By automating payments with GoCardless, Jellyfish Energy is saving 25 hours a week on manual work and has a payments engine that’s ready for 10x scale.
Jellyfish Energy’s mission is to provide the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses with simple and fair energy. One way it aims to do that is by leveraging technology and data to make its services as transparent as its ocean-dwelling namesake.
“We don’t want to be the biggest, we just want to be the fairest,” said Aidon Hudson, CEO, Jellyfish. “Using my background in tech and the energy market, we’ve built out platforms and systems that allow customers to know exactly where they stand on their energy bills, and to make accessing support easy.”
Aidon has founded several businesses and he always uses GoCardless to automate Direct Debit collections and integrate payments into wider business systems. “I only use GoCardless simply because it's so good,” he said. “It saves time by eliminating manual work, it’s super simple from a development and UX standpoint, and the support levels are first rate.”
Saved 25 hours of admin a week. Every week
Direct Debit is the energy industry standard for paying bills because it’s reliable and customers trust it. That makes GoCardless the cornerstone of Jellyfish’s cash generation and a key feature of its tech stack.
“All of our Direct Debits are processed through GoCardless, which adds up to around 90% of revenue,” said Aidon.
“It’s tightly integrated with our billing and accounting systems so payments are automatically scheduled when invoices fall due and then reconciled once collected. We save 20 to 25 hours of manual work a week thanks to GoCardless," added Aidon.
Whether we grow 5x or 10x we won’t need to add people to the credit control team. The time saved also means more time with customers or working on new products.
Pioneering the future of payments
Jellyfish’s commitment to transparency and innovation has also made it an early mover in open banking. In March 2025, GoCardless and Jellyfish Energy completed the UK’s first-ever Recurring Pay by Bank transaction with GoCardless. This is a landmark moment as the industry prepares for the next generation of account-to-account payments to move into the mainstream.
Jellyfish plans to use Recurring Pay by Bank to give its business customers more flexible payment options, by integrating Pay by Bank with its rewards-based platform that unlocks better rates for reliable payers. For Jellyfish, it means lower still transaction costs and payments that settle instantly. It’s also the natural next step for a business dedicated to giving customers real control over their energy costs.
“At Jellyfish, we’ve built our entire business model around rewarding reliable payment behaviour and giving customers real transparency and control over their energy costs,” said Aidon.
"Recurring Pay by Bank is the next natural stage of that philosophy, giving our business customers flexibility and payment reliability that ultimately enables us to offer better rates. Our industry is often seen as traditional and inflexible, which is why we’re excited to be at the forefront of bringing open banking payment solutions to the business energy sector, where they can deliver much-needed value to SMEs managing cashflow."
Easiest API ever
Aidon says the GoCardless API made it simple to integrate payments into Jellyfish's wider business systems.
I've worked on hundreds of projects over the years and the GoCardless API is the easiest I’ve ever used, on any solution. You can get started in minutes and be finished in a few hours of dev time because it’s logical and well structured.
It might be simple, but the GoCardless API unlocks some powerful benefits for Jellyfish.
“The API integration provides real-time payments insights and real-time data synchronisation across our systems,” add Aidon. “Events in GoCardless instantly trigger several workflows, like reconciliations and custom follow-ups on failed payments or cancelled Direct Debit mandates. And it’s engineered for scale. We’ve been growing fast but have never had any downtime on the API endpoints.”
It’s a match
Aidon says it’s a strong match between Jellyfish and GoCardless when it comes to technical philosophy and dedication to helping businesses to grow.
“I love how, like us, GoCardless is tech led and constantly innovating around ways to help their customers build better businesses,” said Aidon. “Like Success+, which uses GoCardless data models to predict the best time to automatically retry failed payments. We're already seeing great initial results with failed payment retries being successfully collected the second time around, and I expect that to keep improving.”
Strategic support
No downtime means no need for troubleshooting support from GoCardless, so the two can focus on strategy instead.
“GoCardless understands growth and helps us in lots of ways, from getting the commercials right as we scale up to being super responsive whenever we’re building out new processes,” said Aidon.
“I know if I send an email across, I'm getting a response that day. If I need some training, they’ll always find someone within the business that can help. And we have regular catch ups along the way to discuss how things are going.”
Up next, Outbound Payments
Aidon is excited at where this partnership of two like-minded, tech-led pioneers is headed next.
We’re already talking with GoCardless about adopting Outbound Payments. Everyone hates trying to get a refund on their final bill from their energy provider, but with Outbound Payments customers could tap a button in our app and get one automatically, within hours. We can’t wait because that’ll save even more time for the finance team.
