GoCardless extends its partnership with Rebel Energy
Ellie Duncan | News
01 Nov 2023
Bank payment provider GoCardless has expanded its partnership with UK-based challenger energy supplier Rebel Energy, to help it better identify customers that may be in financial difficulty and to prevent disruption to service.
Rebel Energy has integrated GoCardless’ ‘Success+’ feature, which uses proprietary GoCardless machine learning models to automatically “optimise” failed payment retries.
The relationship between GoCardless and Rebel Energy began in 2021, when Rebel Energy selected GoCardless to collect payments via Direct Debit, giving customers transparency and control around the exact timing and amount of a payment.
According to Rebel Energy, the partnership has also helped it scale efficiently, growing its finance team from one to four, even as its customer base increased by more than 200 times over the past two years.
Dan Bates, chief executive officer and founder, Rebel Energy, said: “Our goal is to disrupt the status quo and upend the energy sector to challenge the traditional relationship between providers and customers. We want to work with like-minded partners and GoCardless fits the bill perfectly.”
He added: “Throughout our relationship, we’ve seen first hand the role that a great payments strategy can have in supporting a fast-growing company.
“We’re excited to move into the next phase of our journey and focus on doing right by our customers, safe in the knowledge that our payments are sorted.”
Rebel Energy revealed it is looking into using GoCardless’ Open Banking-powered ‘Instant Bank Pay’ to further simplify the sign-up process for new customers and streamline the process for making ad-hoc payments.
“The addition of Success+ will enable Rebel Energy to engage with customers right away if they need help, while our core Direct Debit offering continues to give customers plenty of visibility over their payments,” said Pat Phelan, managing director of UK and Ireland and chief customer officer at GoCardless.
“It’s also been a pleasure to see that Rebel Energy has kept its cost base low during this period of phenomenal growth. It’s a masterclass in scaling efficiently.”
