Tom discusses Adfin as a “new, better GoCardless,” arguing it offers stronger support, more competitive pricing, and a broader product: direct debits, cards (including Apple Pay/Google Pay), open banking, and bank transfers in one platform with integrated chasing and reconciliation via Xero. He says the market has lacked innovation for 15–20 years and positions Adfin’s goal as getting businesses paid faster at lower cost through automation and AI-driven personalization (e.g., mandates and chasing from a user’s own email domain). Adfin is UK-focused, accepts international card payments, and plans euro and USD bank transfers within six months. A key differentiator is an automated direct debit migration process that moves mandates from other providers in about five weeks without customer action beyond notification. The episode also covers VRP scepticism, configurable payment limits/rules, virtual accounts for automated bank transfer reconciliation, and optional surcharging for expensive business cards.
00:00 Are We The New GoCardless
00:42 Why Adfin Wins
02:03 Why Challenge The Incumbent
03:56 Startup Speed Vs Scale
05:16 Payments Platform Explained
05:58 International Payments Roadmap
07:07 Switching Without Risk
09:26 VRP And Open Banking Reality
13:14 MSP Workflow Examples In Xero
15:43 Chasing Emails And Payment Limits
17:47 High Value Bank Transfers
18:52 Apple Pay Fees And Surcharging
22:33 Wrap Up And How To Reach Adfin
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Tom Pope on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-pope-979a4940/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwelling/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here –https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
MSP Glossary: MSP Finance Glossary Explained | MSP Finance Team
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript
Dan: Tom, welcome to the podcast
Tom: Hello, guys. How are we doing?
Dan: very good indeed. And con- controversially, we’re gonna open this podcast with a, with a, I guess a positioning statement really, which is are you really the new GoCardless?
Tom: yes. Podcast
Dan: And end of podcast.
Tom: End of podcast. yeah, we are. we’re more than that, of course, but I think that’s where we started, and I’d like to think we are now firmly entrenched as a really solid alternative, and I obviously think a much better alternative. do you want me to bore you to death with why quickly?
Dan: Go on then
Tom: Why not? I’ve seen you’ve asked the question. So, why are we better than GoCardless? I mean, so number one, our support is amazing. Number two, our pricing is amazing and more competitive. But most importantly, number three, the actual overall product is much better. So Adfin is much more than just a direct debit processor.
We do direct debits, we do cards, we do open [00:01:00] banking, we do bank transfers all in one platform with integrated chasing. The reason that matters is if your direct debit fails, you might wanna, you know, for example, offer the customer to pay by card automatically. or you might actually wanna, you know, have all of that in one platform because you– it’s much easier to reconcile and kind of manage that with your accounting software.
you also want it all integrated with however you’re chasing your invoices, right? So having everything in Adfin, just results in a much better and cleaner experience for you. There are also a bunch of technical reasons, and I guess this is an MSP podcast, so maybe the technical reasons wouldn’t bore this audience, but there are a load of technical reasons why we also really believe our product performs better.
and they often involve the use of AI. So for example, you can send out direct debit mandates with Adfin, and instead of them coming from a, you know, random email address, you can send them from your own personal email address, and they can be personalized by AI to the context, and that means they get signed a lot more quickly, for example.
So yeah, short answer to your question is yes, we are [00:02:00] the new better GoCardless.
Dan: And, and what, what prompted you then to– ’cause GoCardless has been the go-to for the MSP market really,as long as I can remember. so, so there’s a huge, I guess a huge opportunity there for someone challenging, but also a huge challenge, f-for someone so well, well-ingrained in the space.
So, why pick the fight?
Tom: Why I picked the fight? I think we saw this as just a market that was in need of innovation, to be honest. nothing’s really changed in this space for a lot of businesses for 15, 20 years. and yet there are some pretty serious pain points with it. You know, you ask an accountant how easy it is to work with some of these legacy platforms, and they’ll tell you, “Oh, there’s this niggle, and this niggle’s been there for five years and it hasn’t been fixed.”
