GoCardless, an established Fintech firm offering account-to-account payments, has teamed up with Pennylane, a financial management and accounting platform for firms and their accountants.
Through the partnership, the companies will provide SMEs and early-stage ventures with an easy and intuitive way to manage and collect recurring payments. The collaboration will involve combining Pennylane’s subscription management functionality, allowing companies to automate the issuance of recurring invoices and accounting, with GoCardless’ international bank debit network, enabling them to automatically debit clients when payments are due.
This means small businesses and other startups need not rely on inefficient manual processes, like having to maintain a log, to remind them when to send out invoices. This approach should ensure invoices are being sent in a timely manner, thus helping to remove barriers that tend to slow down the payment cycle. This new approach also removes the need to duplicate and update invoices.
When it comes to making sure payments are made, the partnership between GoCardless and Pennylane helps to expedite the process. On average, businesses should get paid 47% faster by working with GoCardless.
Clients may also take advantage of lower failure rates and enhanced visibility of their cashflow, which should help with gaining more certainty about the exact date when they’ll receive payment. This integration also gives joint clients convenient access to the best payment tech as GoCardless introduces Open Banking-powered features at some point during 2021.
At present, clients are benefitting from the power of Pennylane and GoCardless. Benjamin Donteville, Founder at Scalability, a growth agency that lets firms increase their sales via the implementation of an effective outbound strategy, acquired new customers quickly after launching his company earlier in 2021.
When Benjamin’s firm reached 50 customers, he began looking for a solution to help his company save time on accounting and administrative tasks, which led him to Pennylane.
Donteville remarked:
“With subscription management from Pennylane, I easily save an hour a week — and that’s without taking into account the mental load that I’m saving.” GoCardless’ direct debit facility also helped him dramatically cut the amount of payments outstanding: “In April, I had €10,000 in arrears. Now that I use Pennylane’s invoice editor and its integration with GoCardless, I have €400.”
In June 2021, Pennylane finalized an $18 million round from Sequoia Capital, becoming the first French startup that the VC invested in after forming its European unit. Established last year, Pennylane currently supports over 1,200 business owners and around 100 accounting companies.
Rachel Astall, Director of Partnerships at GoCardless, stated:
“We’re excited to work with Pennylane, a company that is a great cultural fit with our own. With its vision to be the best financial operating system for startups and SMEs in Europe and our mission to take the pain out of getting paid, this partnership revolves around our mutual obsession to help merchants save time, reduce costs, maximise cash flow and, ultimately, focus on what they do best. We can’t wait to grow with Pennylane and our joint customers.”
Arthur Waller, CEO at Pennylane, added:
“We are very happy to work with GoCardless, with whom we share the same ambition: to facilitate the financial management of SMEs so that business owners can focus on their customers and the growth of their company. Automating sales management and providing companies with better visibility of upcoming payments are two key elements in achieving this ambition.”