- GoCardless, a UK-based company, was founded in 2011 by British entrepreneur, Tom Blomfield, who kept a small share in the company when he appointed Hiroki Takeuchi as CEO in 2013.
- GoCardless is an online Direct Debit specialist that manages the entire collection process on behalf of its customers.
- As of 2019, GoCardless processes payments for over than 50,000 businesses around the world.
About GoCardless
In 2011, founder, Tom Blomfield, set-up GoCardless in order to fill a gap in the market. He identified that due to their size, smaller businesses were struggling to set up direct debit with the banks and therefore take advantage of automatic, recurring payments from their customers. CEO Hiroki Takeuchi said in an interview that the mission is still to “take the pain out of getting paid so that our customers can focus on what they do best.”
As of 2019, each month, over 50,000 businesses use GoCardless to process their direct debits, with the company processing over $10 billion of payments every year. GoCardless claims to be able to help businesses reduce failed payments to “as low as 0.5%, compared with an average of 3% for Direct Debit in general.”
How does it work?
The platform enables small businesses and other customers of GoCardless to pull direct debit payments directly from their customers’ bank accounts, at a lower cost than credit cards and without the burden of cash and cheques. In addition, businesses using GoCardless gain increased visibility over their payments flow, including due dates, successful payments and failed payments – along with the reasons for failure. The most common issues for failed payments identified by GoCardless, including wrong details, insufficient funds or an outdated PSP platform are just some of the issues being tackled by the company in order to provide the customer with a direct debit service which perceived as being far more efficient than the service offered by the banks.
In 2019, GoCardless announced a funding round of $75 million
GoCardless have come a long way from when they originally went through Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator accelerator. Prior to CEO Hiroki Takeuchi appointment in 2013, GoCardless had raised around £35 million of investment. In 2016, GoCardless announced that it had raised $22.5 million in further funding, off the back of record annual growth in the U.K. and strong early traction in new markets. By 2019, the company received $75 million in Series E funding, in part to fund new offices for the expansion to North America., with Adams Street Partners, Google Ventures and Salesforce Ventures leading the most recent round of investment.
For more information, see https://gocardless.com/