Or, “Oh, you know, they’re always settling net of fees and reconciling the fees in my Xero platform takes ages.” You know, everyone just had this long set of niggles that no one had solved. so we thought, okay, time for something new, time for some change. [00:03:00] And I think AI was also a really big catalyst for us, where we realized the world can kind of move on from I produce my invoice in this system, I chase it manually, I, you know, reconcile it here.
You know, the world was… It always had kind of bits of digital tech interfaced with lots of human work. You know, and GoCardless would sit in someone’s chain and, you know, they might manage their GoCardless account here, but still have to do lots of manual work around it. And where we’re going with Adfin is to say, okay, this is like the cloud computing upgrade for finance, right?
This is the moment actually where a lot of the ways that things have been done for 20, 30 years can now change and be made a lot better. And by better, I mean more automated, and automation means, you know, an opportunity to cut cost and also to have things done better, which means pay faster. and Adfin, for us, that’s our North Star.
How do we get the business paid as quickly as possible for the lowest possible cost? so yeah.
Adam: It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? About, [00:04:00] startups, having that additional sort of agility and flexibility to pivot past an established business. Because I guess what’s going through my head here is, well, you know, GoCardless clearly have the longevity, the scale, the dollars I’m assuming behind them.
Why aren’t they doing what you- you’re doing? And why aren’t they ahead of the curve already?
Tom: Yeah. I think it’s like a lifecycle to all companies, isn’t there? And some companies I think are really good at staying super on top of innovation for a long time, but they’re very rare. You know, and we tend to know who they are, right? it’s Google, it’s Meta. You know, these kind of massive American tech companies are particularly good at it.
Adam: Whereas for the vast majority of businesses, there’s just like a decay curve where the innovation just dries up, they become slower. Not necessarily with Cisco Killers. I don’t want a legal request to come through my door, so I’ll just say It’s a good opinion
Tom: it is something that theoretically happens to companies as they get bigger.
And yeah, like very young, hungry companies like mine, you know, we, you know, we’ve got a hell of a lot to [00:05:00] prove and yet, you know, we can hire the most cutting edge engineers in every space who are super motivated. You know, they don’t work 9:00 to 5:00, they work six days a week till 9:00 PM at night, right?
Like you just have an energy and a drive about you that a lot of companies lose when they’re 50-odd years old.
Adam: Sure. So if I understand what your business does in a very simple level, it does what GoCardless already does but cheaper with some additional administrative, lubrication behind it. Plus it does other payment systems such as cards and, what else did you say? Sorry, I can’t remember. Apple
Tom: Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, direct debits, open banking, bank transfers.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great
Tom: Yeah. So yeah, at heart, think of us like a, we’re a payment platform that replaces all the existing payment infrastructure you might have cobbled together. But then we also build, we also have– you know, you don’t have to use us for this, but you can use a bunch of AI agents to then take the manual work out of your payment process.
Adam: one specific question as well, just because [00:06:00] it’s popped into my head and I’m gonna ask it while it’s done so. GoCardless seems to have a bit of a weakness around international payments in as much as it’s expensive to do that. Are you– Do you have that same challenge or have you solved that?
Tom: we’re very UK-focused at the moment. We can accept payment over card from anywhere in the world. so that, you know, that is used by some customers. But for things like that, I mean, direct debit is a UK scheme, so it only works for UK customers. Open banking is a UK scheme, so it only works for UK customers.
So card is our only international payment method. But we are planning to expand, in the next six months, to support euro payments and US dollar payments as well, so bank transfers
Adam: Okay, so watch this space
Tom: More suspense, yes
Dan: very good. just to,I’ve got another topic for you, but just to hang on the,the sort of trail of thinking here. So, le- less expensive and better lubricated, I think was the word that Adam used, than
Tom: We won’t put that in our marketing.
Dan: no. There’ll be another lawsuit coming at you, I would [00:07:00] imagine.
But,
Tom: It’s been an expensive podcast, this guys.
Dan: yeah. A fun one though. so, the transfer, you know, people are gonna be very well ingrained and, and we don’t wanna interrupt anything that, that is the cash flow supply for a business. So, is there a low-risk way for, people that are interested in this that, that they’ve, that they’ve liked what they heard so far, but they don’t wanna throw everything out and start again.
