Author: Alena Sarri, Owner Operator, Aquatots
Swim schools don’t show up in fintech trend reports. They probably should.
Australia has over 600 registered swim schools teaching roughly 1.5 million kids a year. Swimming is the number-one participation activity for children under four in this country. And almost every one of those schools has quietly gone fully digital with their payments over the past few years.
No fanfare. No press releases. Just a whole industry ditching cash envelopes and bank transfer reminders for automated direct debits and integrated billing platforms. The result is one of the cleanest cashless transitions in any niche service sector, and it happened without most of the fintech world noticing.
What it looked like before
Not long ago, swim school payment collection was a mess. Parents paid at the front desk with cash or card. Others set up manual bank transfers that they’d forget to update when fees changed. Volunteer treasurers at swim clubs spent entire weekends cross-referencing spreadsheets with bank statements. One UK swimming club treasurer described it as having a single volunteer “almost completely tied up” reconciling payments.
Fee increases were the worst part. Under the old system, it could take two or three months for every family to update their standing orders. During that lag, the school was effectively undercharging and eating the difference.
For businesses built on small recurring transactions (weekly lessons at $25 to $65 a pop), that kind of leakage adds up fast.
What changed
COVID forced the issue. Contactless everything became the rule overnight, and swim schools that had been dabbling with online payments went all-in. Most never went back. The Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed the broader trend: cash’s share of in-person transactions halved between 2019 and 2022, dropping from 32% to 16%.
But the shift wasn’t just about tapping cards instead of handing over notes. The real transformation was swim schools adopting purpose-built management platforms that bundle scheduling, student tracking, parent communication, and automated billing into a single system. Platforms like Xplor Recreation, iClassPro, Jackrabbit, and SwimBiz now treat integrated payment processing as a core feature, not a bolt-on.
Direct debit became the preferred payment rail. The reason is simple: it works. Direct debit payment success rates sit between 97% and 99.5%, compared to credit cards where 3-5% of recurring charges fail every month due to expired cards or insufficient funds. For a swim school collecting hundreds of small payments weekly, that reliability gap is the difference between predictable cash flow and constant chasing.
The cost difference matters too. Credit card processing fees run 2-4% per transaction. A swim school doing $50,000 a month in payments is handing over $12,000 to $24,000 a year in card fees alone. Direct debit fees are significantly lower, which is why the model has taken hold so firmly in this sector.
What it means for the business
The numbers from schools that have made the switch are hard to ignore.
One UK swimming club that moved to direct-debit-only collection saw monthly revenue jump from £14,000 to £17,000, a 21% increase, simply by capturing fees that used to slip through the cracks. Schools using automated billing systems report cutting admin time by half or more. Industry benchmarks suggest automated swim schools achieve 20-25% net profit margins compared to the 10-15% average.
That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a structural advantage.
The part fintech should pay attention to
There’s a pattern here that extends well beyond swimming lessons. The children’s activity market (swim schools, dance studios, martial arts, gymnastics, childcare) is enormous. The global kids’ recreational services sector is projected to hit $2.81 trillion by 2032. These are all recurring-revenue businesses built on small, frequent payments from families.
The winning formula across every one of these verticals is the same: vertical software that owns the workflow also owns the payment flow. Swim school operators don’t shop for a payment processor and a management platform separately. They pick one system that does both. The platform that handles class scheduling and skill tracking and parent messaging is the one that collects the money. That stickiness is gold for the payment companies embedded inside these platforms.
Direct debit’s dominance in this space also signals something bigger. For recurring services with small transaction values, bank-to-bank payments beat cards on cost, reliability, and retention. GoCardless built an entire partnership with Swim England around this insight. Australia’s upcoming PayTo system, which uses real-time mandates to eventually replace legacy BECS direct debit, will only strengthen this dynamic.
The takeaway
The swim school industry didn’t sit around waiting for fintech to solve its problems. Operators and industry bodies shaped payment infrastructure around their specific needs: recurring billing for small amounts, near-zero failure rates, and tight integration with the tools they use every day.
That’s the kind of ground-up adoption story that fintech companies spend millions trying to manufacture. It’s already happened here. Most people just haven’t looked closely enough to see it.