Our partnership with GoCardless has unlocked growth opportunities for service providers. Read on to explore how our combined billing and payments expertise have driven customer value since 2020.
Factors inherent within legacy billing and monetisation platforms have earned these systems a bad reputation. Even before 2015, when we launched Elevate IQ billing, we heard the same complaints about traditional solutions. Billing was slow, inefficient, error-strewn, and vulnerable from a security perspective. Billing took time away from other tasks more impactful to a businessâ growth ambitions. Ultimately, organisations felt that billing restricted them, rather than providing a launchpad for accelerated growth.
Itâs why Elevate IQ was launched, bringing the first real-time, cloud-native platform to our industry. Since, the perception of billing has wholeheartedly changed – at least when we consider feedback from Elevate IQ customers. Elevate IQ balances innovative capabilities such as real-time insights and automation, integral to unlocking growth opportunities and efficiency gains, with all of the robust, secure, and seamless functionalities you can usually expect from a billing platform.
While a great deal of the Elevate IQ platform has been built specifically for telcos and MSPs, we must also praise our fantastic partners – such as GoCardless – that enable us to leverage other payment-making expertise to ensure weâre effectively meeting all customer needs.
The partnership
Helping our customers leverage seamless billing to reach their growth ambitions is why Elevate IQ and GoCardless partnered in 2020.
From the get-go, the partnership made perfect sense. GoCardless offers bank payments, such as direct debit and open banking payments, in over 30 countries around the world. Elevate IQ is a cloud-native platform for billing, monetisation, and subscriptions, specifically designed for the tech and telco market to manage complex multistream pricing structures, service tiers, and promotional discounts.
Elevate IQâs expert knowledge of the needs of these markets, combined with GoCardless’ payment expertise, helps simplify billing management and reduce payment failures.
As Tom Metcalfe, Director, UK&I Partnerships at GoCardless, puts it, âElevate IQ is a long-standing strategic partnership for us in the telco space, and weâre united in our dedication to providing easily integrated yet powerful solutions for our customers. Together, we help businesses operate with confidence, using payments and billing functionalities as a launchpad for future growthâ.Â
The integration
The integration between GoCardless and Elevate IQ emerged from our ambition to meet our customerâs changing monetisation needs. Several Elevate IQ customers sought a way of making seamless payment integrations within their existing billing infrastructure – a considerable overhaul if a solution could not be found.
Alongside GoCardless, we worked to bring these solutions into the Elevate IQ platform, fully integrated for the ease of our customers.
Partner trust, customer confidence
Financial flows are crucial to running a business, so Elevate IQ customers require a fully trustworthy partner network.
GoCardless has this in abundance, from a reputation as one of the worldâs leading payment providers backed by investors like Bain Capital Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Permira, to being an FCA-authorised supplier and achieving the latest ISO 20022 compliance. Thereâs synergy in this approach, as Elevate IQ similarly earned our ISO 20022 requirements earlier in 2024.
Within the functionality of the Elevate IQ platform, GoCardless offers seamless and secure bank payments. Payers are protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee in the rare event of an error in the setup or collection of a payment. Equally, its open banking-powered payment feature, Instant Bank Pay, requires payers to authenticate transactions through their online banking platform. This bank-grade security helps to further reduce fraud. At the same time, GoCardlessâ Success+, built into Elevate IQ, gives businesses greater visibility into their payments, specifically to manage and reduce payment failures, recovering 70% of failed payments on average.
A partnership now, for the future
Of course, emerging payment technologies mean the future of billing and monetisation is ever-changing. Within this, Elevate IQ and GoCardless will work hand in hand to bring new solutions to our customers, so that the latest innovations are ready when needed.
On the payment side, weâre particularly excited about the future of Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) — a type of open banking payment which, once implemented, will allow Elevate IQ customers to set up flexible repeat payments. Payment amounts can be adjusted automatically, reducing the friction of business adaptations such as price changes.
2024 saw the exciting launch of Elevate IQ for ISPs, a reworked version of Elevate IQ specifically built to support our ISP customers to:
- Manage complex pricing structures: roll out service tiers, bundles, and promotional discounts without risk of billing errors;
- Streamline customer and revenue insights: analyse customers, revenue, and profitability by product, geography and sales promotion with Elevate IQ Insight;
- Simplify contract management: gain a clear view of âin contractâ and âout of contractâ customers, allowing for targeted retention activity.
Our vision for Elevate IQ for ISPs wouldnât have been fully realised without the powerful solutions GoCardless provides and the exceptional collaboration to bring a bespoke product to market.
Going forward
Weâre fortunate to work closely with many great partners throughout the Strategic Imperatives ecosystem. With an emphasis on maintaining high-quality integrations for the benefit of our customers, the Elevate IQ and GoCardless partnership will continue to evolve, offering our customers more advanced, secure, and flexible payment solutions, powered by a shared vision for streamlined billing and payment processing.
Get in touch today to learn more about how secure and efficient billing can help unlock your businessesâ goals.
