Business Case studies

How Open Collective Uses Wise Business to Automate Payments Around the World - A Case Study

Paola Faben Oliveira

27.10.23 (updated more than 1 year ago)

Read time 3 minutes

Already an Open Collective customer? You don’t need to leave your app to benefit from Wise. Open Collective has partnered with Wise Platform to integrate our global payments infrastructure directly into Open Collective. That means that Open Collective customers can now access fast, convenient international payments directly in their Open Collective app.

And, because Open Collective has partnered with Wise Platform for their multi-currency payments, when you sign up with Open Collective, you’ll also be able to access Wise’s fast and convenient international payments experience directly from Open Collective.

👉 Visit Open Collective

Open Collective works with communities, from mutual aid groups, climate activists, free software projects and more, providing the legal and financial tools to let these groups focus on their missions without worrying about excessive bureaucracy. In total, Open Collective helped +15000 groups raise and manage +105 million USD.

Helping community groups automate payments to move money to where it’s needed is key to Open Collective’s work.

Story of Open Collective

Founded by Pia Mancini, Xavier Damman, and Aseem Sood, Open Collective came about following Pia’s move from politics to tech. From political experience, Pia and Xavier had seen activist groups, social and political movements, climate activists, open source projects and other similar change makers being excluded from some aspects of politics and contributing to society, often because they weren’t legal entities and so struggled to raise and distribute funds in the most impactful way possible.

The core mission of Open Collective is making communities sustainable, increasing participation and allowing groups and communities of individuals who are working together to make positive changes to do so in their own way. This means finding ways to allow groups to continue to flourish without necessarily needing to push them into an off-the-shelf model of how a non-profit group or entity should be set up.

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One of the options Open Collective offers to facilitate this is the fiscal host network, which includes legal entities based in the US, UK, Europe, New Zealand and more, which community groups can apply to, to operate under this legal umbrella rather than having to incorporate as a separate entity. Open Collective also offers easy ways for groups to manage their finances transparently - essential when building trust and raising awareness of causes and activities.

One of the useful features provided by Open Collective is to enable groups moving money from the centre to the fringes. Open Collective is at the core, bringing together the tech platform and a network of fiscal hosts of nonprofits around the world that receive the money for all of these groups. This, says Pia, creates a way of funding these communities at scale without forcing them to incorporate as their own legal entities, which could simply be an unnecessary distraction pulling them away from making positive changes in their community.

Open Collective challenge: automate payments around the world

As we’ve mentioned, Open Collective has ways for community groups to automate global payments. As a business employing dozens of people, Open Collective also needs its own way to automate business payments and run payroll.

Pia explains that their original payment solution was PayPal. However, this had its drawbacks.

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Integrating with an API-based payment solution also brought efficiency savings for Open Collective.

“Before integrating an API to our platform we were using it manually, we would create a transaction in our platform and then execute it manually within an account, and then we decided to integrate an API to the platform to automate the payments."

By using an API, Open Collective was able to cut down on admin time and automate more global payments.

Impact on Open Collective challenges

Ultimately, by moving to a more automated solution, Open Collective has been able to work more efficiently. By making it easier to move money around the world, Open Collective has also been able to scale and bring their products and benefits to more community groups around the world.

Here’s what Pia says:

“It is very easy to send money in a very efficient way. Right in the beginning the collectives and fiscal hosts that we would work with were in the US and us as Open Collective, the team was all around the world. So we needed to pay our staff as well and having a solution to send money to different countries was essential.”

Perhaps the most transformational thing was implementing an API solution. Now, with easier ways to move money globally, Open Collective works with more people and organisations - providing an essential service for people trying to support their community in different ways.

“Also our platform has scaled a lot since implementing an API. We are a 50 person team considering the fiscal hosts, there is no way we would have enough people to do this work manually. I see a correlation between the implementation of an automated payment method and our ability to scale in the last two/ three years.”

Open Collective is a mission driven organisation which helps changemakers around the world do more by giving them ways to raise and manage funds legally and without unnecessary admin.

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