Painless Payments: GoCardless Makes Direct Debit Easy With Twilio

Painless Payments: GoCardless Makes Direct Debit Easy With Twilio

The founders of GoCardless built a college side project into a thriving business.

Together, Tom Blomfield, Matt Robinson, and Hiroki Takeuchi built software to help automate the process of asking their college classmates for club and team membership dues. “We got together to try and solve the problem of recurring payments or late payments, but within the context of sports teams and university societies,” says Tom.  When the three entrepreneurs saw how successful their software was, they expanded their service beyond universities and launched GoCardless, a new way for UK SMEs to manage payments.

GoCardless offers businesses an easy to use direct debit platform that ensures companies get paid on time, and that their customers can pay easily.  “55% of UK SMEs have cash flow problems and late payments are the leading cause of that,” says Tom. The team at GoCardless hopes their payment platform, coupled with Twilio-powered communications, can empower both companies and their customers.

“We’re absolutely fanatical about support,” says Business Development Manager, Nabeel Qureshi. The GoCardless team was well aware customers expect contacting a payment company to be a hassle. It was their mission to make the customers’ experience, easy, quick and above all “awesome.” They built a Twilio-powered phone system to ensure they’d deliver a great experience.

Developer, Tim Rogers built GoCardless’ phone system which tracks who calls in, when they called, records the audio of the call, and logs the lead in GoCardless’ Postgres database. Customers are able to get in touch with sales or support easily, and efficiently. Co-founder Matt Robinson says the integration enabled his sales to team to see “exactly what’s going out and what’s coming in,” critical data their sales team uses to improve.

GoCardless are now setting their sights on a bigger market. They’re hoping to launch in the European Union at the start of the new year. “[the EU direct debit system] is based on the UK system, so we can roll out across the entire Euro Zone,” adds Tom Blomfield.
From college clubs, to UK SMEs, and now into the Euro Zone, we can’t wait to see  what GoCardless has in store.

Learn more about GoCardless here and catch them at TwilioCon Europe. Register here.