GoCardless’ Migration to Transcend: Going Beyond Compliance to Build Executive Trust
Senior Content Marketing Manager II
March 25, 2025•4 min read
Highlights
- 1,040+ hours saved on DSR fulfillment/year
- 99% connection of SaaS tools and data stores
Overview
GoCardless is a global bank payment company that helps over 100,000 businesses globally to collect and send payments without the stress, chasing or expensive fees.
Before Transcend, while using a legacy privacy tool, GoCardless experienced significant hurdles in trying to build and scale a privacy program that was agile and tech-forward. Kat Vetrakova, Head of Privacy & Security at GoCardless, noted:
“We were really just hitting a wall, pretty much at the limit of the support we could get from our legacy provider. Our needs were changing as our company pursued our ambitious growth goals so we needed another platform that could help us get to the next level.”
This realization marked a turning point for GoCardless. Shortly after, the privacy team started the search for a new solution: one that minimized manual work, repositioned privacy as a business enabler, and strengthened compliance across the board.
Enter Transcend. After a full-scale privacy tooling transformation, the GoCardless team was able to cut out hundreds of hours of manual work, evaluate key strategic business initiatives more quickly, and raise executive confidence in the business’s compliance program.
The challenge
GoCardless faced major challenges with their legacy privacy platform, most of which revolved around the burdensome manual work. The team sought a solution that could remove manual processes to:
- Make it easier to generate an up-to-date view of GoCardless’ data ecosystem
- Increase visibility into where data was stored and how it was used across the company
- Automate the tracking and accounting for all pixels, trackers, and adtech—a requirement for effectively collecting and enforcing user consent preferences—to free up the team's time
The company’s legacy system also turned DSR fulfillment into a time-consuming, manual process. In fact, before switching to Transcend, four team members spent around 20 hours a month, every month, to ensure each request was completed successfully.
Beyond these immediate challenges, the team's constant focus on manual tasks left little time or energy for strategic, high-value privacy projects. Reporting on risk and risk appetite was also a challenge—with the team often struggling to tell compelling, data-driven stories to the board about the privacy program’s success.
Transcend’s impact: A transformation success story
After evaluating several other players in the market and moving through a technically deep proof of concept, the GoCardless team landed on Transcend as their vendor of choice—implementing Transcend’s full suite of next-generation privacy solutions, including Consent Management, DSR Automation, Data Mapping, and Assessments.
After implementing Transcend’s full privacy platform, GoCardless realized immediate and substantial benefits. With a truly automated solution, GoCardless was able to drive greater operational efficiency by minimizing manual work, and enable the business to innovate quickly with trusted, compliant data.
In fact, after using the platform for only a few weeks, Kat Vetrakova noted:
“Transcend’s platform has saved us from countless hours of manual datapoint labeling, and manually governing consent and preference management. Beyond that, their dedicated partnership gives us confidence that we can continue to manage privacy projects efficiently and handle new requirements.”
Improved compliance
After implementing Transcend’s data mapping solutions, GoCardless’ internal tracking dashboards went from a limited number of connected apps in the legacy tool to a 100% connection rate with Transcend.
Manual work eliminated
With the legacy solution, GoCardless’ Customer Ops, Marketing, and IT teams spent 20 hours a month fulfilling DSRs. With Transcend, the same tasks took only minutes.
Enabling business innovation
With Transcend Assessments, GoCardless’ privacy team was able to bake due diligence into the start of the third-party vendor screening process. This change drastically shortened SLAs on the privacy team’s end: eliminating bottlenecks and powering proactive risk management across the business.
Elevating trust in the privacy program
Not only was GoCardless able to use Transcend to significantly cut manual processes and the resulting costs, team leaders are now able to quantify these savings in real-time dashboards—making it easy for them to socialize their organization’s impact with senior leadership and the board. Kat Vetrakova noted:
“Transcend has altogether elevated trust in the privacy programme around the business.”
Kat Vetrakova, Head of Privacy & Security at GoCardless
About Transcend
Transcend’s next-gen data and privacy governance platform helps companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500s to high-growth startups, better govern their data—improving compliance, cutting costs, enhancing business innovation and increasing customer trust.
From Consent Management, to automated DSR Automation, to a full suite of data mapping solutions (Data Inventory, Silo Discovery, Structured Discovery, and more), Transcend has you covered as your company grows and evolves in a swiftly changing regulatory environment.
Senior Content Marketing Manager II