understand, saving time and money for both employers and employees.

Husky’s software, available for a monthly subscription, helps SMEs find the most suitable workplace pensions and save money by offering preferential rates. By using Husky directly, SMEs can access lower-cost pensions than they would by going directly to the providers.

“Large employers implement salary exchange all the time, because they have lots of support and resources,” said Brendan Shanks, CEO and Founder, Husky. “But SMEs get very little access to help and as a result 95% don’t implement salary exchange, so they’re missing out. Plenty of people need all the help they can get with saving: a quarter of UK adults have less than £100 in savings (Money and Pensions Service, 2022), and almost half of UK households would struggle to cover a £300 bill (Nest Insight, 2023). ”

Clients sign up on the website and monthly subscriptions are paid through Chargebee. And since it began offering GoCardless as a payment option, it has reduced late payments to almost zero, along with nearly eliminating all the associated admin and hassle.

Too many late and failed card payments

When it started out, Husky only accepted credit card payments. “We had a lot of late or missed payments because of expired and cancelled credit cards,” said Brendan. “We’re a lean team, and we were struggling to resource the chasing of overdue payments.”

Husky reports that failure rates for credit card payments run at around 9%.

“We have really aggressive plans for growth,” said Brendan. “As our customer base grows, the financial liability of unpaid debt and the challenge of chasing it would grow to be massive.”

Simple integration of Direct Debit payments

GoCardless is a Chargebee partner, so it was simple for Husky to spin up Direct Debit as an alternative to credit cards. 

Robin Kilpatrick, CTO, Husky said: “We knew Direct Debits had some advantages over credit cards for subscription payments, especially reliability and costs. Clients were also asking to pay by Direct Debit too.”

“It was simple to integrate GoCardless,” said Robin. “We just had to key in some company and banking information and the rest was automatic. Our customers now have a choice between Direct Debit or credit card payments when they sign up, and all the information flows from Chargebee to GoCardless. One of the advantages of using the Chargebee integration is that someone can switch from credit card payments to Direct Debit in the same flow.”

"We don’t have to have an operations team to manage the payments," added Robin. "It’s a testament to how reliable the service is that I very rarely have to sign in to the GoCardless site.”

Reduced payment failures to almost zero

Today, two-thirds of customers pay Husky through GoCardless.

“Payments are so much easier for customers to manage on Direct Debit than they are on credit cards,” said Robin.

Just how effective this is can be seen in the huge drop in failed payments, freeing Husky from the burden of chasing overdue bills. “We see failure rates of almost zero on GoCardless,” said Robin.

In the rare event a payment does fail, Husky can rely on GoCardless’s Success+ service. It intelligently manages late payments, automatically collecting 70% of failed payments on the day best suited to customers.

“GoCardless is proving so successful at first-time collection that our retries are extremely low,” said Robin. “We have enabled Success+, though, to help us if there should be a problem. We’re always interested in anything that automates tasks that would otherwise need one of our team to fix.”

Saving time and money

Husky is saving money, too: the fees for GoCardless transactions are a fraction of what it costs to process card payments. “GoCardless transaction fees are half those of credit cards,” said Brendan. “That really adds up over the hundreds of customers that have chosen to pay by GoCardless rather than card.”

For Brendan, this speaks to the strong alignment between the value that both Husky and GoCardless offer to customers.

Robin concluded: “I’d encourage other companies to look at integrating GoCardless earlier than we did. It really does make life easier in terms of collecting debt and having fewer failed payments.”