ManyPets
Pet insurer ManyPets has built a slick customer experience around automated payments from GoCardless, helping to keep policy renewals high and the finance team lean.
About
Pet insurance
Integration
Payment Type
Office locations
Payer locations
Key benefits
500,000
payments processed a month with GoCardless.
95%
of customers pay monthly using GoCardless.
Pain-free payments for pet insurance
ManyPets is a leading pet insurer in the UK and US. Its mission is to make the world a better place for pets and their owners with a range of pet insurance and pet wellness services.
It has grown fast since opening for business in 2017 and now insures 500,000 pets.
“We’re not purely insurance people, we’re more customer focused,” said Derek Livingstone, Head of Treasury, ManyPets. “We’re about creating insurance policies and processes that simply deliver what people need, without the jargon or small print.”
ManyPets prides itself on offering fantastic experiences, and GoCardless helps by making monthly policy payments pain free for customers, and low-cost and efficient to process for the business.
Payments sweet spot
ManyPets was previously using a legacy payments system developed in-house, which was beginning to add hours of extra admin as the business grew. When it decided to launch its new pet insurance offering, it needed a new payments integration, and a decision had to be made: face a lengthy and complicated process to build one from scratch, or find a new Direct Debit solution.
Over 95% of ManyPets’ payments in the UK are taken using Direct Debit, so the ability to scale was a top priority. GoCardless allowed it to do exactly that, as Guy Farley, Co-Founder and CTO, explained:
Our legacy system ‘worked’, but could never be used to grow the business. GoCardless means no extra admin time as we continue the push to grow as quickly as possible.
Today, GoCardless has helped ManyPets to strike the perfect balance between customer experience, operational complexity, and costs, adds Derek.
“We have to balance three competing priorities with payments,” he said. “One, making it easy for customers to pay; two, minimising operational processes and, finally, keeping the absolute cost of accepting payments down.”
ManyPets has found that sweet spot with GoCardless.
“Customers trust Direct Debit and it’s very familiar, and the GoCardless platform allows us to collect payments in an efficient, tech-enabled way that is also way cheaper than card,” added Derek.
Building a better business
The reliability of GoCardless means ManyPets has been able to build a better business around low payment failure rates and strong retention rates – both strategically important financial performance measures.
“Insurance is a renewal business and our success depends on being there for customers for the life of their pets,” said Derek.
Because GoCardless makes renewals painless it’s important to our long-term financial viability. Across 500,000 monthly payments our failure rate is only 0.64% and chargebacks are just 0.01%, which massively outperforms other businesses.
Automating payments with GoCardless has also allowed ManyPets to enable payments to be collected on any monthly date, without making things fiddly for the finance team.
“If we did Direct Debits manually, we'd have to limit customer choice, and employ at least one person to manage things, which wouldn't be the most exciting job,” said Derek. “But with GoCardless, it's all automated and we have flexibility to collect payments when we want.”
“As a growth business that is scaling quickly, we need to build streamlined processes and keep a very lean finance team – GoCardless is a best of breed tech partner that lets us do that,” said Derek.
An API that’s easy to work with
Finding an API that was both easy to implement, yet also powerful and customisable was a big factor for ManyPets. The GoCardless API is optimised specifically for Direct Debit and has pre-built code for a number of popular programming languages.
The API was one of the key reasons ManyPets chose GoCardless over other solutions, and Guy wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others in his network.
“I would definitely recommend GoCardless to somebody else. It’s an example of how to do an API well. The developers are very happy.”
Happier and more educated customers
As well as developers feeling much happier since the move to GoCardless, customers are benefitting from the change as well. And with more visibility in reporting the operations team are better equipped to inform customers about their specific payment.
“Customers are happier because they get better information when they query a payment. They’re used to Direct Debit and are happy as long as it works well and is transparent,” said Guy.
Keeping up with customers, and ahead of the competition
Soon, GoCardless will be going global with ManyPets as the company looks to add ACH payments, the Direct Debit equivalent in the US.
“We’re always thinking globally, so having a partner that covers the markets we want to be in, under a single account management structure, single interface and consistent APIs – all that will make it easier for us to achieve our goals,” said Derek.
And throughout this journey, ManyPets’ dedicated GoCardless Customer Success Manager will be on hand to help.
“Ultimately we’re a tech led business and must continue innovating to keep up with customers and ahead of the competition,” said Derek.
“We have a direct line to our GoCardless Customer Success Manager, who we can engage on specific challenges and opportunities. They’re also a ready source of insights and best practices from the wider marketplace, illustrating how leaning on GoCardless’ payments innovation expertise allows us to stay focused on doing what we do best.”