GoCardless, the bank payment company, is expanding its relationship with challenger energy supplier Rebel Energy to shake up the energy industry with a new approach to payments and customer experience.

Rebel Energy has now added Success+, a feature that uses proprietary GoCardless machine learning models to automatically optimise failed payment retries, to the services it uses from the fintech. This will help Rebel Energy better identify customers that may be experiencing financial difficulty, enabling the company to not only work with those that need greater flexibility around their payment plan, but also prevent any disruption in service.

The new contract builds on a relationship which began in 2021 when Rebel Energy selected GoCardless to collect payments via Direct Debit. Not only did the energy supplier and its customers appreciate the transparency and control that came with knowing the exact timing and amount of a payment, using GoCardless has also allowed Rebel Energy to scale efficiently: despite their customer base growing 200x over two years, the number of people in their finance team only increased from one to four.

Dan Bates, CEO and founder, Rebel Energy, said: “Rebel Energy is a rebel with a cause. 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.

“Throughout our relationship, we’ve seen firsthand 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.”

Pat Phelan, MD of UK & Ireland and Chief Customer Officer at GoCardless, said: “We’re proud to support Rebel Energy as it grows, not least of which because we believe in its aim to be the most customer-centric energy company on the market. 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. 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.”

As it continues to grow, Rebel Energy is looking at other ways to put its customers first, including the potential use of 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.