Recurring payments: GoCardless Joins Forces with TransferWise
FACTS
- On the occasion of the Web Summit held in Lisbon, the British FinTechs TransferWise and GoCardless announced a partnership.
- Goal: enable corporate customers to be sent recurrent payments from worldwide faster.
- GoCardless is based in London and connects with credit transfer systems to collect receive corporate payments.
- Issue: until recently, GoCardless customer companies only could collect recurring payments from another country if they held an account in the domestic bank.
- From now on, businesses will no longer have to sign up for each country where they intend to collect payments. This prevents fees applied on abroad-originated transactions. The collection of recurring payments will be applying real-time change rates.
- How it works? GoCardless relies on this British money transfer company’ APIs, and foreign exchange technology. The point would be to centralise international revenue via a single bank account, whichever the currency.
KEY FIGURES
TransferWise:
- 6M customers worldwide
- €4B sent each month
GoCardless:
- 50,000 corporate customers
- 30 countries
- $13B in payments processed per year
CHALLENGES
- Meeting an increasing need. According to a study by YouGov for GoCardless, 73% of the surveyed companies intend to aim for international reach within 5 years. And 39% say they cumbersome international payments would prevent them from achieving this goal.
- Worldwide one-stop counter. Though this initiative, the London-based FinTech says they are aiming for a goal: becoming a worldwide one-stop counter for all businesses resorting to recurring payments.
- TransferWise, for their part, intends to keep strengthening their European partnerships’ ecosystem. This unicorn already claims several partners including the British neo-bank Monzo, German m-banking players N26 and BPCE in France.
MARKET PERSPECTIVE
- In May this year, the cross-border money transfer company raised close to $300 million, lifting their valuation to $ 3.5 billion. A few months later, TransferWise claimed their business was profitable for the third year in a row.
- GoCardless also raised $75 million early this year as they aim for the US.