GoCardless, the leading fintech for recurring payments, has launched its first payment intelligence product, Success+ to help businesses tackle the problems caused by failed payments. Failed payments are not only costly for businesses to collect, they also impact customer relationships and increase the risk of bad debt and customer churn.

Success+ uses machine learning to analyse trends from GoCardless’ recurring payments data and identify the ideal time to retry a failed payment. It automatically schedules payment retries – within the parameters set by the merchant – on the optimal day for each payer.

Intelligent retries are available at launch, with additional features to follow including the option to not retry a payment if the probability of failure is high, which will be particularly pertinent in the current environment. More than 2,000 GoCardless customers have been testing Success+ and are already seeing the benefits of optimising payment retries. By being able to automatically choose the best retry date, businesses are seeing payment failures decrease by 15%.

Monsur Alam, Head of Finance at Insurance company NEOS, said: “Before using Success+ we were recovering 30%-40% of our failed payments. Now 80% of our retries are successful, plus it has helped us save half a day of work per month.”

According to ¹GoCardless research*, businesses are spending thousands of pounds annually recovering payments through internal processes. Specifically, in financial services (£140, 400), IT (£136,800), business services (£103,200),health and wellbeing (£86,400) and utilities (£85,200)

Emma Jones, founder of Enterprise Nation, said: “GoCardless shares our passion for supporting small businesses. Now, more than ever, business owners require clarity on cash flow as the impact of missed payments or bad debt can be significant. We welcome the introduction of new products that enable business owners to get paid on time, and without confrontation, as this speeds up cash moving through the economy and builds a better culture of prompt payment.”

Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO and co-founder of GoCardless, said:

“Success+ is the first in a line of payment intelligence products that we are launching to help our customers manage their recurring payments more effectively. It enables businesses to retry their payments at the optimal time, when funds are most likely to be available.”

“Of the 2,000 customers who have been testing Success+ prior to launch, 63% have seen an improvement in cash flow. Many of our customers struggle with the problems caused by failed payments and we are now able to improve the process for them, proving that payment failure is optional rather than inevitable.”

Success+ is available in Bacs to optimise recurring payments from payers in the UK, and will be rolled out in SEPA shortly and to other bank schemes later in the year.