GoCardless
More info
- Creator
- Hiroki Takeuchi, Matt Robinson, Tom Blomfield
- Released
- Type
- Direct debit payment service
- Website
- gocardless.com
The London company that turned direct debit into an API, so a subscription business can pull money from bank accounts without negotiating with every bank itself.
The founders came out of Y Combinator in 2011 with a simple observation: for recurring payments, direct debit was cheaper and more durable than cards, but getting onto Bacs in the UK meant a sponsor bank, paper mandates and weeks of manual work. GoCardless became the intermediary that holds that relationship and lets a merchant create mandates and collections with a couple of HTTP calls.
Over the years it added SEPA, Swedish Autogiro, Australia's BECS and more, and in 2022 bought Latvia's Nordigen to bring in open banking data. The pitch is boring in the best sense: cards expire and get replaced, but a bank account often stays put for decades, so fewer customers quietly churn out. Co-founder Tom Blomfield left to start Monzo.