I- is there a simple way to get started other than doing it client by client, like new clients? Or is there a transfer process, if you’ve got a mandate set up with an- any other provider already?
Tom: Yeah. I-I’m– Oh, God, it’s almost like I planted that question because I really should have mentioned that. It’s a good point. So yes, we have built the only, to our knowledge, the only automated transfer service for direct debits, in the market. So you can actually use Adfin, with, you know, you can bring any other provider’s direct debits to us, and we can seamlessly migrate them onto our [00:08:00] platform without your customer having to do anything.
so this was a really big pain point when we started because we’d go to customers and they would say, “Yeah, this sounds great, guys. I love it, but I’ve got 500 customers being invoiced on direct debit today, and I don’t want to switch because I don’t want to ask 500 people to re-sign a mandate, because if 50 of them decide not to re-sign, I’ve lost 50 customers.
It’s not worth it.” And so this was a really big problem for us early on because we thought, “Well, if we can’t solve this, then actually this is gonna be a tough nut to crack.” And, e-even from a just a pure competition point of view, it’s obviously a good thing for people to be able to move around and not get locked into a provider.
So no, we did crack it. you can migrate to us without your customers essentially knowing. They’ll get a, they’ll get a mandatory notification, like an email, but they don’t have to do anything. so that makes the direct debit switch process really easy. It takes five weeks. We manage the whole lot for you, fully automated.
but because of our pricing structure where we don’t charge a monthly fee, we don’t charge a setup fee, we only charge a percentage of the successfully paid transaction, it’s also pretty easy to dip your toe in, right? And we might have– You [00:09:00] know, sometimes businesses sign up and they say, “Right, I like the sound of this.
I’m gonna, you know, start my– start with my new clients on Adfin, get used to it, see if it works. If I’m happy, I’ll migrate everyone else over. Or start using you guys for my payment links on card, but leave my direct debits. Once I’m happy with that, I’ll move the direct debits over.” So we don’t mind, and we put a lot of kind of human support behind people migrating as well to make it as easy as possible.
Dan: Okay. really interesting. so let me,let me go with another controversial topic then. Variable recurring payments, VRP. Talk to me.
Tom: Yeah. All right. So, I mean, very brief history of open banking in the UK for the audience in case they don’t know. They might not even care. And to be honest, they’d be quite entitled not to because some of this gets quite tedious, to be honest. But, you know, open banking, was all about two things.
One was making it really easy for people to switch bank accounts and kind of have more transparency on their bank data, and the [00:10:00] other was around payments. And so you hear about this thing called AIS, account information services, and that’s the thing that allows you to view your balance for your HSBC account within your NatWest app, for example.
or when you know, sign up for a loan, for that loan provider to get, with your permission, to retrieve data from your transaction history. So it’s kind of the AIS side of open banking. And then there was the payment side, which actually was a bit of an afterthought, and they kind of cobbled it on at the last minute when they realized the whole point of open banking is to allow people to do anything on their banking app via API.
Hang on, they can make payments in their banking app, so they should probably be able to do that via API too. So then they cobbled PIS on without really thinking about whether that would make a particularly good payment service. And, you know, the reality is it’s not a great payment option for a lot of people because just, you know, opening your bank account and making a transfer to someone is not something you do super often.
Not that many people want to pay for their business. I know when I buy some shoes online, not many people want to transfer Nike 100 quid directly from their bank account with no card protections or chargeback [00:11:00] rights or anything of the sort, right? It’s a pretty, pretty crazy thing to do. So this all happened a long time ago, and then sort of people started saying, “Well, hang on, this should be better than this.
Like, we need kind of a concept of, like a mandate. Like, we need the concept of a bit like direct debit, a business being able to have the right to pull funds from an account on a schedule.” So I might, you know, sign up with my accountant and say, “Look, I authorize you to pull up to 200 quid a month for my bill and kind of manage that like a direct debit.”
The problem was it’s not mandated, right? AIS and PIS was mandated by law. The banks had to comply. They had to build the infrastructure. With VRPs, there was no mandate to provide that service for free. So for the last, probably close on 10 years, maybe even more now, there’s been continual wrangling between sort of industry bodies who are very keen on this thing being a payment service but then sort of want it for free.
