Regular Payments in 20 minutes with GoCardless | Hacker News Reader

Regular Payments in 20 minutes with GoCardless

blog.gocardless.com

43 pointshcm14 comments

This looks like the first UK alternative to Stripe however it appears you can't accept cards from outside of the UK:

Can I charge non-UK customers? You can charge anyone with a UK bank account. Very soon you will be able to charge anyone with an EU bank account.

Source: https://gocardless.com/faq

given the 1% transaction fee I'm guessing they don't accept credit cards at all - payments are exclusively through bank transfers. Can anyone from gocardless confirm is this is correct? If so, I think the site could be a little clearer.

In any case, this looks like a useful service with or without card processing, and the more "instant" payment alternatives there are to paypal, the better. Also +1 for some innovation on this side of the pond.

If that's the case then they definitely need to make things clearer. There's only one mention of it on their homepage and nothing in the FAQ.

I'm thinking get paid "directly from your customers’ bank accounts." coupled with the name gocardless means there is no credit cards involved.

Tom from GoCardless here.

We currently accept UK bank-to-bank payments - customers enter their account number and sort code on the checkout page. We'll work on making this clearer on our landing page - thanks for the feedback. We'll be rolling out across Europe in the next few months.

GoCardless is particularly good for subscriptions & regular variable payments, as we're based on the UK direct debit network.

Bank accounts and sort codes are not particularly secure - I might for example give these out to someone making a payment to me, and some businesses publish this information as a matter of course.

What additional checks do you undertake to ensure that the person using the service to make a payment is the owner of the bank account in question?

(I'm not saying Credit Cards are perfect, but they do allow for a lot of additional information to be verified to confirm the cardholder.)

We work with the banks and a number of third-party identity-checking providers to verify that the bank details match the identify given. There's also a lot of additional stuff going on to match the person at the keyboard with the identity provided.

It's worth noting that there's a very strong consumer guarantee in case of fraud: http://www.bacs.co.uk/bacs/businesses/directdebit/collecting...

Looks more like a UK alternative to Dwolla (https://www.dwolla.com/)

I've always liked the idea of GoCardless, and we've been seriously considering implementing it on an upcoming service, but our main concern has always been that clients will be far less likely to want to set up a direct debit than they will do a one-off payment on a card.

People are really used to buying stuff with a card online, but a direct debit? Not so much. Does anyone have any figures on how GoCardless affects conversion rates?

(I'm aware that it would always be possible to have GoCardless as an option, but that would have its own impact on conversion rates).

I think if you're talking about one-off, it's a fair point. With regular payments, UK consumers are much more comfortable setting up direct debits. Just under 80% of UK adults currently have at least 1 active direct debit set up, for example.

Sure, most people have active direct debits set up, but isn't the number of those are set up solely through the internet somewhat smaller? Furthermore, most people seem to associate direct debits with a certain class of business, usually utility companies. In my experience, it just isn't common for someone to set up and manage a direct debit online.

So yes, whilst one-off payments are significantly larger, I'd still be wary of a reduced conversion rate through GoCardless. Of course, if I had a very narrow margin, your incredible rates might easily redeem the difference in revenue, but without hard numbers it's difficult to make a business decision.

Great to see Matt & team starting a blog, can't wait to integrate GoCardless into our upcoming mobile app.

Thanks Viktoras! Just drop us an email at help@gocardless.com if we can do anything to help

a much better name than the previous groupay (this appears to be the same company).

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