English company GoCardless has started its activity in France almost one year ago day to day. Since then, they developed partnerships with companies such as Habitat or LaFourchette, growing four times faster there than when they launched in the UK.
The London-based company has been founded by young entrepreneur Hiroki Takeuchi in 2011. The startup provides a simple to integrate, scalable and secure solution for businesses to set up and accept bank-to-bank online payments. They recently raised $13M in a round led by B2B Cloud and SaaS specialized VC firm Notion Capital.
There are various advantages for companies, “the service allows more confidence between B2B businesses, it is functional with larger transactions than credit card payments. Also, in contrary to a credit card, an IBAN doesn’t expire, so no risk for failed payments. The debit management tool that we built is very simple and easy to use for the company”, commented Amaury de Closset, France Country Manager at GoCardless.
Customers have also good reasons to use this payment method, “there is structurally less actors intervening during the transaction, and it is less expensive for both parties. People can easily manage their subscription with their online banking app since it appears almost instantaneously in bank statements”.
Their principal clients are SaaS companies, GoCardless solution allows them, for instance, to get monthly payments from customers who subscribed to their services. They also provide direct debit for small companies and recently recruited French startups clients like Youshould, Zenchef or Mon-Avocat.fr.
Moreover, GoCardless aim to become a larger company by permitting direct debit from all over the world. But developing such a service definitely implies to face obstacles : “The hard thing with Fintech is that everything takes a lot of time to deploy. Each currency as a proper debit model and each bank agreement is different”. The company would like to reach out, big global SaaS companies like musical streaming services, that are used internationally and requires recurring payments from their customers.
In the meantime, de Closset said that “France is the biggest international target for us. We want to, at least, double our French team in order to kick-off aggressive plans and recruit clients in the country.”