GoCardless makes money by charging merchants a small percentage-plus-fixed fee on every Direct Debit and bank payment it processes, layered with newer revenue from open banking and Instant Bank Pay.
That's the mechanism.
Here's the stranger part.
London fintech now moves more than $130bn a year, for over 100,000 businesses, across 30+ countries. It built that scale on Direct Debit, the least glamorous payment method in Britain, the one nobody mentions at a dinner party. And despite processing more money than most people will see in a hundred lifetimes, GoCardless still hasn't posted a full year of profit.
It's also about to stop being GoCardless, A Dutch rival has agreed to buy it.
So how does GoCardless make money at this scale, what do GoCardless fees actually look like on the ground, and why does a company this large still run at a loss right as it's being acquired? Here's the full picture.
What Is GoCardless?
GoCardless is a London-headquartered fintech that lets businesses collect and send payments directly between bank accounts, rather than through card networks. It was founded in 2011 by three Oxford students Hiroki Takeuchi, Matt Robinson and Tom Blomfield none of whom knew anything about payments when they started, and all of whom decided that was the sector worth cracking anyway.
The company's early years were unglamorous by design: a UK Direct Debit product launched in 2013, then expansion into France, Germany and Spain the year after. Robinson and Blomfield eventually left to build other things Blomfield went on to co-found Monzo leaving Takeuchi as the sole founder still at the helm. In 2017, mid-expansion, Takeuchi was hospitalized after a serious cycling accident. Twenty-four hours after surgery, he dialled into a crisis call with investors and told them one thing: he was coming back. He did, and GoCardless kept growing under him.
That persistence is part of why the company now sits where it does: authorised by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority as a Payment Institution not a bank, a distinction worth being precise about, since so much of what GoCardless does looks bank-adjacent. Is GoCardless a bank? No. It moves money between accounts you already hold at real banks; it doesn't hold deposits or lend.
The Direct Debit Problem It Solved
Direct Debit exists to solve a problem cards were never built for: businesses that need to be paid the same way, again and again, without chasing anyone. Unlike a card payment, which the customer pushes, Direct Debit is pull-based once a customer signs a mandate, the merchant initiates collection on its own schedule, which is exactly what a subscription, membership or utility bill needs.
That structure gives merchants three things cards struggle with: control over payment timing, freedom from card-expiry churn, and meaningfully lower processing costs, since Direct Debit runs over banking rails like Bacs rather than the far pricier card networks. The trade-off is speed Direct Debit isn't instant, and payments typically take several working days to clear.
GoCardless built its entire early business on managing that trade-off well: automating mandate collection, retrying failed payments, and handling the compliance overhead of a scheme most small businesses would never touch alone. It's a genuinely unglamorous problem, It's also one that quietly underpins a huge share of recurring revenue in the UK economy.
How Does GoCardless Make Money?: Per-Transaction Fees Across 30+ Countries
GoCardless makes its money the same way most payment infrastructure does: by taking a small cut of every transaction that flows through it. GoCardless fees follow a tiered structure, charged as a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed fee:
Under standard pricing, larger transactions may attract additional charges depending on payment type and plan.
It's a simple mechanic that compounds hard at scale. GoCardless now processes more than $130bn in payments annually across 30+ countries up sharply from around $25–30bn as recently as 2022 and that growth shows up directly in the top line. Group turnover reached £160.9m in the year to June 2025, up from £132.3m the year before, itself a 38% jump on the year before that. This is the part that answers how GoCardless makes money in the plainest terms: not one big product, but millions of small, repeatable transaction fees, charged every time a gym, a charity, a broadband provider or an accountancy platform gets paid by one of its customers.
It's worth remembering why the fee is the only lever available: is GoCardless a bank able to lend against deposits or earn a margin on customer balances? As an FCA-authorised Payment Institution, it holds no deposits and takes no interest spread, so the per-transaction fee isn't one revenue stream among several. It's the entire business model.
The model scales unusually well for a fintech. Once the Direct Debit rails and fraud infrastructure are built, an extra billion pounds of payment volume costs GoCardless comparatively little to process which is exactly why the business has been chasing volume so aggressively, and why its per-transaction fees, however modest per payment, now add up to real revenue at national-infrastructure scale.
