GoCardless

GoCardless is a British company offering an open banking platform for merchants to collect recurring and one-off payments directly from customer bank accounts. The platform also offers a global bank debit network, enabling merchants to access multiple markets through its platform (more than 30 countries as of February 2022). The platform can be integrated by merchants through a RESTful API (for simple integration), a pre-built payment page (embedded to client’s website), or a payment link (using GoCardless straight away).

With regards to recurring payments, the company claims that its platform reduces payment costs by 56% and time to receive payments by 47%, compared to industry alternatives. In addition to settling payments, the platform also offers “Verified Mandates”, to verify new customers without hindering the checkout experience, and “Success+,” a machine learning-based payment intelligence tool. The company expanded its operations to Germany in June 2022, by launching “Instant Bank Pay” (for merchants to accept on-off payments) and Verified Mandates.

In March 2024, GoCardless entered an agreement to acquire Sentenial Ltd, which operates globally under the Nuapay brand, from EML Payments Limited for an undisclosed amount. Through this acquisition, GoCardless planned to leverage Nuapay's account-to-account payment services and open banking expertise to expedite the rollout of new disbursement capabilities and offer new payment verticals, such as payroll, financial services, utilities, insurance, gaming, and gambling. GoCardless acquired Latvian open banking data provider Nordigen in July 2022, to access Nordigen’s APIs, which connect to over 2,300 banks in Europe, across 31 countries. Through this, GoCardless can open up access to open banking account information services (AIS), and deliver data products for several use cases including credit assessments and customer engagement. The company also expanded its operations to France in September 2022, by launching its Verified Mandates in the country.

However, GoCardless reportedly laid off around 17% of its staff in June 2023, in an attempt to reduce 15% of its cost base.

Key customers and partnerships

The platform reportedly processed over USD 35 billion in payments annually and had over 85,000 business users as of March 2024.

In 2021, the company entered several partnerships with companies including Epson (printer manufacturer), Gr4vy , and Pennylane and Fiski (accounting platforms).

Moreover, in December 2021, leading buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) company Klarna selected GoCardless to roll out Klarna’s “Pay in 4” offering and its financing solution offering in the US, using GoCardless’s open banking infrastructure and global bank debit network. The partnership was in line with GoCardless’ plans to expand its presence in the US — a market it entered in 2019 — as it doubled its headcount in 2021, and plans to expand the team by 125% in 2022.

Funding and financials

GoCardless raised USD 312 million in Series G funding in February 2022, at a valuation of USD 2.1 billion (more than double its USD 970 million valuation in December 2020), to invest in product and geographical expansions.