GoCardless Raises $95 Mn In Funding Round Led By Bain Capital Ventures The payment platform will use the funding to accelerate its open banking strategy, combining the latest technology with its global bank debit network
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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London-based fintech company GoCardless on Thursday announced it has raised $95 million in a Series F funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures that will fuel open banking strategy and accelerating delivery of next-generation bank-to-bank payments.
The payment platform will use the funding to accelerate its open banking strategy, combining the latest technology with its global bank debit network. Merchants will be able to access both portals for recurring payments of instant open banking payments that will provide visibility and speed, while bank debit maximizes cash flow and minimizes churn by pulling funds automatically from payers-all at a lower cost than cards.
According to a statement made by Carolyn Breeze, ANZ general manager, GoCardless, since launching in Australia and New Zealand GoCardless has seen significant traction with current year-on-year (YOY) growth at 251 per cent. This new funding round will support their local strategy to expand its presence in the ANZ market and allow us to leverage open banking to introduce new products like instant first payments to more than 2800 of their customers locally who include Docusign, Movember, SiteMinder, and more.
"The development of the NPP means we are one step closer to ushering in a new era in payments. Soon consumers and businesses will have safer, simpler, and more cost-effective ways to make and take payments. We have already led trials using open banking principles in the UK, for example, becoming the first to take recurring payments in a framework similar to the mandated payment services. We look forward to using the lessons learned from these pilots to help Australians tap into the new opportunities created by NPP," said Hiroki Takeuchi, chief executive officer, and co-founder, GoCardless.
The latest fundraise, follows 46 per cent YOY growth for the IT service management company despite the challenging economic environment and supports its ambitious growth plans. It brings the total raised to-date to $240 million.
"This funding round demonstrates the strength of the business and the confidence both our customers and investors have in GoCardless. We are incredibly proud to have seen continued business growth in such challenging times, and to have been able to continue supporting our customers - helping them stay in control of their payments and cash flow," Takeuchi further added.
The platform also plans to expand its offering into the adjacent e-commerce market to launch a simple and secure way of making bank-to-bank payments as a lower-cost alternative to cards.
"We believe that open banking is set to disrupt the payment landscape by introducing new, simpler, and more secure ways of making bank-to-bank payments that will compete with traditional card networks. Our investment in open banking innovation will create a uniquely valuable payment offering - continuing to provide our customers with the best way to collect recurring payments," Takeuchi later remarked.
The company claims to reassemble payment for businesses of all sizes, from multinational corporations like Xero to SaaS businesses like Deputy, and Zuora. In 2020, the platform further claims to have shown hardiness throughout the pandemic with an increase in new bookings of 100 per cent. In addition, the fintech company expanded its technology offering with payments intelligence tool Success+, powered by machine learning, to help businesses optimize their retry strategy when payments fail.
Open Banking, and its equivalents around the world, is designed to open up banking data to provide consumers and businesses with access to better services that can save them time and money, and each year the payment platform processes over $18 billion of payments across more than 30 countries.
"We are excited by GoCardless' enormous growth potential in a massive and largely untapped market. In particular, we're seeing strong early results as GoCardless moves beyond SMBs to serve mid-market and enterprise customers and expands its international footprint to address a growing need for bank debit processing. We have enormous confidence in Hiroki and the entire GoCardless team to build a multi-billion dollar company that will redefine the payments industry," concluded Matt Harris, partner, Bain Capital Ventures.
