Collections that run like clockwork for Taurus

Taurus Insurance is a Gibraltar-based insurance intermediary serving the UK market with award-winning lifestyle coverage solutions. It primarily provides gadget insurance via its three brands – Switched On Insurance, Trusted Insurances and Swipe Insurance – but its product portfolio also includes travel.

The company differentiates by bringing the flexibility of monthly subscription experiences to gadget insurance, allowing customers to take out insurance on flexible monthly rolling plans.

Taurus collects tens of thousands of payments every month and fine margins matter at that sort of scale. From efficiently collecting payments to minimising payment failures, streamlining processes and operations directly impacts the bottom line.

That’s why Taurus works with GoCardless to collect monthly payments via direct bank payments.

Increased payment visibility, enhanced forecasting

“Our subscription base is the majority of our business,” said Clare Caras-Altas, Finance Director, Taurus Insurance Services. “The entire business takes in the region of 48,000 payments a month, with 99% of those collected by GoCardless, which runs like clockwork.”

As the head of a busy finance function, accurate and streamlined backend reporting is extremely important to Clare. Here, the increased visibility into payments offered by GoCardless makes a huge difference to operations.

“Without the excellent reporting facilities in GoCardless it would be very difficult to reconcile such a high volume of payments,” said Clare. “The reporting in GoCardless is easy to access and understand, and the ability to pull bespoke reports enables me to reconcile payments with relative simplicity.”

The benefits of increased payment visibility also extend into improved cash flow management and financial forecasting, which in turn improves strategic planning for Taurus.

“Overall, having a rock-solid platform like GoCardless for automated monthly payment collection is a huge advantage from a cash flow point of view,” said Clare. “We can be more confident of our ongoing income, and we can see an income stream that is forecastable for the near future.”

Pushing collection rates to elite levels

To maximise the advantages gained by automating payments at scale, Taurus leverages Success+ from GoCardless to automate failed payment recovery.

Success+ uses GoCardless’ payment intelligence data and machine learning to reduce failed payments. It does this thanks to intelligent retries, which identify when each customer is most likely to have funds in their account, and automatically retries payments on that day.

The solution has helped squeeze out valuable extra performance from its payments collection processes, as Clare explained: “We have historically had a very good collection rate, but it improved by more than 2% with Success+. GoCardless has been instrumental in achieving an amazing collection success rate, which is running at almost 99%.”

As an automated recovery process, Success+ reduces the time spent chasing failed payments by 64%, and 70% of Success+ users report improving customer relationships since they no longer have to chase late payments.*

If I had to use three words to describe Success+ I would say it is simple, efficient and cost-effective.

Free to focus on growth

Since working with GoCardless, Clare and her team report feeling completely unburdened by worrying about payments and their impact on the customer journey. They also feel confident that help is at hand should they need it, which will be vital as Taurus pursues ambitious growth plans.

“GoCardless gives me the peace of mind that the customer journey is simple, collections are extremely high, and the numbers in my reports are correct,” said Clare. “But one of the main reasons I enjoy working with GoCardless is the amazing customer success team. I have quarterly reviews with my Customer Success Manager and I always feel that there’s support behind me, whatever I need to do.

“The support from GoCardless and the customer success team leaves us free to focus on growth. We plan to move into Australia shortly and across the European Union by the end of the year. And we’re delighted to have GoCardless on that journey with us.”

*Source note: GoCardless customer survey, 2020