This guest blog was written by the team at the leading bank payment network, GoCardless.

With interest rates at the highest level since 2012 in Australia and costs rising across the board, it can feel like the macro environment is designed to dent you and your clients’ businesses.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. As you’re at the centre of your customers’ financial processes, you’re in the perfect position to make strategic recommendations and add greater value to their businesses.

That’s why we’ve pulled together three trends we’re excited about right now so that you’re up to date with valuable recommendations for your clients.

PayTo is here*

The deadline has now passed for banks to be PayTo ready. This is great news for your consumers as it’s now more widely available and they can start to reap the benefits.

PayTo is set to change the payments game in Australia for multiple reasons.

PayTo requires customers to verify themselves using their bank account so that you can quickly assess that they are who they claim to be. And it’s all done online and during the transaction, so verification is in real-time. It means that payments can be processed faster and fraudulent transactions are stopped before they even start.

What’s more, because payment authorisation is in real-time, it provides an effective alternative to card payments. This means you can save money on expensive card fees and leave behind the inefficiencies of cards, such as high failure rates.

To find out more about PayTo and better advise your clients, join our online PayTo University.

AI presents a world of opportunities for payments

There’s still a lot to learn about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications. For payments, however, we can already see the potential.

One way machine learning can help in the payments space is by analysing a huge quantity of data to identify patterns.

These patterns can then inform important decisions for you or your clients’ businesses.

For example, following a failed payment, GoCardless uses 10 years of payment data to predict when a payment retry is most likely to be successful. Through the millions of data points we use, we’ve been able to reduce payment failures to as low as 0.5%**.

This data can also be leveraged to spot fraud before it happens. Using payment data we can identify whether a potential customer appears to be risky. Those that appear risky will then be asked to verify that they own the bank account they’re trying to pay with. This proactive approach has helped to reduce fraud by up to 62%**.

**based on GoCardless transaction data

Jump on the automation train

For the small businesses you work with, time is tight. Manually setting up direct debits, chasing payers and reconciling payments across multiple systems is time-consuming. That’s why they can make a huge time saving by maximising use of the Xero App Store and integrating payments into their operations.

That’s what Mörk Chocolate, a business that supplies specialty drinking chocolate to the coffee industry, has done. They integrated GoCardless through their Xero account. The two work easily together: once a payment is made, it is reconciled within their accounting system by simply clicking one button.

“What we love most is the reconciliations. After the payments have been collected, we just click ‘okay’, everything gets bucketed away and it’s all good. That aspect really does speed up our accounting processes,” said Kiril Shaginov, Mörk Co-Founder.

Mörk is just one of many success stories we’ve seen, where the GoCardless and Xero integration has helped them boost their top and bottom line. That’s why we have renewed our strategic partnership with Xero for another five years, helping businesses win and retain customers, stress less and get paid on time.

To find out more about how you can truly add value to your clients with Xero and GoCardless, check out GoCardless on the Xero App Store.

*Please note that Payto is not yet available to set up as a payment option within Xero. GoCardless customers can use PayTo directly within GoCardless and then manually enter and reconcile the payments within Xero.

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