GoCardless

A direct debit is a pull payment: the business collects the money on a mandate that the customer signed once, and each payment takes two to five business days to confirm. GoCardless collects direct debits through Bacs in the UK, ACH in the US, BECS in Australia, PAD in Canada, Autogiro in Sweden, Betalingsservice in Denmark and the Australian PayTo scheme. In the euro area GoCardless uses SEPA direct debit, and the scheme for each payment follows the country where the payer holds the account.

A check before the first payment protects the business against mandates signed with stolen bank details. With Verified Mandates, the payer logs in to the bank and lets GoCardless confirm access to the account. GoCardless offers this check for Bacs, ACH and Autogiro and for SEPA in Germany and France, and the Swedish Autogiro scheme requires it for every mandate.

GoCardless added one-off open banking payments in 2021 under the name Instant Bank Pay, a product that is now called Pay by Bank. The customer approves each payment in the banking app, and the money moves over Faster Payments in pounds or SEPA Instant in euros, without a mandate. A licensed payment initiation service starts the transfer, and the customer logs in only at their own bank. When Mollie completed the takeover, Pay by Bank from GoCardless was available in 38 countries.

Variable recurring payments combine both models: the customer gives one open banking consent with limits, and the business then starts payments within those limits. GoCardless launched its VRP offering in July 2022, and the feature works in pounds only and for a limited group of sectors. In May 2025, GoCardless and 30 other organizations co-funded a new company that is to run commercial VRPs as an independent scheme operator owned by the payment industry.

In July 2022, GoCardless agreed to buy Nordigen, a Latvian open banking data provider that connected to more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries and gave free access to account data. The Nordigen product now runs as GoCardless Bank Account Data, an account information service that reads account details, balances and transactions after the customer consents. The service covers the EEA countries under PSD2, with up to 24 months of transaction history and up to 90 days of continuous access to an account.

Success+ retries direct debits that failed, and GoCardless uses a machine learning model to choose the day of each retry for each customer. The model looks at the timing and characteristics of a payment and predicts how likely a retry on a given day is to fail.

Protect+ is the fraud product that GoCardless launched in October 2022 for businesses that collect bank payments. Protect+ targets three kinds of direct debit fraud: identity fraud with stolen or bought bank details, payers who take a service with no intent to pay, and unfair chargebacks. Protect+ combines transaction data from the GoCardless network with risk settings that each business defines for itself.

Mollie, the payment provider from Amsterdam, agreed on 11 December 2025 to buy GoCardless and closed the deal on 1 September 2026. At the announcement, GoCardless handled more than US$130 billion of payments a year in more than 30 countries and had open banking connections to more than 2,500 banks. Under the plan announced then, software platforms on Mollie Connect can add the bank payment network of GoCardless, so that their merchants take card and bank payments through one embedded integration.

Since the closing, the company carries the name "GoCardless, a Mollie company" and is run by its co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi, while Koen Köppen, the CEO of Mollie, leads the group. Together the two companies serve more than 350,000 businesses, and GoCardless brings an established presence in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The integration runs in phases, and the closing brought no immediate change to the services, contacts or contracts of existing customers.

A GoCardless entry on a bank statement means that a business collected a direct debit or a bank payment from the account through GoCardless. The payment lookup of GoCardless asks for the country of the account, the amount and the date, and then shows which business took the payment and what for.

GoCardless runs regulated payment institutions in the UK and in the EU. GoCardless Ltd in London is authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, with registration number 597190. In the EU, GoCardless SAS in Paris holds an authorization of the French supervisor ACPR (in French) for payment services, under bank code 17118.

A direct debit is pulled by the business on a mandate and confirms within two to five business days. Pay by Bank is a transfer that the customer pushes from the banking app for every single payment, so it needs no mandate. Regular bills of changing size fit the direct debit, and one-off payments that the business wants confirmed before delivery fit Pay by Bank.

Developers connect to GoCardless through an API with a full reference of all endpoints and parameters, and a sandbox account lets them test before going live. More than 350 software products connect to GoCardless through ready-made integrations.