How Village Hotels automated 100,000+ Direct Debit collections to enable scalable growth

If you process 100,000 transactions totalling £10m+ each month, fee structure makes a big difference. And at that volume, any process changes need to be executed with precision. So, for Village Hotels, which looked to change its system and supplier between one payment run and the next, the race was on to get things right.

About Village Hotels

Founded in 1976 as accommodation attached to a squash club, Village Hotels has grown to comprise 30+ full-service hotels across the UK. Now offering rooms, food, drink, business, leisure, and fitness facilities – the chain’s diverse portfolio has seen it acquired several times over, most recently for more than £400m.

The Challenge

Overcoming fees and inefficient collections to unlock growth

In 2022, Village Hotels found itself in the market for a new payments partner – when its legacy system was discontinued. Whilst it had the opportunity to upgrade to a new system with the same supplier, the high migration cost and untenable fee structure prompted Finance Manager Darren Bown to look elsewhere:

Our existing provider was very keen to charge us on tiered pricing by transaction volume – so the more we got paid by our customers, the more we’d pay our provider. We didn’t want that kind of obstacle to our growth, which is when and why we found AccessPay.

There were other challenges with our existing setup, too – like the hassle of needing a card reader to make payments through our banking portal, like wanting to boost our security against phishing, and finally, the delays to payments caused by downtime. All of this needed to be fixed, ideally by one new provider.

On top of the accommodation business, Village Hotels also has over 130,000 gym members – which means processing a large volume of monthly Direct Debits. Add to this the company’s supplier payments as well as payroll, a provider switch needed to be smooth, instant, and technically perfect to avoid disruption in the business.

The Solution

Switching to AccessPay – enhanced security, flexibility, and savings

After a product demo showcasing that AccessPay could offer the same core functionality, at a lower overall cost and with a more scalable pricing model, the company made the call and provided notice to its old provider:

The flexibility and customer service of AccessPay played a big role in our choice. We wouldn’t get punished for going over our payment limits, which means one-off spikes in business weren’t a concern. We could have a chat about it if we needed to increase our tier.

With AccessPay we could also operate with a Hardware Security Module (HSM), which we didn’t even need to host ourselves, which meant greater security and much less hassle. Add to this the Account Name Verification (ANV) protection, which gives us an additional check when making payments to unfamiliar accounts, and we come out much more secure than before.

Making the switch in June 2022, the new system was up and running in time for the next month’s Direct Debits collection, and the HSM was in place within just 3 weeks.

The Impact

Faster, cheaper and more reliable Direct Debit collections

With more competitive, flat-rate pricing and a better user experience, AccessPay has made the payments process cheaper, faster, and easier for Village Hotels:

It’s a much more modern interface and plugging in extra services is easy, which makes a big difference to the day job. But most importantly, there are no more transaction thresholds or charges for exceeding them, which means we can grow with confidence. We’re going to be opening more gyms and facilities, so we need to be scalable.

AccessPay has made a big difference to our Direct Debits in particular. Submission and retrieval are straightforward, we can download file formats that go straight into our other systems. We can check new accounts easily with ANV. Our whole payments process is now much more reliable and much easier to use – payroll is faster, training is easy, communication has been excellent.

Read more about AccessPay’s Direct Debits & Account Name Verification, or arrange a demo to see it in action for yourself.