If you’re looking to change your Direct Debit provider, you may feel uncertain about the process involved in moving your revenue from one provider to another.
The good news is that the process is not complicated, and your new Direct Debit provider will want to help you with the process. We’re going to break down the process and explain how we help businesses switch to our Direct Debit service.
Why do businesses change their Direct Debit provider?
There are a lot of reasons why businesses choose to switch to a new provider. Most of our customers come to us if they are:
- Annoyed about a price increase
- Frustrated with a system outage or a failure of collections
- Generally disappointed with a lack of customer service
Complete the Bulk Change Process
The first thing we will do is help you to complete a Bacs document, that covers what Direct Debits you want to migrate to us, and some details about your incumbent provider. That document will then come back to us for completion.
For the Bulk Change, there are no actions for your customers to take, and they don’t have to sign new DD Mandates – they just need to be made aware of the change.
Agree the date of change
When you are migrating, there must be a 10 day clear window of no Direct Debit activity before the first collection date with your new Direct Debit provider.
So we will work with you to understand your collection profile, the various collection dates you may have, and the best date for you to carry out the migration.
Liaise with the Banks
After the date of change is agreed, we will contact our bank with the bulk deed and the relevant dates for the migration, our bank will liaise with your current Direct Debit provider’s bank, and they will approve the migration.
Once everything is approved between the banks, you will need to approach your current Direct Debit provider, and ask them to release the data behind all the Direct Debits you currently have with them. This will typically come to you in the form of an excel or .csv file via email or a secure download method.
Notify your customers of the change
Once you have that data, you need to send that to us so we can use it to update our system. We will then use that to send out a Notification of Change, a Bacs-compliant communication document informing your customers that we are taking over the Direct Debits from your previous provider.
Make the first collection
The final step is for us to make the first collection as your new Direct Debit provider, on the date that we agreed earlier in the process. The funds will be collected on the same dates, and deposited into your bank account as normal – so it’s business as usual thereafter.
Migrate to London and Zurich
As we’ve set out in this article, switching to a new Direct Debit provider is a simple process, and migrating to us could help you save on collection costs while getting a better level of customer service.
If you’d like to learn more about our Direct Debit services, click here. Or if you want to get a quote from us and start migrating your Direct Debits, click here.
