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About GoCardless: Connecting Payments, Partners, and Research
GoCardless is a global payments company that helps businesses collect one-off and recurring payments directly from customers’ bank accounts.
Its technology supports payments for everything from subscriptions to invoices, helping businesses simplify payment collection.
Through partnerships with software providers, GoCardless also lets businesses manage payments within the platforms they already use.
The Challenge: More Marketing Plans Than In-House Capacity
GoCardless has a talented in-house creative team, but limited capacity to support the demands of the entire business.
With multiple events taking place every month, requests for exhibition stands, presentations, booklets, and other collateral competed with broader business priorities.
The partnerships marketing team often had to make difficult tradeoffs, scaling back plans and leaving valuable creative ideas on the table.
The joint research report and event with their partner Aryza brought this challenge into focus.
The project called for:
- Specialist publication design: A substantial print and digital report that required expertise and capacity beyond what the internal team could provide.
- A unified creative direction: A cohesive design that brought both brands together while meeting the expectations of multiple stakeholders.
- Consistent event materials: A coordinated report, brochure, invitation, and landing page that created a seamless experience across touchpoints.
GoCardless needed a creative partner who could ease the pressure on its internal team, bring specialist expertise, and manage the work from concept through production, without compromising quality or consistency.
The Solution: Approximately 50 Hours of Dedicated Report Design Support
To bring its joint research with Aryza to life, GoCardless partnered with Designity for specialist report design and supporting event collateral. A dedicated creative team brought creative direction, project management, and design execution together:
- Caterina Toffoli: Creative Director
- Diana Romero: Creative Project Manager
- Florencia Gutman: Senior Graphic Designer
Through Designity’s Creative-as-a-Service model, GoCardless gained approximately 50 hours of design capacity for the report itself, with additional support for the brochure, event invitation, and landing page.
Caterina’s role went beyond reviewing layouts. She helped the two brands find a shared visual direction, balancing their identities so neither overshadowed the other.
When the initial “Uneven Ground” cover concepts struggled to resonate with all stakeholders, she recommended building on “Rising Tides,” the title of the report’s introduction. Wave-like forms and sea-inspired imagery gave the team a visual foundation to carry through the publication.
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With that direction established, the team developed four connected deliverables:
- Research Report Design: Designed the 20-page Rising Tides: Late payments in UK consumer lending report, taking it from cover concepts through page layouts and final production. The team organized the supplied content and data into a publication that needed to be both accurate and easy to follow, with careful checking throughout.
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- Trifold Brochure Design: Created a brochure introducing GoCardless and Aryza for event attendees. Alongside the report, it gave the two brands another piece of printed collateral to share at Lending Forward. Both pieces needed to be ready for the same Monday print deadline.
- Event Invitation Design: Created the invitation for Lending Forward, the London event where GoCardless and Aryza would discuss reimagining payments and future-proofing lending businesses. This extended the team’s support beyond the research publication to the materials promoting the event itself.
- Landing Page Design: Created a dedicated landing page for the event, adding a digital deliverable alongside the report, brochure, and invitation. Together, these assets supported the joint research launch across its publication and event materials.
The partnership also gave GoCardless support through final production.
When last-minute changes arrived on Friday afternoon, Caterina in Cape Town and Florencia in Argentina coordinated across time zones, with final tweaks on Sunday evening to meet the Monday 10am UK print deadline.
How Designity Worked With GoCardless: From Research to Event Assets
Over approximately four weeks, including a pause for content approval, the team developed the creative direction, designed the report, and coordinated feedback across both brands.
Phase 1: Explore a Direction for Both Brands
The report originally carried the title “Uneven Ground.” Early cover concepts explored topographic designs, using a graphic approach rather than a literal interpretation.
Finding common ground mattered. The design needed to reflect the research while ensuring neither brand overshadowed the other.
Phase 2: Turn “Rising Tides” Into a Creative Foundation
When the initial concepts struggled to win agreement, Caterina suggested drawing on the introduction’s new title, “Rising Tides,” for the broader creative direction.
Wave-like forms and sea-inspired imagery gave the teams a stronger visual foundation. That direction shaped Rising Tides: Late payments in UK consumer lending and carried through the publication.
Phase 3: Make Technical Research Easy to Follow
The team laid out the supplied content and data across 20 pages, paying close attention to accuracy, readability, and visual consistency.
GoCardless reviewed sections of a few pages at a time. This gave stakeholders opportunities to refine the work as the document developed.
Phase 4: Connect Feedback and Event Materials
Designity used Miro to centralize feedback from GoCardless and Aryza, making it easier to gather input and keep both teams aligned.
Calls helped clarify questions and resolve conflicting feedback, while consolidated comments kept the review process organized across approximately two to three revision rounds.
With an understanding of the wider event materials, Designity maintained a consistent visual direction across the report and supporting assets through its presentation and publication design expertise.
Phase 5: Take Ownership Through Final Production
Final content changes arrived on Friday evening, ahead of a Monday 10am UK print deadline.
Caterina in Cape Town and Florencia in Argentina coordinated across time zones to complete the remaining work.
The report and trifold brochure were ready for printing, with physical reports available at Lending Forward in London, where the report was launched to an audience of lending and finance professionals.
The Results & Impact: Added Capacity to Deliver the Research Launch
Designity gave GoCardless the creative support to deliver a project its stretched internal team couldn’t take on.
The results included:
- Around 50 hours of report design support: Specialist design support to turn supplied research and copy into a finished report.
- A 20-page co-branded report: Print and digital versions that helped both partners share their findings consistently.
- Approximately 81% lower annual cost than three in-house salaries: Designity’s quarterly Plus plan costs $5,495/month, compared with the combined average U.S. salaries of a Creative Director, Creative Project Manager, and Senior Graphic Designer.*
- Four coordinated deliverables: A report, trifold brochure, invitation, and landing page for the joint research launch.
- A creative direction both brands agreed on: Caterina helped align stakeholders on a concept that worked for both partners.
- A report attendees engaged with: Freya saw attendees reading printed copies at the event with further digital downloads throughout the month following.
*This comparison uses Designity’s quarterly Plus plan at $5,495/month ($65,940 annually) and $355,806 in average combined U.S. salaries for a Creative Director, Creative Project Manager, and Senior Graphic Designer, based on Salary.com data from October 2026. Benefits and overhead aren’t included. The plan provides different capacity than three full-time hires, and the comparison doesn’t reflect actual client savings.
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Looking Ahead: Big Ideas Are in the Cards
For GoCardless, the possibilities now extend well beyond one research report.
From exhibition stands and presentations to booklets and other marketing collateral, Designity continues to help turn ambitious ideas into finished work.
Meesha, Partnership Events Manager, credits the partnership with saving valuable time and making more creative projects possible.
The takeaway?
Great ideas shouldn’t have to wait for extra bandwidth.
With dedicated creative leadership and specialist support, your team can make more happen.
Got big ideas in the cards?
Book a demo to see how Designity can support your team, then put us to the test with a 2-week trial and no upfront payment.
