Matera is a French start-up that helps homeowners manage their condominiums and rental investments. The company currently supports 7,000 co-ownership clients, representing 150,000 co-owners throughout France, offering two solutions: Matera Property Management and Matera Rental Management. Now the 4th largest player in the French market for property management, Matera gives the power back to co-owners, saving them time and cost savings of around 30%.
“As an alternative to the traditional model built around expensive intermediaries, Matera helps owners manage their properties in a simple way to optimise their rental profitability,” explains Anthony Cloerec, Head of Finance: “We provide owners with tools and access to expertise in order to empower them to manage their co-ownership independently.”
Since its founding in 2017, Matera has automated its customer billing and payment processes with GoCardless. “We are always trying to promote the simplification and automation of common tasks and GoCardless was a bit of a no-brainer for us,” says Anthony.
Simplicity in our DNA
When a co-ownership becomes a Matera customer all they have to do is fill out a simple online direct bank payment mandate on the GoCardless portal. After that, the payment experience is completely automated.
“Once this mandate is completed, the client no longer has to worry about payment flows,” says Anthony. “We will just notify them about new bills to be paid, the status of bills and the next direct debit deadlines, so they can organise the funds for when the payment is due. Everything is clear and accurate, and this regular communication with customers means we have almost no payment failures. This helps us ensure customer churn remains low.”
Today, most Matera customers pay via GoCardless and the experience this enables has become fundamental to its philosophy.
“Almost 99% of our customers pay with GoCardless and its simplicity has become a part of our DNA - removing all the daily time-consuming tasks that occur with a co-ownership,” says Anthony.
GoCardless takes away customers’ mental burden of, ‘We have to pay the bills,’ and eases the weight of day-to-day management.
End-to-end automation
On the business side, the advantages of GoCardless range from full visibility of its billing situation to accelerated cash flow.
“The platform is very simple and very interactive,” explains Anthony. “With just a few clicks, I can have an overview in a single page of all of the current debits and what will happen in the next few days. That is a real comfort for a fairly small finance team.”
“GoCardless respects the timing of our billing and really speeds up the collection of cash. It’s important for us to be able to manage our cash flow on a daily basis and improve our payment times.”
Matera also saves time on financial admin, thanks to an integration between its billing platform and GoCardless. This has enabled it to automate the entire flow between invoicing and collecting payments.
“GoCardless is fully integrated with our billing tools and therefore greatly simplifies financial management,” says Anthony. “From the moment an invoice is sent there is no human intervention. The hours of admin time saved by GoCardless helps Matera focus on what matters most, our customers.”
International expansion
Matera has recently expanded into the German market and GoCardless has gone with it, helping the team to lift and shift its payments experience with the minimum of fuss.
“GoCardless has proved able to accompany us through all the stages of our development,” says Anthony. “When we launched in Germany in 2021, GoCardless enabled us to replicate our organisation from France and very quickly provide a simplified and aggregated payments system across the two markets. We are likely to expand in the coming months to other countries and again GoCardless will provide us with comfort and simplicity by following us there.”
Simple and efficient
Matera has found a partner with exactly the qualities it needed to be able to deliver on its mission.
“If I had to sum up GC, it would be simple and efficient,” concludes Anthony. “We really have a process that is very simple for us and customers, and at the same time very efficient in the collection of payments. These are really the two most important qualities we were looking for in a partner like GoCardless.”
“I am very confident that GoCardless will be able to support Matera with future challenges and continue with us on our adventures.”