Instant Bank Pay and the Open Banking Push
Instant Bank Pay is GoCardless's open banking product for one-off payments, launched in 2021 to solve the one thing Direct Debit can't do: settle instantly. Where Direct Debit takes days to clear, Instant Bank Pay has been rebranded Pay by Bank, with the underlying mechanics unchanged, runs over Faster Payments and gives both merchant and customer real-time confirmation the moment a payment is authorised.
It exists because recurring-revenue businesses kept hitting the same gap: they needed Direct Debit for subscriptions, but something faster for a first payment, a top-up, or a one-off charge and too often that meant falling back on expensive card fees.
GoCardless's own figures put the savings at roughly 54% cheaper than an equivalent online card transaction, which is a meaningful line in the GoCardless fees story: the company isn't just defending its Direct Debit business, it's actively undercutting cards on a second front. More than a third of GoCardless's customers now use open banking in some form, and over 37,000 businesses have been onboarded to the feature since launch. For a company built entirely on bank rails, open banking isn't a side project, it's the second engine of the same business.
The Losses Behind the Growth and the Mollie Deal
GoCardless has grown revenue every year for the past three years and still hasn't turned an annual profit, though the gap is closing fast. Net losses fell from £78m in FY23 to £35.1m in FY24, then narrowed again in FY25 pre-tax losses down to roughly £24.2m from £31.2m the year before with the company posting its first adjusted-EBITDA-positive quarter between April and June 2025. Full-year, adjusted profitability is the next milestone, targeted for FY26.
That progress is now happening against a very different backdrop. In December 2025, Dutch payments firm Mollie signed an agreement to acquire GoCardless, creating a combined provider serving more than 350,000 businesses across Europe and the UK. GoCardless hasn't disclosed the deal's value itself, but it's been widely reported at around €1.05bn roughly half the $2.1bn valuation GoCardless carried at its 2022 funding round, a reminder that fintech valuations don't only move upward.
The deal is expected to close by mid-2026, pending regulatory approval, and will fold GoCardless's bank-payment network into Mollie's existing card and local-payment stack rather than replace it. For a founder who once talked his way back onto an investor call less than a day after surgery, handing the company he built to a bigger buyer is its own kind of decision not a retreat, by his own account, but a bet that the combined business ends up bigger than either half alone.
The Bottom Line
GoCardless built a genuinely large, genuinely boring piece of financial infrastructure bank-to-bank payments and made it pay through volume rather than margin. That's how GoCardless makes money at its core: small, repeatable transaction fees, spread across $130bn+ in annual payments and 30+ countries, with open banking now adding a second, faster layer on top.
It's not yet a profitable business in the strict sense, but it's a growing one, and shortly, it won't be an independent one either. Whether the Mollie combination proves to be the platform Takeuchi describes or simply the end of GoCardless as a standalone story is the next chapter and, fittingly for a company this used to grinding out slow, unglamorous progress, it probably won't be resolved quickly.
FAQ
1. What is Instant Bank Pay?
Instant Bank Pay is GoCardless's open banking feature for one-off payments, launched in 2021 and now rebranded Pay by Bank. It lets merchants collect a single payment that settles and confirms instantly over Faster Payments, rather than waiting the several days a standard Direct Debit takes to clear.
2. Is GoCardless a bank?
No, GoCardless Ltd is authorised by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority as a Payment Institution, not a bank, a status confirmed on the FCA's public register. It moves money between customers' and merchants' existing bank accounts rather than holding deposits or offering banking products itself.
3. Is GoCardless being acquired by Mollie?
Yes. Mollie signed an agreement to acquire GoCardless in December 2025, creating a combined payments provider serving over 350,000 businesses. The deal, reported at around €1.05bn, is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close by mid-2026.
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Sources: Figures drawn from GoCardless's own press releases and pricing page, the UK Financial Conduct Authority's public register, and reporting from Sifted, Tech.eu, Silicon Republic, FStech and Contrary Research. Figures reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing.
The EP+ Editorial Desk covers UK startups, founder stories, and venture capital. All editorial content is independently produced and human-reviewed before publication.
