GoCardless bets UK VRP mandate makes bank payments default: £160.9M FY25, Mollie deal

London bank-payment company: collects recurring and one-off payments for 100,000+ businesses via direct debit, open banking (Instant Bank Pay / VRP) and real-time rails across 30+ countries.

VRP would become the default rail for recurring and one-off bank payments, displacing cards and extending direct debit.

Founded in London in 2011 by Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson to fix recurring payments for SMEs with direct debit. From 2019 GoCardless placed an explicit bet on VRP: it took the first live transaction through a sandbox built by the OBIE and, as UK regulators pushed the nine largest banks to build VRP for sweeping, launched Instant Bank Pay so merchants could collect one-off and variable recurring payments through open banking.

Dec 2023: rewards-card fintech Yonder went live paying credit-card balances via Instant Bank Pay. Jan 2024: JustGiving made GoCardless its exclusive Open Banking payment provider, replacing American Express for one-off giving. Sep 2024: the CMA confirmed all nine mandated banks had completed the Open Banking Roadmap, including VRP for sweeping. FY25 (year to Jun 2025): group turnover £160.9M, up 22%; payment volume £79.2bn, doubled partly by the Sep 2024 Nuapay acquisition; first EBITDA-positive quarter on an adjusted basis. Dec 2025: Octopus Energy moved 5.5M accounts and £12bn of payments to GoCardless in one of the UK's largest direct-debit migrations.

Still running and being acquired: in Dec 2025 GoCardless agreed to be acquired by Mollie, and in 2026 it plans to launch commercial VRP — branded Recurring Pay by Bank — claiming 100% payer coverage from day one and 99.5% uptime.

GoCardless treated the regulator as a co-builder: it executed VRP transactions before the mandate finished, so it was ready when the CMA9 opened the rail.

It married the new rail to an existing one — Instant Bank Pay with direct-debit fallback — which de-risked early customers whose banks did not support VRP.

Reference customers (Yonder, JustGiving, later Octopus Energy's £12bn migration) gave the product credibility that a standalone VRP startup lacked.

Volume economics compounded: £79.2bn of FY25 payment volume and 100,000+ merchants gave it pricing power and an acquisition case for Mollie.

Regulatory mandates create rails, not winners: GoCardless won the VRP moment because it had spent a decade as the direct-debit layer — when the CMA opened the rail, it could package it instantly.

As of September 2026, GoCardless is still operating independently while the Mollie acquisition closes. It reports 100,000+ businesses, US$130bn+ in annual payment volume across 30+ countries, and its first adjusted EBITDA-positive quarter in FY25, with a first adjusted EBITDA-positive year expected in FY26. Later in 2026 it plans to launch commercial VRP (Recurring Pay by Bank) with 100% payer coverage and 99.5% uptime.