The SaaS company’s growing line of programs, including HubWorks!, Educate, feedAustralia, Safe, and the just-launched Thriving Together, currently support more than 6,000 early childhood education and care services and 200,000+ families across the country.

What sets HubHello apart is their dedication to creating software that helps ensure children in Australia, especially the most vulnerable, are taken care of. They want to do some social good through their commercial service by keeping the best interests of children and their families at the heart of everything they do.

Integrated payments helps families and services

Making life easier for families is what it’s all about, explained David Salajan, CEO of HubHello. “We’re making a big push now to expand our families portal, where they can find the right childcare, own and update their information across multiple touchpoints and services, prepare healthy meals, track their children’s learning milestones, and do just about anything involved with early childhood development.”

True to their vision, HubHello decided to integrate payments into their platform to make it easier for families to pay their childcare fees. But they also wanted to help services more efficiently collect payments in order to stay on top of cash flow, avoid bad debt, and avoid having uncomfortable conversations with families – a major operating concern for many services which makes the payment function within HubHello the most important part of administering their businesses.   

“We actually started out looking to integrate with a bank directly. But that turned out to be a minefield to be honest. It was hard to get the right information when dealing with multiple people across multiple departments. The high fees in a lot of cases and lack of technical documentation and API connectivity would have required a lot of work from our end.” 

HubHello didn’t want to take on all the responsibility, development, and compliance risk the bank solution would create, so they turned to Payrix for a better alternative. Turns out, it was an easy choice.

Seamless automation feels good

HubHello knew of Payrix through a friendship with one of its founders. David said, “The Payrix team was easy to talk to, and from the technical front, they were willing to adopt their technology to suit our needs, which was very attractive to us. It was a matter of trust and their openness and flexibility provided a strong start to what has turned into a winning partnership.”

As a result, HubHello became one of the first in their space to offer online direct debit request forms to services. Before partnering with Payrix, HubHello clients had to download a direct debit request form, send it to a family to fill in, and then manually input the details into their system. Now, the process is entirely online and the experience is seamless for families and totally automated for services. Families can easily log in, change their payment method, make payments, and more – all online or using a mobile app. 

He added, “Our seamless, online payment experience has gone over well with our clients. They’ve been happy with it all, especially the electronic, direct debit request form for parents, so there’s no paper exchange at all now. The next step for us is to fully automate the service onboarding experience. At the moment, there’s still a little bit of manual work there in regards to the identification, proof of address, and so forth. But that’s now possible via the Payrix API. 

New opportunities for growth

With Payrix, HubHello has also begun expanding their capabilities beyond facilitating traditional childcare fees. For example, through their feedAustralia meal planning program, services can now buy groceries for their businesses. Along those same lines, HubHello is also about to release a shopping experience where both services and families can buy learning resources, toys, and other things related to early childhood education and care through their platform.

“There are always new things that we can leverage from Payrix. Another one is implementing a donations function for our charity Healthy Australia,” David said.

Looking back at their journey with integrated payments, HubHello would advise other companies exploring their options to seek an integrated payments partner like Payrix. “It’s definitely the way to go. We’re a Software-as-a-Service company. So we build software, but you don’t need to have that front end with someone like Payrix. The tools that you get right off the shelf – billing, maintaining clients records, etc. – are plug-and- play ready to go!”