Mollie completes €1.1bn GoCardless takeover at half its 2022 valuation

Mollie has completed its acquisition of GoCardless for roughly €1.1bn, closing a deal first announced in December 2025 and folding one of Britain's best-known fintechs into a Dutch-led European payments group. More than 90% of the price was paid in Mollie shares, meaning GoCardless investors have not cashed out so much as swapped one cap table for another.

The combined business now serves more than 350,000 companies across more than 30 markets, pairing Mollie's card and local payment methods with GoCardless's bank-to-bank collection network. Mollie chief executive Koen Köppen runs the enlarged group, while GoCardless keeps operating under founder Hiroki Takeuchi as "GoCardless, a Mollie company."

A down round dressed as an exit

The headline price tells only part of the story. GoCardless priced at $2.1bn in a $312m Series G round led by Permira in February 2022, with BlackRock also investing and Balderton Capital backing the company since its early days. In euro terms, the €1.1bn deal values GoCardless at roughly half that peak.

Because the bulk of the consideration is Mollie stock rather than cash, GoCardless's existing backers have effectively rolled their stake into the merged company rather than locking in a loss on paper. It is a structure that lets both sides describe the deal as a merger of equals even though GoCardless is the one losing its independence and, by several accounts, its premium valuation.

The timing lines up with a broader repricing across late-stage European fintech since the 2021-22 funding peak. Growth-stage valuations ran well ahead of what public markets would later support, and GoCardless's own numbers show that reset. Its annual loss before tax shrank to £24.2m for the twelve months to June 2025, the last period for which it has published accounts, and it has since reported a profitable quarter for the first time, following a series of cost cuts. Mollie, for its part, says it reached EBITDA profitability in 2024 and posted €147m in net revenue for 2025.

Why bank payments and cards together

GoCardless built its business on Direct Debit and, more recently, open banking payments that move money directly between bank accounts rather than through card networks. That approach cuts the failed-payment and chargeback costs that plague subscription and recurring-billing businesses, but it has never displaced cards as the default way most consumers pay online.

Mollie's pitch for combining the two is that merchants should not have to choose. Köppen argued that "a card-only approach has its limits, leading to high costs due to failed payments and customer churn," and said folding GoCardless's bank-payment network into Mollie marked a step towards his company's goal of removing financial bureaucracy for businesses.

Takeuchi, GoCardless's co-founder and chief executive since 2011, described the combination as bringing together two businesses with strong products across Europe and beyond, and said it should let the group serve customers better, grow faster and raise standards across the industry.

"By combining our expertise in card, bank and hyperlocal payments into one provider, we can better serve our customers, accelerate growth and raise the bar for the industry." — Hiroki Takeuchi, GoCardless co-founder and CEO

Geography fills the gaps

The two companies also complement each other on a map. Mollie operates out of 12 cities across the European Economic Area, with local payment tools such as the Netherlands' iDEAL, Italy's Satispay and Switzerland's Twint built in. GoCardless brings established footholds in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, markets where Mollie has had little presence.

GoCardless was founded in London in 2011 by Takeuchi alongside Matt Robinson and Tom Blomfield, who went on to co-found the digital bank Monzo. Neither Robinson nor Blomfield remains active in the company. Takeuchi, who was paralysed from the chest down following a cycling accident in 2016, has stayed on as chief executive throughout the company's growth, its 2022 valuation peak and now its absorption into a rival.

For founders and investors watching Europe's payments sector, the deal is as much a signal as a transaction: scale increasingly matters more than independence, and even a well-funded category leader in bank payments found it cheaper to merge than to keep competing alone. What happens to GoCardless's US and Australian operations under Mollie's European-centred strategy is the open question the companies have yet to answer.