IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews
00:05:28 · Pranav Sood
[00:05:28] S1: Gaia, this is only a ten minute podcast. I could talk for ten hours about all amazing stories we've got. So we serve about 70,000 small businesses every month. And so there are tens of thousands of businesses and their owners who are benefiting from our product. But a couple that I spoke to recently, one is a gentleman called Matt from an acting coaching agency. He's an amazing guy. He basically helps actors and actresses to kind of improve their skills to go on TV or go on the stage and so on. And his business, as you can imagine, is the kind of business where COVID really hit him hard because previously what he was doing was offering people classes in person in town halls or in venues that he'd rented. And suddenly he had to pivot everything to online. And so in that moment, he moved from a payment system where people would pay when they turned up often in cash. And often if they didn't turn up, they wouldn't pay him, which wasn't hugely helpful given that his costs stayed the same regardless of the class size to a world where he has to do everything over Zoom or online. It's amazing to hear him talk about GoCardless because he's implemented it. It saved him a ton of time. It's helped him collect a ton of money. And I think he might be the most enthusiastic advocate of our product I've ever met, which is amazing given that we have a company full of them. So Mats is a story that I really liked. Another one that I loved recently, a lady called Eva, who is the artistic director of a baby ballet studio. So she's amazing lady, super creative, super passionate about dance, hates talking about money or gets really emotional when she talks about money. And so was telling me she always used to just delegate the act of chasing money to people in her team rather than doing it herself because she gets so mad about having to do it. And then they discovered GoCardless and suddenly nobody has has to do it because everyone pays on time every time, every month. And so those are just a couple of literally people I've met in the last couple of weeks that have really stuck with me, but we're super, super fortunate to count many, many tens of thousands of customers as people who benefit from our product every month.
00:07:43 · Gaia Lamperti, Pranav Sood
[00:07:43] S0: Amazing. I love the case studies you brought up. We did mention COVID, right? So something I was going to ask you is, do you believe that one of the unexpected silver linings of the pandemic is that automation of payment and in general digitization of payments accelerated and is now here to stay. [00:08:03] S1: Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, it was a terrible and continues to be a terrible situation for lots of businesses around the world. But one of the silver linings is absolutely the move from physical to digital has accelerated. People have increasingly realized the value of software to manage and help to automate their businesses. And people have increasingly also seen that online cloud based tools are actually quite easy to use. And it's one of the things I think I always find when I talk to SMEs, one of their biggest challenges, not just about our solution, but really anything in SME productivity space or the cash flow space is this kind of inertia and fear about how difficult it might be to move your business from what you used to do to what you want to do in the future. And so suddenly the situation where the choice element is removed and you just have to do it, got a lot of people over that hurdle. And I think you're absolutely right. I think this is here to stay. I don't think it's a new thing. I think it's an acceleration of something that was already happening. And, you know, again, as you say, tough times for lots of people, but we've got to pick up the benefits, right? And I think that move towards automation is probably the biggest one.
00:09:11 · Gaia Lamperti
[00:09:11] S0: Absolutely. And to conclude, I would like to ask you something very practical. So imagine as a small business owner, I would like to shift to a payment intelligence tool. What should I look out for when I pick my providers for a specific product? What should be, you know, the main features or main characteristics I should be paying attention to?
00:09:33 · Pranav Sood
[00:09:33] S1: Yeah. So I think there are probably three big themes. Number one is how easy is it to use? And lots of SME owners will be using software of some form to manage their business, whether it's something like a Xero or an Intuit or a Sage that they use for a general ledger software, or whether it's a more vertical SaaS solution that they're using to run things. Your payments providers should integrate into those software options. And so it should be really easy for you to do all the things that you need to do and to be able to look at the actual live reporting of your payment statuses and where your money is at any given point. I think the second theme is really about the quality of the support and the quality of the guidance that you can get about using the product. Lots of businesses offer very, very basic help when it comes to things going wrong. And payments is such an important part of anybody's business that I think if you're going to entrust that to another company to look after, you also want to know that they offer a really high standard of support just in case, you you do need it, just in case anything does go wrong. And then I think the third thing is obviously cost. Everybody is focused on cost, not on the impact on their bottom line. But I think I would urge people not to be focused exclusively on the cost per transaction. So lots of people get very preoccupied when it comes to payments about how much am I paying per transaction, but they forget that the total cost of processing payments is actually much bigger than that. So don't just think about the cost per transaction, think about the costs in the whole. And that means both checking to make sure that your providers aren't charging any hidden costs, but it also means thinking about your own costs and thinking about the time, the money, the effort that you're going to have to put in to maintain this payment system alongside any other software that you've got. And so the right answer may not always be the cheapest answer, but making sure that you invest in discovery upfront is obviously absolutely crucial in getting that one right.
00:11:27 · Gaia Lamperti, Pranav Sood
[00:11:27] S0: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Prunav. That was great. Really enjoyed having this conversation with you, and I do hope to speak with you soon again. [00:11:35] S1: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Gaye.