How did one of Mexico’s largest gym networks with over 400 branches, transform its recurring collections into a frictionless and predictable process?
Membership-based businesses thrive on collection consistency. The challenge isn’t the first payment, but ensuring every renewal occurs on time, with minimal friction for customers and total predictability for finance and operations teams. This is especially true for a large chain that operates more than 400 branches across Mexico and serves over 1 million members, where the sheer volume of recurring payments multiplies the complexity of debt collection.
This gym chain faced practical obstacles that limited its scalability: Before partnering with Belvo, they struggled with the low prioritization from their legacy banking partner for processing large debit volumes, compounding the complexity of setting up and running automatic debits across their multiple legal entities and branches. This was especially critical given the customer profile: individuals committed to a healthy lifestyle who are generally loyal and resistant to losing their membership. They urgently needed a model that could operate at scale and reduce manual intervention, matching the reliability of their billing process to the high loyalty of their customer base.
The solution? Migrating to Direct Debit (Domiciliación Bancaria) using Belvo’s infrastructure to standardize how payments are initiated, retried, and reconciled. This way, front-line teams did not have to change how they sold memberships or supported customers.
Predictable cash flow: why Direct Debit is the driving force behind the gym subscription model
For recurring subscriptions, Direct Debit is crucial because it significantly reduces failed charges and avoids card churn (payment loss due to card expiration or replacement). The mandate is collected once and applied to future billing cycles, making renewals more predictable and ensuring continuous service coverage for customers.
Traditional payment methods, particularly credit cards, come with high processing fees and lower success rates due to expiration, fraud, or insufficient funds. In contrast, Direct Debit offers substantial cost optimization, an economic analysis by Belvo suggests a potential reduction of up to 74% in monthly processing costs by migrating to this scheme, which can translate to annual savings of up to MXN $23 million pesos, depending on transaction volume. This efficiency is critical in resource allocation, as it frees up collections teams from repetitive manual work, allowing them to focus on strategic tasks and ultimately improving ROI.
Crucially, this system provides a superior customer experience and directly boosts retention. By eliminating payment friction, Direct Debit provides a premium, low-effort experience, which is key in a market like Mexico where 36.9% of the adult population reports experiencing financial stress. This ease of payment helps maintain customer activity longer, leading to a lower service cancellation rate and increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).
With Belvo, the gym’s chain’s team was able to:
- Consolidate file handling, aligning cut-off times.
- Implement a simple retry strategy to recover failed payments.
- Maintain a clean and predictable audit trail.
If your company is exploring this challenge, the foundation for success lies in establishing total automation, predictable cash flow cycles, and simplified daily financial oversight. These capabilities are core to Belvo’s Direct Debit solution, which natively supports the operational rigor required for massive subscription growth.
From fragmented processes to a unified operational model
Before the switch, teams had to juggle multiple formats and bank behaviors. This created avoidable friction: manual reviews, late reconciliations, and uncertainty about which branch or legal entity owned a transaction at any given time.
With Belvo, the gym chain centralized how debit files are generated and submitted, and standardized how returns and chargebacks are handled. This also simplified cross-entity reporting, providing the finance sector with a reliable daily view of what was charged, what settled, and what needed immediate attention.
Piloting and accelerated scalability
The pilot confirmed the robust quality of the payments and the financial predictability of Belvo’s rails. In the initial evaluation period, the platform successfully processed over 37,500 collections out of more than 162,000 created transactions.
Crucially, for risk and back-office management, the success was marked by a near-zero liability: over a period of less than three months, from July 15 to October 1, 2025, the platform handled a rapidly scaling payment volume while maintaining an exceptionally low liability profile: the chargeback rate remained at just 0.2%. This immediately validated the goal of keeping payment liability safely below the 1% threshold, a vital achievement for scaling the business’s operational health.
| Month of Operation (Post-Go-Live) | Successful Monthly Collections (Approximate) | Month-over-Month Acceleration |
| Month 4 | ~50,000 | Baseline for scale |
| Month 5 | ~100,000 | 100% Growth (Doubled volume) |
| Month 6 | ~200,000 | 100% Growth (More than doubled volume) |
| Starting Month 7 | Over ~325,000 | Scale Consolidation |
Direct financial impact and predictability
Operational consistency and increased adoption were directly reflected in revenue. In a single month (September), the gym chain collected approximately MXN $12 million, a significant jump compared to the nearly MXN $2 million collected in the prior month, proving the model’s effectiveness in guaranteeing predictable, high-volume revenue. This increase demonstrates the rapid growth in adoption of the new method and operational consistency as more branches were integrated.
Direct Debit (Domiciliación Bancaria) is the model for growth
This case study of the gym chain in Mexico proves that migrating from legacy payment processes to direct debit is a strategic necessity for companies with high volumes of recurring payments.
Belvo provided the necessary infrastructure to standardize and automate collections, transforming what was once a fragmented operational pain point into a repeatable and scalable model, ensuring:
- Predictability for cash flow.
- Efficiency for the finance team.
- Better UX for its members.
True innovation lies in making collection operations as stable as the core business.
