• Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product Officer & Chief Growth Officer at GoCardless


• 17.11.2022 04:40 am

Financial IT: Can you please briefly tell us about GoCardless and your role in it?

Duncan Barrigan: GoCardless is a global leader in direct bank payments. We make it easy to collect recurring and one-off payments directly from customers' bank accounts through direct debit and open banking. Our global bank payment network and technology platform currently serves more than 75,000 businesses worldwide, from multinational corporations to small businesses.

Businesses choose GoCardless because our platform allows them to collect direct payments, which are structurally faster, more secure, and more reliable. What does the GoCardless team do for it? The organization builds simple and secure bank Payment Solutions for people of businesses everywhere.

I joined GoCardless more than 7 years ago and today I am the Chief Product Officer and Chief Growth Officer. My responsibilities include looking after product development alongside our Chief Technology Officer. Additionally, I make sure that my vision of the product matches with marketing objectives.

Financial IT: How does harnessing open banking helps businesses these days?

Duncan Barrigan: Open banking benefits businesses in two ways. The first is through helping them offer better customer experiences. The second one is enabling them to optimize what matters to their business. For example, we recently announced a new customer, Crowdz, a small and mid-sized enterprise (SME) finance platform, which will use our open banking payment offering to power instant payments for their customers. They'll see the impact on their balance almost immediately.

In addition, Crowdz will use Verified Mandates, which combines the account data side of open banking with direct debit, for even greater fraud protection. This gives funders and the business itself more assurance that the bank account has been validated. They are making sure that the funding is going to the right person.

And from Crowdz’s perspective, it comes back to this point that direct bank payments are structurally cheaper, helping them to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost.

Financial IT: Can you briefly describe the main features of GoCardless products?

Duncan Barrigan: First of all, GoCardless makes it easy for merchants to collect instant, one-off payments as well as recurring payments. GoCardless eliminates the need for businesses to rely on customers to pay on time. The software also eliminates the time-consuming process of chasing late payments and provides greater visibility into the status of each payment. Merchants can also benefit from automatic reconciliation if they integrate into one of our accounting partners. By using GoCardless, businesses reduce their admin time and the fees they spend on card processing.

The platform is powered by Wise and collects payments from 30+ countries, either into a local bank account or an existing UK account, due to built-in foreign exchange at the actual market rate.

Financial IT: What are the upcoming milestones you have for GoCardless?

Duncan Barrigan: We have big plans in the world of open banking; we believe this is a once-in-a-generation technological shift. We have just acquired Nordigen, a platform that enables free access to open financial data, as well as premium data insights.

We’ve had a constant stream of open banking feature launches, starting with Instant Bank Pay, which enables businesses to take instant, one-off payments, in April last year. We have rolled out Instant Bank Pay to Germany and recently released Verified Mandates in France -- our fourth market for this feature.

Looking ahead, we are excited to offer Variable Recurring Payments in the UK, and implement PayTo in Australia.

And outside of open banking, we have made a significant push in what we refer to as our ‘payment intelligence’ solutions. In these instances, we utilise the data collected from tens of millions of payers. Our first offering, Success+, automatically optimises failed payment retries. Since its launch, we have helped merchants recover, on average, 70% of payments that initially fail. Our latest payment intelligence product is GoCardless Protect+, an end-to-end fraud prevention solution, which just launched a couple of weeks ago. With GoCardless Protect+, merchants will be able to improve their overall percentage of successful payments, significantly reduce the costs associated with managing payer fraud and protect both their revenue and reputation.