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Introduction to Taking Payments with Direct Debit

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As Global Head of Content Marketing, Chris oversees all of the content requirements for our organic, growth marketing, and demand generation campaigns. This requires a fundamental understanding of the pain points our customers are experiencing and a thorough comprehension of the ways those customers consume and engage with content. A growth marketing expert in the tech space, Chris has worked with complex global businesses such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Dell and Oracle to grow their most valuable customers, increase revenue and speed up deal cycles. He has also led on customer lifecycle management programs and account-based marketing strategies for BlackRock, EY, Grant Thornton and UBS. ConnectSee full bio

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As Director of Global Payment Partnerships at GoCardless, Paul and his team manage global relationships with the organisations that make payments work. His expertise was instrumental in building GoCardless' ACH payment product, enabling the company to enter the North American market successfully. Paul sits on the UK Finance Working Group on Open Banking and holds the Chartered Banker, MCIBS qualification. The Chartered Banker Diploma is the highest level qualification awarded by the Chartered Banker Institute, recognised and supported by major financial services organisations across the globe. ConnectSee full bio

Last editedApr 20231 min read

The three things you need to know about taking payments with Direct Debit - also known as ACH Debit or bank debit.

Once you have a Direct Debit mandate set up with your customer, you can collect Direct Debit payments from them at any time.

There are three things you need to know about taking payments with Direct Debit:

You need to give customers advance notice of changes - If you make changes to either the payment frequency or payment amount, you must notify your customer about it before taking further payments. What constitutes a change depends on what the original debit authorization specified. Learn more about customer payment notifications.
Payments are not instant - Payments may take more than 3 working days to clear on your bank account. Learn more about ACH Debit payment processing times.
You must submit payment requests in a specific format - Starting with having an origination agreement in place with a bank, you must follow Nacha's (the organization which runs the ACH scheme) file format to be able to successfully collect a Direct Debit payment. Learn more about submitting ACH payment requests to the bank.

How to collect Direct Debit payments with GoCardless

1.

Create your free GoCardless account, access your user-friendly payments dashboard & connect your accounting software (if you use one).

2.

Easily set up & schedule Direct Debit payments via payment pages on your website checkout or secure payment links.

3.

From now on you'll get paid on time, every time, as GoCardless automatically collects payment on the scheduled date. Simple.

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Take Direct Debit payments easily

GoCardless can process Direct Debit payments on your behalf, including:

Notifying customers - GoCardless sends your customers advance notice of each payment.
Submitting payment requests - GoCardless handles all submissions to the bank on your behalf.
Fast collection - GoCardless has optimized the ACH debit collection process to collect funds as fast as possible.

Learn more about taking ACH Debit payments with GoCardless - the easy way to collect payments via Direct Debit.