London-based GoCardless is opening for business in the US, on a mission to shake up recurring payments in the world's biggest market.
With an office in San Francisco, GoCardless has hooked up to the Automated Clearing House Clearing network, enabling merchants to pull payments directly from their customers’ bank accounts, at a lower cost than credit cards and without the overhead and burden of cash and cheques.
In addition, businesses using the platform gain increased visibility over their payments flow, including due dates, successful payments and failed payments - along with the reasons why.
More than 45,000 businesses worldwide transact through GoCardless each month, and the business processes $10 billion of payments each year. it raised $75 million in February to fund international expansion into new territories.
The company's arrival in the US coincides with a growing demand for ACH debit. In 2018 - the fourth consecutive year in which the ACH Network added more than one billion new transactions - the system saw 23 billion transactions, of which 13.4 billion were debits.
Sarah Grotta, director debit and alternative payments advisory service, Mercator Advisory Group, said: “Consumers and businesses have continued to find new uses for ACH payment transactions despite the fact ACH is a forty-year-old, batch-based solution. We find that there is strong growth recently for ACH in bill payments and on-line and mobile payments and also person-to-person (P2P) transactions.
"Merchants and billers like to encourage the use of ACH as it can be an economical payment choice and bank account details change less frequently than card numbers, reducing the amount of payment maintenance.”