GoCardless — What I Think
GoCardless built a company on the least glamorous corner of payments, and that’s exactly why I respect it.
While every other fintech fought over the card — the tap, the swipe, the shiny consumer moment — GoCardless quietly owned the boring tide that actually runs the economy. Bank-to-bank pull payments. Direct Debit. The recurring charge. The subscription, the rent, the SaaS bill, the gym membership. Not the impulse buy. The thing you already agreed to pay, on a schedule, forever.
The insight the card-obsessed missed: a huge share of real economic value is recurring, and recurring is a terrible fit for cards. Cards expire. Cards get reissued after fraud. Cards charge interchange that’s pure deadweight on a payment between two parties who already trust each other. Running a £40 monthly subscription on card rails is paying a toll built for one-time stranger purchases on a transaction that’s neither. Bank debit, pulling straight from the account, is structurally the right rail for “money you’ve promised to pay regularly.” The whole thesis is that the right rail for recurring was sitting right there, unloved, because it was clunky and country-specific and nobody wanted to do the integration work.
And they made the ugly rail beautiful through software. Direct Debit schemes existed for decades and were a nightmare to access — different in every country, bank by bank, paperwork and mandates and reconciliation. GoCardless turned that fragmented mess into one clean API, then took it global. They also saw open banking early — account-to-account payments, initiated straight from the payer’s bank, are the natural extension of the same idea. Pull money without the card middleman.
The exposure: bank rails are commodity rails, and “we make boring payments easy” is a thesis everyone eventually agrees with, including the banks and the big processors. Open banking lowers the barrier they spent years climbing. The same wave that validates GoCardless invites competition onto its turf. The moat has to be the recurring-payments network and the depth of scheme integrations, not the API itself. The arc bends toward whoever owns the most account-to-account reach as cards slowly give back the recurring world they were never built for.
Favorite & worst CEO
On leadership: Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO. Real admiration here — not just for the founding insight that recurring deserved its own rails, but for the resilience the public story carries, having kept leading the company after a serious cycling accident. The vision I connect with is the discipline of it: he picked an unsexy, structurally correct problem and stayed on it while flashier fintechs chased consumer headlines. The founder risk is the flip side of that discipline — a thesis as patient as “own the boring recurring rail” has to compound for a very long time, and the danger is open banking commoditises the wedge before the network effect hardens. Right idea, right temperament. The question is whether the moat sets before the crowd arrives.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.