The secret to GoCardless’s takeover of global payments

Payments leaders GoCardless have had stratospheric growth in the last couple of years, and are well on their way to becoming one of the great fintech unicorns. 

Siamac Rezaiezadeh, Director of Product Marketing at GoCardless, says a big part of GoCardless’s success lies in understanding customer pain points – something that the company has achieved through carrying out market research with Attest.

How research has driven GoCardless’s meteoric rise to the top 

Since GoCardless process payments at a global scale, it’s especially important for them to unpack behavioural and attitudinal differences across regions. By way of example, running research across five international markets helped them develop a proprietary framework called the 8 Dimensions of Payments. It was the first time they’d been able to establish pain points across the payments process spectrum; from the cost businesses incur for payments, to international coverage and more. 

“We didn’t have a way to succinctly say ‘as a customer in this industry, in this country, we predict you’re feeling this particular pain that can be quantified as X’. We wanted to get a really good set of market benchmarks for the challenges our customers are facing,” says Rezaiezadeh. 

We wanted a really good set of benchmarks for the challenges our customers are facing.

Informing sales conversations

Discovering the real-life challenges their customers face has been a gamechanger for GoCardless, upping the effectiveness of both sales and marketing conversations. Because the sales team are now armed with reliable insights they’re better able to explain the benefits of GoCardless’ products to potential customers. 

Rezaiezadeh says: “We wanted to revisit our existing framework for how well we can articulate our value proposition. With the data, we notably improved the maturity of our articulation, which we were then able to pass to our sales team. Before using Attest, that framework was used in around 5-10% of sales conversations; after using Attest it’s used in 25-30% of sales conversations and being able to quantify pain points has been a big driver of this.”

With the data, we notably improved the maturity of our value proposition articulation.

Driving new products and features

Insight gained through Attest research has also noticeably impacted the product and feature launch process. Consumer data has now become an embedded part of the way GoCardless continues to offer customers industry-leading products and features. 

Rezaiezadeh says: “One-hundred percent of our product and feature launches are backed with data. This enables us to launch products in a much more sophisticated way, with full confidence that what we’re offering customers is useful and valuable.” 

GoCardless’s new real-time payments product, Instant Bank Pay, powered by open banking technologies, is just the latest revolutionary offering from the London-based fintech.

100% of our product and feature launches are backed with data.

A successful partnership

Rezaiezadeh says GoCardless’ partnership with Attest has transformed the way the company makes business decisions – because consumer data is now so accessible to them, they no longer have to rely on guesswork.

“Attest’s simple platform has enabled the GoCardless team to find out a really wide range of crucial information about our market quickly and reliably,” he says. “The platform gives us the confidence to run market research that we know will reveal or compound actionable knowledge about our market.”

Attest gives us the confidence to run market research that we know will reveal actionable knowledge.

Rezaiezadeh adds that working with Attest’s customer success team, known as ACE, has empowered GoCardless to carry out their own multi-market research rather than having to use an agency.

“The Attest team has been extremely helpful in assisting us bring together surveys from many different geographies and merge them into a really useful, cohesive set.” 

With the impacts proven, GoCardless plan to continue using consumer insight via the Attest platform to inform their marketing, product and sales strategies; all in aid of achieving their goal to make payment processes smoother and simpler for businesses around the world. 

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