Mobile Club
GoCardless has helped France’s Mobile Club grow from 100 customers to nearly 30,000, all without significantly increasing the size of their finance team.
About
Consumer electronics rental service.
Integration
Payment type
Office locations
Payer locations
Key benefits
30k
new customers onboarded without significantly expanding the finance team.
80%
of customers pay by direct bank payment.
Disrupting tech ownership
Mobile Club believes it no longer makes sense to own consumer electronics such as computers, smartphones and tablets, so it offers a monthly rental service instead.
“We launched with big ambitions to serve almost one million customers in a matter of years,” said Pierre Chabert, Mobile Club’s Finance Director. “We knew immediately that collecting payments at that volume would be a challenge.”
After putting various payments players through their paces the team decided that GoCardless could best meet their requirements.
“GoCardless offered the most powerful solution to enable us to scale,” said Pierre. “The welcome they gave us stood out, too. We only had about a hundred clients but this didn’t matter to GoCardless and it was willing to bet on a successful future together.”
Winning bet
That bet has paid off. Today, Mobile Club has nearly thirty thousand customers, most of which pay via GoCardless.
“80% of customers pay by SEPA Direct Debits enabled by GoCardless, and it is also the payment method with the highest success rate,” said Pierre.
Before we switched to GoCardless we tested it against cards for three months and there was no contest. Payments with GoCardless were twice as successful than with cards.
A large part of this is down to the fact that while cards expire, get lost or stolen, customers’ bank account details rarely change. This helps maximise payment success rates and it also simplifies the Mobile Club customer experience.
“Our customers stay with us for a long time, so we don’t want to keep asking them to change their details,” said Pierre. “In fact, once they sign the GoCardless mandate at the very start of their rental, it’s all automatic from there. They don't have to worry about paying their bill every month and they can even choose their preferred payment date. It's really very simple, fluid and easy.”
A platform for growth
Automated and reliable payments deliver a raft of business benefits for Mobile Club, from scalability and efficiency to better financial visibility and improved cash flow. And all these roads lead to growth.
“Going from a few hundred payments to tens of thousands is complicated, and GoCardless was an important partner in absorbing this volume,” said Pierre. “But more than that, higher payment success rates means more cash in the company, which allows us to recruit and grow while staying efficient. Even with a much larger customer base, I don't need to hire someone to manage payments on a daily basis, and so a small finance team can still manage thousands of payments.”
Olivier Thierry, Co-founder and CTO of Mobile Club, also noted that more reliable payments mitigates the risk of customers falling into arrears while they still have expensive tech in their possession.
GoCardless has allowed us to develop intelligent collection funnels that allow us to take customers’ payments at the time of the month where they are most likely to be successful.
Incredible integration
Olivier was seriously impressed with the performance of GoCardless – both the product and its people – during the integration process.
“The experience integrating GoCardless has been absolutely incredible,” he said. “We were initially attracted to GoCardless by the quality of the product, its documentation and the ease of integration with its APIs. But the way our account managers supported us to ensure the success of the implementation, both on the compliance and technical side, was invaluable.”
The simplicity of the switch to GoCardless also provided benefits beyond technical capabilities. “Payments is not our core business so we were able to focus on what we do best, which is renting out high-tech products,” said Olivier.
More adventures to come
Mobile Club has strong international ambitions, with plans in the pipeline to expand throughout Europe to Spain, Portugal, Germany and Netherlands.
“As a start-up, partners that can grow with us are key, and GoCardless can support us in all these countries thanks to SEPA Direct Debit,” said Pierre. “We are always trying to offer the latest innovations and so is GoCardless, and this will help to make us a major player in the rental business.”
Olivier added that he feels sure there’s more to come from the journey that Mobile Club and GoCardless have started together: “On the deployments we have at home and abroad we are very happy and have never had a problem. That leaves us very confident to continue the adventure with GoCardless.”
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