Open banking is the key to changing how we pay, and get paid. So when we closed our Series F funding round at the end of 2020, we immediately put that investment to work - accelerating our product development and launching Instant Bank Pay, a new way to pay directly from a bank account using open banking. It’s been met with enthusiastic adoption and thousands of our customers are already using it to collect one-time payments.

Closing another funding round just over a year later is a real vote of confidence for our strategy and I’m delighted to share that we’ve raised over USD312 million with Permira as our lead investor and BlackRock Private Equity Partners also joining the round as a new investor. This new funding provides us with the opportunity to build on our unique experience in bank debit and usher in a new era of direct bank payments.

Open banking is going to play a big role in our future, so we’re doubling down on our plans to accelerate in this area and are expanding our vision to become the world’s ‘bank pay’ network. By providing simple and secure direct bank payment solutions, we’ll help businesses and their customers bypass unnecessary intermediaries and pay directly via their bank account.

In short, we are focused on enabling both recurring and one-time payments that are lower cost, faster, and more secure for businesses globally. At GoCardless, we’ve always believed that bank debit is the best way to collect recurring payments, and open banking is set to make ‘bank pay’ the best way to collect one-time payments too.

Until now, online payments have been constrained by payment methods that were created for an offline world, resulting in high transaction costs and slow payout times. We know that there is a better way to collect payments, so we’ll be looking to open our ‘bank pay’ network to other payment service providers who want to tap into our technology and platform.

Our team worked incredibly hard in 2021 - growing our customer base by 20%. Our organisation is the strongest it’s ever been and, through tracking the continued development of open banking initiatives, we have seen a significant rise in payment innovations. As an example - we collected the first-ever live Variable Recurring Payment (VRP) with Open Banking in the UK back in 2019. Now, it's been announced that the UK's top nine banks must build VRPs before July 2022 and we are already building exciting capabilities to be at the forefront of this opportunity.

It’s a very exciting time for us and I’m delighted to be able to start a new year off with such positive news. We’re thrilled to welcome the Permira and BlackRock Private Equity Partners teams to join us as we take GoCardless to the next level.

Finally, I’d like to extend a huge thank you to our customers, our partners, our investors and the entire GoCardless team for being a part of this journey with us.