CASE STUDY
We’re also using the insights generated and
driven by the Looker platform to improve
our verification processes – with these
varying, we’re identifying where there are
bottlenecks, where we can make things
better and faster to improve our merchants’
experience of our onboarding flow.
You mention that some of the
processes before Looker were
‘outdated’, can you tell us more
about this and how Looker helped
improve the situation?
Our financial planning and analysis
(FP&A) team were spending around four
days every month manually developing
reports for the board.
Using Looker, we’ve been able to automate
the process of data analysis significantly
freeing up both this team and the data
analysts who were supporting this process
on a regular basis.
to focus on more strategic efforts as we
continue to execute our ambitious growth
plans,” Palmer said.
John O’Keeffe, VP of EMEA, Looker, said:
“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.”
Jon Palmer, Head of Business Intelligence,
GoCardless, explains more about the
solution implementation and its
business benefits:
What’s your role at the business?
As the Head of Business Intelligence (BI),
my role is to enable and foster a culture of
data-led thinking across the GoCardless
business. I’m responsible for developing the
BI strategy, ensuring we have the right tools
and technology in place in order to meet the
business needs, while also driving adoption
of analytics across the business – taking the
onus away from the data team and putting
the power in the hands of the individuals.
As we continue to grow, I’m also working to
create a ‘self-serve’ ethos – making sure that
each employee has access to the data that is
relevant to them and their role.
How does GoCardless use data to
improve decision-making?
Tell us about GoCardless
Our mission is to take the pain out of getting
paid, for businesses with recurring revenue.
We’ve created the first global network for
recurring payments, designed and optimised
for taking invoice, subscription, membership
and instalment payments. We’re using the Looker platform to –
among many other elements of commercial
data – track the impact of product feature
releases and gain a better understanding
of the sales funnel, detailing where revenue
drivers exist and how our products are being
used by customers.
We now process US$13 billion in transactions
a year and we’re proud to count 50,000
businesses around the world as our customers,
from small businesses to household names
like TripAdvisor and The Guardian. This is especially important as we move into
new geographies – we recently launched
in the US – and access to data will help us
quickly establish what’s working and where
and how we can improve as we grow.
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We’ve also been able to benefit from
Looker’s scheduling feature – in which we
can 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.
Another area we’ve seen improvement and
development in is business-wide security
and privacy – we’ve made real strides in
that area. Using Looker, we can now control
who across the company has access to what
information and when. This ensures people
in the right roles can see the right level of
sensitive data.
Is there more in the pipeline in terms
of your deployment of Looker, and
if so, could you give us a flavour of
what that might look like?
One of the benefits of rolling out the Looker
platform is that the tool can drive insight
and action into other applications, alongside
serving more traditional dashboard-driven
use cases.
We’re starting to embed Looker in internal
applications like Salesforce so that we’re
driving a deep understanding of customer
success into all our business processes. n
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