Spot On

Payments that hit the spot

Spot On is an insurtech start-up using technology to relentlessly reduce overheads in order to offer affordable pet insurance for every cat and dog owner.

In an industry where, Spot On estimates, around 60% of customer service queries are related to payments in some way, a payments platform with a great API is a must-have for both efficiently handling these queries and creating a great customer experience.

Putting customers in control

That platform is GoCardless, around which Spot On has built a series of event-driven, automated processes to help customers self-serve common payment queries.

“The GoCardless API is fantastic at firing out events to the rest of our systems,” said co-founder Christian van der Westhuizen. “Whether its customers changing their payment date, rescheduling a missed premium, finding out when their next payment is due, or dozens of other scenarios, thanks to GoCardless we can allow customers to self-serve most of the time.”

Because 100% of customers pay by GoCardless, Christian believes the company could eventually automate as much as half of customers’ payment queries. This would have an enormous impact, he explained: “If that volume of tickets didn’t require any human touch then the extra discount we could pass on to customers would be massive.”

Accelerating growth

Behind the scenes, GoCardless also enables Spot On to run an incredibly lean finance team – a major advantage for any fast growing company.

“Cash reconciliation is normally a big process, but GoCardless makes it a non-event,” said the company’s other co-founder – and Christian’s brother – Gerhard van der Westhuizen. “Reconciliation takes less than ten minutes instead of days.

For a company with a completely digital sales journey, conversion rate is also an essential performance measure. Here, the numbers tell their own story.

“When someone lands on the GoCardless payments page our percentage drop off is in the very, very low-single figures,” said Christian. “GoCardless isn’t adding any friction to our experience. In fact, it helps us substantially outperform industry conversion rate benchmarks.”

Support and certainty

Spot On benefits from the Enhanced Customer Success package, providing direct access to a named customer success manager whose job it is to make sure they get everything they need from GoCardless, including custom reporting.

“To measure the quality of traffic sent to us by third-party comparison sites, we need to know the payment failure and cancel rates, but only after customers have made their first payment,” said Gerhard. “All it took was one email to our customer success manager and now it’s a feature of our monthly reporting packs.”

Day-to-day, having a higher level of support has given the Spot On team a great deal of peace of mind.

“As a business owner you don't need any additional uncertainty,” added Gerhard. “We’ve got a partner that has taken the time to understand our business and it’s a comfort knowing that we can handle any challenge that may come along.”

Payments with a smile

Among the next challenges to solve for Spot On is monitoring and optimising the quality of incoming payment mandates. Under consideration is GoCardless Protect+, which uses payment intelligence data to automatically identify, prevent and monitor potential fraudulent payers.

“Any mandate that fails to create, or fails to take money later down the line, introduces operational overhead,” said Christian. “We’re exploring how Protect+ and open banking data from GoCardless can help mitigate that.”

Finally, as Spot On continues to grow, Gerhard and Christian are pleased to have an effective but friendly partner in their corner.

“The GoCardless team seems to attract a certain type of individual – knowledgeable, kind and fun – and the actual product works incredibly well,” said Gerhard. “Simply put: GoCardless takes Direct Debits very reliably, while giving you access to all the information you need to build great business processes.”