Billingbooth and Gocardless Expand Partnership to Add Open Banking and Payment Optimisation for Telcos

GoCardless, the bank payment company, has expanded its long-standing partnership with Billingbooth, a specialised billing software designed for telecom companies. The collaboration will see GoCardless’s full suite of bank payment solutions integrated directly into the Billingbooth platform, helping telcos simplify their billing and payments process, and easily recover bad debt.

The integration now includes Instant Bank Pay, GoCardless’ open banking-powered payment solution, and Success+, its AI-driven tool to optimise and automate payment retries. The new features complement Billingbooth’s existing GoCardless Direct Debit functionality, providing an end-to-end billing and payment solution for its customers.

For telcos, especially those dealing with high volumes of low-value transactions, effective credit control is a major challenge. The integration addresses this by enabling them to take both recurring and one-off payments within a single platform. Instant Bank Pay allows for the immediate and secure collection of outstanding payments directly from a customer’s bank account, eliminating manual processes and long waits. This speed reduces administrative overhead and late payments. 

In addition, Success+ helps businesses to automatically recover two-thirds of failed payments, on average. By applying machine learning to identify the best time for payment retries, the tool increases the likelihood of successful collection, further reducing the need for manual debt chasing and improving cash flow.

Tom Metcalfe, Director, Global Partnerships at GoCardless, said: “For telcos facing a challenging market of consolidation and squeezed margins, efficiency is more critical than ever. This expanded partnership with Billingbooth brings our best-in-class technology to a sector that is perfect for bank payments, providing a seamless solution that solves their biggest billing and payment pain points.”

Alvaro Mari-Thompson, Director at Billingbooth, said: “Debt recovery is the single biggest problem for many of our customers. This partnership with GoCardless provides a robust and reliable offering that perfectly integrates with our platform, so our joint customers have an all-in-one solution. GoCardless has truly reinvented the payments industry by building a modern, technological layer on top of the aging BACS system.”