GoCardless bets on open-banking to take a place in e-commerce

FACTS

•  London-based FinTech GoCardless, which simplifies recurring payments by direct debit, ended the year with a major new fundraising campaign.

• In 2021, the start-up plans to accelerate its development in e-commerce and present its solution as an alternative to bank cards.

• This Series F fundraising amounts to $95 million. Its main investor is Bain Capital Ventures, a U.S. fund that invested heavily in FinTech in the United States and is now entering the European market.

• This new agreement brings the total financing raised by the company to $240 million and its valuation to $970 million.

CHALLENGES

• Leverage the development of Open-banking: in the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent in France), use cases of open-banking are emerging, making account-to-account transactions serious alternatives to credit cards. GoCardless wants to build on this trend to position its direct debit offer among e-merchants.

• Building on the success of instant Payment: Instant payment also represents an opportunity for FinTech. With these funds, it wants to invest in a new offer that would combine both transfer and direct debit. Concretely, a customer could make his first online payment by instant transfer and then be debited monthly from the subscription amount. This solution could appeal to e-merchants who currently use recurring card payments, which are more costly in terms of acceptance.

• GoCardless is therefore consolidating its positioning as a payment service provider among subscription specialists and, more broadly, among all invoicing professionals, especially e-commerce players, which now represent a prime target for FinTech.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• GoCardless is poised to enter the coveted circle of unicorns in 2021. It has processed $18 billion in payments in 2020 (up from $10 billion in 2019) in more than 30 countries, including France.

• Despite the health crisis, FinTech recorded a 46% increase in revenues in 2020.

• It has 55,000 corporate clients, from multinationals to SMEs, some of which experienced strong growth during the pandemic, such as Doctolib.  France is GoCardless's second largest market, with 3,000 customers such as Doctolib, Sowee (an EDF subsidiary) and AssurTech Luko.

• It is targeting 10,000 customers in France by the end of 2021.