GoCardless

GoCardless Is a Fintech Unicorn Reinventing Online Payments

As one of the fastest growing startups in the world, GoCardless is changing the way payments work in the digital era. Their journey includes a stint in the famed Y-Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley and they have raised more than $47M to emerge as a leading player in the fintech space serving over 10,000 customers including TripAdvisor, The Guardian, and Box. GoCardless has transformed the way digital businesses handle recurring payment and direct debit by, well, going cardless.

We sat down with Claire Little, Office Manager at GoCardless, to learn a bit more about how they’re managing to scale their workforce so quickly while maintaining breakneck growth. The company shows no signs of slowing down. With the headcount currently around 110 people, Claire says they’re adding seven new employees per week and will be over 170 members by the end of 2017. GoCardless’ rocketship growth requires a future-ready technology that will support their business travel and governance needs when they reach 1,000+ employees in a dozen global offices.

"Always having to change flights, get refunds, different days, switch hotels, TravelPerk has been a lifesaver! I don’t know how you do it, but I’m so happy that you do! You do all the running around for me."

Claire Little, Personal Assistant at GoCardless

Just set up a policy and go

In addition to her office manager responsibilities, Claire is also the de facto executive assistant to the GoCardless management team. The VPs used to account for the majority of the company’s entire travel requirements, so booking only 5-6 trips per month for the entire executive team wasn’t much of a problem. However, since the sales and marketing teams have expanded so quickly, Claire’s travel management workload increased exponentially. She now oversees up to eight trips per week or 30-40 trips per month, and the destinations vary wildly from throughout the EU all the way to JFK and SFO, especially with all of the conferences and events.

The biggest problem TravelPerk solved for Claire was letting her transfer ownership of travel booking to each individual traveler. Claire simply set up the parameters of the GoCardless travel policy, like how much they can spend on hotels per city or how far in advance they can book a flight without approval, then she just lets the team log into TravelPerk and book their own trips. All the details are already there, they just set up their user account and all of the passport details, travel preferences, and receipts are saved in the same place.

It’s clear that GoCardless is on a moonshot trajectory and will continue to expand throughout 2018. Maintaining your company culture and efficient business processes while rapidly scaling your workforce can be a monumental challenge. With TravelPerk, Claire knows she can count on a scalable and reliable travel program that stays consistent no matter how fast the company grows. Best of all, TravelPerk provides that combination of technology and service that makes all the negative aspects of managing a travel program disappear—shielding her from dealing with the airline’s horrible customer service.

Good luck to you, Claire and to the entire team at GoCardless!