Member Article

GoCardless banks on Looker to boost data efficiencies

Fintech payments firm GoCardless has joined forces with Looker to drive productivity gains across its business, universally adopting data analytics to improve efficiency across multiple departments including finance, product and compliance.

Since deploying Looker, GoCardless has significantly modernised its approach to data, replacing its previous processes that were outdated and time consuming. Prior to deploying Looker, GoCardless employees had limited access to data, with its analysts tasked with responding to requests for a significant number of reports – taking up valuable time and typically requiring them to deliver various dashboards following ad hoc requests.

Today, 95% of employees at GoCardless have a Looker account, with three quarters (75%) of them using it in a meaningful way on a monthly basis. Requests made to the data team have now been reduced to nearly zero, where previously at least a dozen analytics tickets were created weekly.

GoCardless’ financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team has saved four days per month by using Looker to automate the process of data analysis at the executive and board level – significantly freeing up both this team, and the data analysts, who were supporting this process on a regular basis. Additional features, such as scheduling, enable updated reports to be regularly shared with team members – including, specific reports shared on a weekly basis with the CEO and relevant teams – without the requirement for people to manually update and send each week.

GoCardless also uses Looker to track the impact of product feature releases, including gaining a better understanding of the sales funnel, detailing where revenue drivers exist and how its products are being used by customers.

Looker’s data platform has improved regulatory compliance for GoCardless through features such as managing file permission sets that include version control, access to certain documents and the viewing and edit history of such files. Looker also enables GoCardless to maintain its customers’ data privacy, through the organisation and anonymisation of personal information, and management of this data at scale.

“We wanted to foster a culture in which everyone has access to data to inform decision-making, as well as ramping up efficiencies. Since working with Looker, we’ve been able to open up access to data across the business and we’ve seen near universal adoption of the platform,” said Jon Palmer, head of business intelligence at GoCardless.

“The Looker team has been integral to on-boarding and training our employees to enable a self-help culture across the company. This has also freed up the analysts to focus on more strategic efforts as we continue to execute our ambitious growth plans,” he added.

John O’Keeffe, VP of EMEA, Looker, added: “We’re delighted to work with a like-minded business such as GoCardless that shares similar values and ambitions to harness analytics to drive increased productivity across the business. GoCardless is about to enter a critical growth period in its lifespan and we’re pleased to be able to support the team by enabling insight-led decision-making as a framework for expansion.”

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