The bank’s saying, “Hang on a second. Why would I give you this for free? It costs us a lot of money to run.” and actually a lot of the infrastructure they built for this, they built out of their compliance teams who weren’t actually [00:12:00] resourced or funded to do this properly. So actually no one really knows if PIS is gonna scale anyway, right?
It’s not built in the same way that like a card rail is built, which is super robust and super scalable. So they say, “Well, we’re not gonna do this unless we get paid.” So, you know, there’s been a bit of noise over the last couple of years on commercial VRP, which is people saying, okay, and I– there is a bit of a technical difference here where a certain form of VRP is available and is mandated.
Let’s not get into the rabbit hole there. But like VRP for most people, commercial VRP, various people have tried to make it happen. There’s been various industry groups trying to say, “Right, this is the funding structure.” But I’m pretty sceptical at this stage because yeah, no one has managed to figure out how they’re gonna make the banks enough money to make this actually workable as a product for the market.
and until that’s solved, it’s not gonna go anywhere, I don’t think.
Dan: Okay, so
Tom: how many listeners we lost then. God, sorry.
Dan: Ho- hopefully none. we best, best add in another fruity or l- lawsuit, [00:13:00] topic,just to keep everyone engaged.
Tom: it? Yeah. Yeah. Used to be my specialist subject, now I’m a bit rusty. So, yeah, right into the podcast if I got any of that wrong.
Adam: may- maybe we can regain some of those listeners who are just about to press stop or whatever. could you give us two or three kind of real world workflow examples of how the– your product comes to life from an MSP owner’s perspective? So he probably got some direct debit routine stuff going on.
He buys hardware, you know, for clients, at irregular times during the month. he has suppliers who are probably on direct debit. I’m trying to think what are some of the other scenarios that go on. but yeah, just paint a picture of a, of a few of the kind of workflow efficiencies that your product, can pull together
Tom: that’s a good question. So let’s imagine, I don’t know, you’re running a business and you’re raising your invoice in Xero today, and you’ve got a bunch of people on direct debit, and maybe you’ve got some ad hoc invoices you’re raising through cards and things like that. So sort of straightforwardly, point one [00:14:00] is we would still connect to your Xero account.
we integrate with Xero. We’re a Xero partner. you still raise your invoices in Xero like you do today. The big difference is instead of those invoices being raised, some of them going to GoCardless, some of them going to Stripe, you having to follow up, you having to chase, you having to kind of do a bunch of reconciliation between those platforms.
With us, the difference is everything is completely automated. you can choose how automated, but if you want, you can literally automate everything. and so that, what that means is those direct debits are gonna be still synchronizing to Xero, but, you know, they will be s- where they– if anything goes wrong with them, we’ll automatically be trying other payment methods within the parameters you set to get the invoice paid.
And for your card payment invoices, instead of you issuing them and then having to remind people and chase and check your bank account to see if they’ve paid, and if they have paid, marking the invoices paid in Xero, like, you know, there’s a bunch of financial admin there. All of that is taken away. you’re probably also as a net result gonna find your cash flow improves because if you think about like all the different [00:15:00] steps that you have to do manually, a lot of MSP owners don’t have the time to be on top of this every hour of every day or necessarily the money to pay an accountant to do it for them.
So it becomes a kind of a once a week or once every fortnight task, and we see really big increases often in how fast people get paid when they start using Adfin. Simple things, right? Allowing clients to pay over WhatsApp, Apple Pay on WhatsApp. following up with chasing emails more actively. Using Adfin’s ability to chase from your email domain instead of just template reminders, so it’s a lot more personal.
People respond a lot better to a personal email. So kind of we give you– we give the business owner a lot more tools to automate and take kind of work away and get them paid more quickly.
Dan: So two, two questions from me then. Number one, this sounds like it’s doing some of the work of something like Chaser
Tom: Yep, definitely. Yep
Dan: and,and secondly, and I think Adam was thinking of this point as well, in his earlier question. There i- there is,there’s quite a v- a [00:16:00] variability in terms of how much you might be wanting to request via the direct debit.
