UniHomes is an online platform where students can find university accommodation. Founded in 2015 by industry professionals and ex-students, UniHomes wanted to solve a problem facing students across the UK - make finding university accommodation simpler.

How did they do it? Transparency.

With other services hiding fees or choosing not to show all fees upfront, UniHomes gave students what they needed - the ability to find high-quality accommodation with minimum stress, and bills included.

Processing a high volume of payments

Before setting up the business, Co-founder and Director Bradley Cox was already aware of a future problem they’d face - the amount of manual work involved in processing a high volume of payments, and the errors that come along with it.

I didn’t want to set up this business and process payments manually. It’s unnecessary, wastes time, and only causes headaches.

Why UniHomes chose GoCardless

Unwilling to accept that wasted time and effort, Bradley began researching different payment providers online. He wanted a solution that wasn’t just automated, but also:

• Cost effective

• Intuitive to use

• With a great API (to integrate with Salesforce)

• From a credible and reliable provider

He found several providers but ultimately chose to use GoCardless to process payments at UniHomes.

We chose GoCardless over other payment providers because it ticked all the boxes - automated, affordable, and easy to use.

Setting up, and seeing results

Bradley recalls setting up GoCardless being simple and quick, taking only a week from Contact sales to being ready to collect payments.

Now five years on, UniHomes operates with 90% of its customer billing handled automatically by GoCardless, saving Bradley’s team countless hours from the manual alternative.

And with GoCardless, payment failures at UniHomes are less than 1%, compared to UK average payment failures of 8% for Direct Debit in general, 8.4% for card payments, and 7.3% for bank transfer.

We’re really happy with GoCardless. Being able to run the billing function of our business so easily, with such little resource, is a win for us. And because it’s so easy to set up and use, as well as having a great API, I highly recommend GoCardless to other businesses.