GoCardless provides Octopus Energy with a global, enterprise-grade payments engine that’s built for scale, and can process payments and refunds faster than the competition.
Direct Debit mandates migrated from previous provider.
1-2 days
for refunds to be processed, compared to up to five days previously.
£1 billion
payments processed every month in the UK alone.
£48M
in failed payments recaptured across 12 months.
Accelerating scale with enterprise-grade payments
It took less than 10 years for Octopus Energy to grow from disruptive start-up to the UK’s largest energy supplier, providing greener, cheaper energy to 11 million customers across 27 countries.
Octopus has risen to the top by combining its customer obsessed culture with a world-class technology stack. That stack now features GoCardless’ enterprise-grade payments engine, which provides Octopus with a centralised global platform that reduces transaction costs, streamlines operations, and delivers deep automation and granular control over the customer experience.
One of the largest Direct Debit migrations in UK history
The relationship with GoCardless began with Octopus’ 2022 acquisition of Bulb, and has been growing and evolving ever since.
Over the years, Octopus and GoCardless have consistently raised the bar for operational and customer experience excellence, by automating payments at scale and proving that paying bills can be a positive customer experience.
Among the most recent successes, GoCardless supported Octopus in enabling customers to get their account credits back faster than ever. The two teams collaborated closely to undertake one of the largest Direct Debit migrations in UK history, moving 5.5 million customer accounts and £12 billion of annual payments to the GoCardless platform.
Refunds that once took up to five working days can now land in customers’ bank accounts in just one or two days — faster than any other major energy supplier — because GoCardless allows transactions to move smoothly behind the scenes, with fewer delays and less repetitive admin. Someone tapping “refund” in the Octopus app on a Monday could now see the money back before lunchtime on Wednesday. Around 70% of refunds already happen this way, with roughly 30,000 processed every week.
Moving £12 billion of payments with zero disruption is a huge technical achievement. It’s another step in using technology to make energy fairer and faster for customers.
- Greg Jackson, Founder and CEO of Octopus Energy
Turning enterprise scale into measurable value
Following the recent migration, GoCardless now processes more than £1 billion every month for Octopus in the UK alone, and payments from more than 8 million Octopus customers in total across six payment schemes. This frees up Octopus’ teams to spend more time helping customers where it matters.
Elsewhere, the full breadth of the GoCardless product suite has allowed Octopus to convert its enterprise-level scale into additional value.
Headlines include recapturing £48m of failed payments in the last 12 months thanks to Success+, which uses machine learning-driven models to automatically retry payments at the time they’re most likely to be successful. Importantly for the customer experience and compliance, the feature’s fine-grained controls allow Octopus to exclude vulnerable payers from repeated attempts to collect payments.
And, on an operational level, unifying global payments processing across multiple markets under a single contract — including the UK, EU and New Zealand — has driven down transaction costs and management overheads.
GoCardless has been an essential partner as we’ve scaled — the platform is strong and built for growth.
- Mario Lupori, Commercial Director for Octopus Energy
Built for scale, engineered for the future
Octopus’ modern payments backbone looks set to play an increasingly pivotal role as it continues its global expansion, and as the energy transition accelerates worldwide.
From keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth, to supporting customer-centric innovations in smart tariffs, flexible billing and real-time energy management, its payment systems based on GoCardless are built for scale and engineered for the future.