So, not uncommon for an MSP to sell 10,000 pounds of product, for example. and, with, other payment profile, platforms, there, there’s a limit which you can apply to have indeed. how do, how does that work with your system?
Tom: Yep. Okay, cool. Question one, chaser. Yeah, absolutely. So chase is kind of an email rules-based chasing tool. We can do that. You can set things up in a very static way with Adfin if you like, but we sort of advise you don’t, to be honest. we like the more AI agentic-driven workflows. So you can connect your email address to Adfin, and then Adfin will intelligently mix what it sends.
So we’re sending emails from the Adfin domain that sound official, and it can send personalized emails from your domain. You can control this, you can see it, you can choose how much automation you have. But like just, you know, even as you two, right, if I sent you a personal email saying, “Hey, chaps, would really appreciate it if you pay me this five grand.
Here’s a payment link,” you’re far more likely to pay than if you get some very official template-looking email that you’re just gonna [00:17:00] say, “Oh, comes out in two weeks, whatever,” right? So, you know, we, we really believe in personalization on point one. And then point two, so, I’ve forgotten what it was.
What was point two again?
Dan: The,the value that you can, you can request
Tom: yes. Sorry. Long day. value you can rest. You can set all that up for the invoice or for the customer in Advent. So you can set limits and you can sort of say, “Right, you know what? I’m allowing direct debit up to five grand. Above that, I want bank transfers because I want to save on the fees,” for example.
Or, I want to allow people to pay with Apple Pay up to 1,000 pounds. More than that, it’s got to be a bank transfer.” So you can set all those rules up in the platform. we can accept relatively high value payments over direct debit. It’s, I can’t actually remember what our default limit is, but if you talk to support, we’ll do a bit more due diligence on your business and we can potentially raise that limit.
But the other big feature we’ve got for the really big payments is that, like, automated bank transfer service. So, you know, going back to the Xero example from Adam, if you’re sending out invoices to clients for like 10 [00:18:00] grand and you’re sending them out from Xero and you want them to make a bank transfer, you’ve got to keep an eye on that bank account for that transfer to come in.
if you’re sending chaser emails through a chaser, for example, you’ve got to remember to turn that off and mark it as paid when the invoice lands. It’s just all work, right? It’s all admin. So for almost a nominal fee with our bank transfer product, it’s very cheap. You know, you can have the payments.
You– Basically, we will give you a virtual bank account, which those bank transfers land in. The advantage of that is that we know the second the money lands. There’s no, oh, is the reference there? Is the reference not there? Does the amount match or anything like that? We know it lands. We ping the money straight onto you, so it’s like a pass-through account.
We handle any chasing, and we handle that reconciliation, so the Xero invoice is immediately reconciled. So yeah, we to give everyone the tools, but for the higher value payments, that’s really useful. And we have a lot of lawyers, for example, that, that really like that product today.
Adam: I, I was just thinking, Dan, as, as well actually, around the sort of card, credit card or Apple Pay potentially sort of set up as well, [00:19:00] where, and I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this, but where you’ve got, clients, MSP clients looking to no- negotiate terms with an MSP when buying hardware, for example, and, you know, and wanting 30 days or whatever it is o- of terms and the MSP says, no, I want payment with order.”
So it’s just sort of, again, going back to taking out the friction from this process. If you can give the client that, you know, the credit card opportunity and okay, you can use Stripe or something else, but that is now yet another tool potentially, that you’ve got to administer with some more complexity.
So I mean, it’s not something we’ve really talked about, Dan, but I’m interested in your opinion actually around this whole kind of credit terms piece and the degree to which giving clients that flexibility,as a way of giving them what they want at the same time as getting your payment through
Tom: Yeah. I mean, for sure. I don’t know, Dan, you might have a better view, but I mean, we… Again, it’s about giving people the tools in one
Adam: it’s, I think what it’s doing is it’s allowing fewer and fewer excuses[00:20:00]
Tom: Yeah.
Adam: the client
Tom: Yeah.
Adam: Oh, you know, whatever, I can’t make a back, BACS payment this, you know, I can’t do this today or there’s some- something else, or I need to use a different account. Oh, so and so’s got the card, they’re not in the office today.
