GoDaddy Goes Long on Growth with Global Partners

HQ Scottsdale, AZ
Customer Since 2013
Industry Online Services

“The ROI of Tipalti really is not having AP involved in outbound partner payments. That’s huge.”
—Phil Newell, Director, Finance & Accounting IT

With more than 17.5 million customers worldwide and more than 76 million domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers, and manage their work.

A few years ago, when GoDaddy first started growing its international business and adding global partners and affiliates, it experienced some major difficulties in making cross-border payments. As Phil Newell, director of finance & accounting IT at GoDaddy explains, “We started at zero payments internationally because we didn’t have the ability. For example, if someone in India made $50 commission, we sent them a check in USD, and then his bank charged $30 dollars to deposit the money in Rupees, so there were big issues.”

As payments started to mount for its domain-name auctions and overall global growth, it became clear that applying technology to its accounts payable process would be a better solution than adding more AP staff.

“As we were growing, we did not want to keep adding more people to support outbound payments. The big focus was to streamline everything, and remove manual processes as much as we could.”

In addition to paying internationally, making the commitment to go global with partners also brought new tax-compliance responsibilities to the company. GoDaddy was able to solve global payments and tax compliance with Tipalti. “We’ve been able to offload the collection of tax information from all of our partners to a central place where we don’t physically manage and input this data. It’s all on the platform, which has really helped reduce the compliance risk,” says Newell.

The return on its investment in Tipalti has been threefold:

• It unlocked GoDaddy’s global growth capacity with international partners and boosted revenue.
• It strengthened GoDaddy’s relationships with international partners by paying them fast, in their preferred method and currency
• It streamlined GoDaddy’s overall AP operations and compliance.

According to Newell, “The ROI of Tipalti really is not having AP involved in outbound partner payments. That’s huge. We’ve outsourced our AP function into a shared-services organization. So, the ability to hand it all off to Tipalti obviously is a huge labor cost savings, and a much more efficient process.”

Looking ahead, GoDaddy has future-proofed its financial operations with an end-to-end ability to stay lean, scale globally, and attract and maintain good partners. And if the next phase of growth comes with acquisitions, the company can maximize these investments without compromising scalability or needing new approaches or technology.

“I’m sure we’ll be acquiring more companies, and with every one of those companies we pick up new partners. Volume’s going to increase. Outbound payments are going to increase, and the ability to onboard them into a common platform is going to be a huge benefit for GoDaddy as we move forward.”