Global payments, without the punishing FX fees

Pump helps companies save time and money on hyperscale cloud services. By pooling the purchasing power of thousands of companies, it secures enterprise-level discounts that smaller startups could never access on their own.

“We do this through various products that reduce cloud and AI costs and help companies forecast future costs,” said Stuart Lundberg, Head of Operations at Pump. “We currently support AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and we’re constantly adding new hyperscalers.”

Pump collects a significant portion of its monthly billing — millions of dollars a month — using ACH Pull via GoCardless, which lets it bill global customers simply and cheaply, without losing out to punishing FX fees.

Payment costs were killing margins

Pump’s previous ACH Pull partner was stronger in cards than it was in ACH, and it couldn’t handle the global coverage Pump needed.

“About half our customers are outside the US, in dozens of countries around the world,” said Michael Buckwald, COO at Pump. “Their ACH product was relatively immature — it didn’t offer truly global coverage and the economics were much worse. They only allowed us to choose one currency to settle in, and we had to pay FX fees for all the others.”

As Pump grew — it now bills close to $10 million a month through GoCardless, out of almost $40 million in total — this risked becoming a margin killer. It was time for a change.

Any currency, at a flat rate. And millions of dollars saved

As Pump explored the market, GoCardless soon emerged as the ideal package because it lets Pump settle in whatever currency it wants.

The economics we get with GoCardless have definitely saved us millions of dollars a year. We can bill customers in their local currency and have payments settle in that same currency, plus the number of countries covered was probably the best out of all the options we looked at.

The per-transaction costs are superior overall, too.

“Most payment providers we spoke to wanted to charge a percentage of each transaction, whereas GoCardless gives us a flat rate,” said Michael. “That’s critical for our business model because we’re a volume play with relatively small margins.”

Can’t think of a single failed payment

Cloud service providers bill Pump for customers’ cloud usage, which Pump then on-charges. That makes reliable payments essential to avoid a serious cashflow crunch.

“The payment side is absolutely mission critical to the business, and we trust GoCardless to handle it,” said Michael.

We’ve been working with them for at least three years, and I can’t think of a single payment not going through, or any kind of outage or technical issue.

This combination of reliability and strong commercials has provided a crucial foundation for Pump’s growth. “We’ve grown in an extraordinary way over the past two years, and a big part of that is the partnership with GoCardless,” added Michael.

Dev’s love the API

The GoCardless platform has become a key part of Pump’s wider business systems, from the seamless API through to insightful reporting.

“We get great insights into customer balances from the GoCardless platform, which helps us optimize our operations and make smarter decisions on customers’ creditworthiness,” said Stuart.

“The API is very robust, and our developers love working with it,” added Michael. “We use the GoCardless currency conversion API right across the business.”

Pump up the volume

Pump is continuing to grow quickly, and it knows it can take that growth in its stride with GoCardless taking care of ACH payments.

“We’ve grown to about 2,000 customers and we continue to grow quickly,” said Michael.

“GoCardless is a true enterprise-grade solution and a critical pillar of our operations. As our customer base has scaled, GoCardless has scaled with us without creating any extra overhead. It gives us a tremendous amount of security and comfort, knowing that a substantial amount of revenue is going to come in each month — on time, every time.”