You know, whatever it is, all these different sort of excuses which may come up. having that at all is pretty cool, I think
Dan: I need to, call Switzerland and move some money around so I can make
Tom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Do you accept gold in a suitcase? No. yeah, the… Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, we find Apple… I mean Apple Pay, Google Pay are obviously super popular. we’re very cost competitive on those. traditionally, I think a barrier for that has always been people going, “Ooh, you know, I don’t wanna make this an option because it’s gonna be 1.5% and that’s a lot of money.”
And yeah, so there’s a couple of things there. One, we’re pretty cost competitive. The highest our standard card fee is 1% and that could fall with volume if you’re a bigger MSP. so there’s immediate quite a big saving there. But also we’ve got the ability to surcharge business p- business cards.
So, you know, business cards are expensive, you know, often around 2% to [00:21:00] process. that puts a lot of people off. but with Open you can just flick a switch and off- you know, surcharge that onto the business. So when they go to pay, we’ll say, “Oh, you wanna pay with a business card? That’s fine, but there’s gonna be an extra fee.
Do you accept? If not, go and make an open banking payment or a bank transfer instead.” so yeah, it’s bonkers. A lot of people, even with the surcharge, will still pay on card, and I think it’s because a lot of business owners actually just are collecting those points on their, you know, Amex or whatever it is, and they want those points no matter what.
I don’t know. I don’t know whether that’s rational or not. I never asked. Someone was explaining to… An accountant once explained to me that there’s a kind of a good new tax dodge there. I didn’t really get my head around it, but, anyway, it’s a popular feature. People like it.
Dan: we definitely don’t wanna, drift into any more legal,
Tom: to probably to get this one approved by legal before we put it out, aren’t I? Yeah.
Dan: but, but no,I think the point is that,it’s taking friction out at, at all and in all scenarios, and everyone is a bit different. Some people,I know per- personally, [00:22:00] like I get very aggrieved if I just can’t pay on Apple Pay.
and, and so, so that alone, meaning I don’t have to type card details in, for example, is that’s good n- that’s good news as far as I’m concerned. And,and yeah, to Adam’s point, yeah, payment should be a natural part of any negotiation. and, and being able to, yeah, take all the friction out of it sounds really interesting and then know there’s n- there’s not then admin, black holes,that then follow as a result.
and of course,in our trade, we’re having to deal with all of that, so anything that, that makes life easier for us as well,certainly sounds very interesting. we are… I guess we’re nearly on our normal time budget. We almost always go over. but, but, somehow I think we’ve had a really fun and informative,podcast and, hopefully legal won’t cut too much out of this.
if anyone wants to carry on the conversation,how best to get a hold of you?
Tom: Yeah. I mean, reach out, adfin.com, A-D-F-I-N.com. yeah, have a look. Look at the website. There’s a link on there to book a demo, [00:23:00] so, click that if you’re interested. we’ve got a super friendly team who’d love to show you around. so yeah, hope it was of interest. We’d love to… We- and we’ve got quite a few MSPs on the platform.
We love MSPs as a segment. I think the use case is just really perfect. So, yeah, we’d love to work with more, so do contact us.
Dan: Very good. And any final thoughts, Adam?
Adam: no, I mean, what’s not to like? I, I’m lo- loving, you know, the competition here, which is ultimately providing easier and better solutions for the market. you know, that’s what we need. and, yeah,I think, you know, I’d encourage our listeners to go out there and look at this stuff, you know.
And,and, you know, build a framework within,their business which, a- as I would always say, helps to educate their clients around what their payment terms are and what their expectations are. So, you know, this isn’t, from my perspective, an excuse for your clients or your policies around payment to be lazy.
But I think what it is around providing some additional flexibility, some additional options. I’m always into automation, and efficiency, so if you [00:24:00] can build some of that in,then great
Dan: Very good. Brilliant. Tom, thank you very much for joining us. And,I think Adam is, book-booking his demo right now
Tom: I was gonna say, if I really get you guys on board, yeah.
Dan: Ping.
Tom: Love it. Thanks, guys
Dan: Thank
Adam: Thank you. Cheers