Customer Success Story - GoCardless: “Lingohub has made Collaboration a thousand Times easier”
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Today’s success story presents a truly global player in online payments. More than 20,000 customers around the globe trust in its payment service including great companies like TripAdvisor and the FT. GoCardless is definitely one of the hottest fintech startups in UK and has recently been listed among the 16 fintech startups that could one day be worth.
In today’s customer success story Nicola Anderson, VP Marketing at GoCardless, talks about their company, vision and how they manage localization and collaboration with Lingohub. Many thanks Nicola for taking the time and sharing interesting insights in your company’s growth.
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“We really love how Lingohub has made collaboration a thousand times easier. We can easily split the translation work among different people.”
Set up in 2011, GoCardless now processes over £ 1 billion each year for thousands of businesses. Please tell us more about your incredible success story and the very beginning of your company.
GoCardless was founded in 2011 with a mission to simplify Direct Debit and make it easier for small businesses to get paid.
We’ve grown at lightning speed since then. Our wide range of customers now include local gyms and scout groups all the way up to large organisations such as the Financial Times, the Guardian and Thomas Cook. We offer our customers the ability to take payments in the UK, across the eurozone and most recently in Sweden too. Today, GoCardless processes over £1bn of payments every year for over 20,000 customers - with ambitions to do much more!
GoCardless committed itself to simplify Direct Debit and open it up to companies who have never used it previously. Can you tell us more about your product and its features?
GoCardless started with a simple premise - to open up the previously inaccessible Direct Debit scheme to freelancers and small merchants taking regular payments. Direct Debit is a cheaper and more reliable alternative to credit cards, bank transfers and cheques. An added benefit is that it helps merchants to reduce late payments, admin overheads and high transaction fees.
In the last couple of years we’ve started to attract large corporations who want to replace existing Direct Debit solutions with the more flexible, connected and cost effective GoCardless platform. Our API allows organisations to connect payments directly into their other systems with a white label option available. Real time alerts mean businesses can receive immediate notifications about any payment failures or Direct Debit mandate cancellations, allowing them to take immediate action. Flexibility in the setup of payments means merchants can also allow their customers to pay on the date and at the frequency that suits them.
Lots of developers are reading our blog, so we’d like to point out a technical perspective too. How does GoCardless integrate with other sites or products?
The GoCardless API allows merchants to manage Direct Debit payments via their own website or software. When a customer signs up for the merchant’s services the customer can set up a Direct Debit authorisation online. Developers can easily build an integration to create and manage payments and subscriptions automatically - there’s no need to manually add a new customer to GoCardless. Our API provides full flexibility in payment creation, and we offer it to all of our merchants at no extra cost - it’s well-documented and we provide client libraries to reduce the time required to build an integration. Integrators can even allow their own users to collect Direct Debit payments using our partner API. What's great is that lots of popular accounting packages have already built these integrations to work with GoCardless behind the scenes, so users can seamlessly collect payments from their customers within the tools and services they're currently using.
GoCardless already expanded to France and Germany. What are your future plans in terms of global expansion? In how many countries are you currently exporting and how many languages do you support?
We currently take payments across the UK, Eurozone and Sweden and have localised sites in UK, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. This year we’re focusing on growing our European markets, with a plan to expand further afield in 2017. Potential new markets include the USA, Australia and Canada.
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How did you manage your translation workflow before you started using Lingohub?
It used to be a extremely manual and painful process. We were using GitHub, which is fairly complex and requires training and technical knowledge to use. It was challenging to onboard our translators, as we hire them for their translation ability rather than their technical skills. So we had to add several manual verification processes before adding our content to the site, due to the high risk of human error.
We are extremely happy that you’re now translating your powerful product with Lingohub. Which improvements have you made since you’ve started using Lingohub? What do you like best about it?
We really love how Lingohub has made collaboration a thousand times easier. The flow for both the developers and the global team are now much smoother, as each use case has a tailored experience. The whole process is more transparent than before, and we can easily split the translation work among different people.