Orus provides professional insurance for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses. Its goal is to simplify an essential but often complex need, so its customers can focus on growing their businesses.
“Our vision is to provide very simple and transparent insurance,” said Axel Compain, Head of Finance & Strategy. “We’re bringing professional insurance into the 21st century and improving a customer experience that has lagged in this industry for the past decade.”
Since 2024, Orus has collected customers’ insurance premiums by SEPA using GoCardless, which offers the perfect combination of high payment success rate and low transaction fees — helping Orus keep more of the money it makes.
The trouble with their previous payments partner
Orus collects customers’ premiums monthly or annually. With a business model built around collecting a commission on policies underwritten by other insurers, low-cost, reliable payments are essential. The trouble was, their previous payments partner wasn’t a SEPA specialist.
Their SEPA tech stack wasn’t good and that caused a few problems. We wanted to lower our rate of failed payments, but their solution didn’t allow automatic retries. It also couldn’t tell the difference between a chargeback and a failure caused by insufficient funds, so every failure was treated as a chargeback, costing us €7.50 each.
Less failures, lower costs
When looking for alternatives, it quickly became clear to Axel that switching to GoCardless would allow Orus to keep payment failures to a minimum, with the added bonus of lowering its overall cost per transaction.
“GoCardless is a SEPA specialist that understands what businesses need, and they’ve built an excellent tech stack around those needs,” said Axel.
One of those tools is Success+, which uses payments intelligence to automatically retry failed payments on the day they’re most likely to succeed. The feature has helped Orus recover more failed payments with zero intervention from the team.
Success+ is a very smart feature that gets payment failures down to the lowest possible rate. It’s helped us recover 38% of failed payments worth more than a million euros.
And when payments do fail, they now cost far less, because they’re accurately classified.
“Payments usually fail because of insufficient funds,” said Axel. “Only a tiny fraction — between 0.3% and 0.5% — are actually chargebacks, so we’re not paying the €7.50 fee nearly as often. And GoCardless gives us a number of free chargebacks before we’re billed anyway.”
Less churn than cards
Orus still allows customers to pay by card — choice is part of delivering a convenient service. But 70% of its 60,000 customers pay by GoCardless, and Axel wants that share to grow because SEPA customers tend to churn less.
“We’ve seen that the unpaid rate is a lagging indicator of churn,” he said. “If someone doesn’t pay, we terminate their contract — but what matters most right now is keeping churn as low as possible. And churn is very different between SEPA and card: it’s much higher for card users than SEPA users. That convinced us to push SEPA adoption harder.”
A developer-friendly API
Orus has integrated GoCardless directly into its billing and finance systems via the GoCardless API, allowing it to build a payment setup that precisely fits its needs.
“The GoCardless API allows us to build the integrations we need on top to analyse payment performance,” said Axel. “Our developers are very happy with the API. The initial integration was simple, and it’s not something we have to keep revisiting or work hard to maintain," he added.
We haven’t worked with a major bank’s API ourselves, but we know they’d be much more painful to work with. It certainly wouldn’t be a smooth, two-week integration handled by a single developer.
A partner for growth
As well as a rock-solid payments platform, Orus has a partner for growth in GoCardless.
“Our GoCardless Customer Success Manager has worked hard to understand our business and where we want to get to, and we’ve built a strong long-term partnership,” said Axel.
“We’re growing fast — doubling our payments every year — and the platform has scaled with us. We’ve worked closely with GoCardless to create commercial arrangements that recognise both our potential and the stage of growth we’re at. It’s the best kind of partnership: a win-win for both of us.”
