Finance

Fintech GoCardless halves loss, targets full-year profit by 2026

Published

2 months ago

February 3, 2025

Business Finance News

Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless.

Zed Jameson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Financial technology unicorn GoCardless more than halved losses in 2024 and said it’s aiming to reach full-year profitability by 2026.

The London-based startup, which helps businesses collect recurring payments such as subscriptions, reported a net loss of £35.1 million ($43.8 million) in the full year ending June 30, 2024.

That was a 55% improvement from the £78 million GoCardless lost the year prior.

The firm noted that “restructuring activity” at the end of the full year ending June 2023 contributed to a reduction in operating losses in 2024. In June 2023, GoCardless announced it was cutting 15% of its global workforce. That took GoCardless’ salary expenses down 13% to £79.2 million in the company’s 2024 fiscal year.

Still, while this improved the company’s financial picture, GoCardless’ CEO Hiroki Takeuchi told CNBC that revenue growth also helped significantly.

“We’re much more focused on the cost side … We want to be getting very efficient as we scale,” Takeuchi said in an interview last week. “But we also need to continue growing. We need both of those things to get to where we want to be.”

GoCardless grew revenue by 41% to £132 million in full-year 2024. Of that total, £91.9 million came from customer revenue.

Last year also saw GoCardless record its first-ever month in profit in March 2024. Takeuchi said its his aim for GoCardless to post its first full-year profit in 12 to 18 months’ time, adding it’s “well on track” to do so.

‘No plans’ to IPO

Back in September, GoCardless acquired a firm called Nuapay, which helps businesses collect and send payments via bank transfer.

Asked whether GoCardless is considering further mergers and acquisitions in future, Takeuchi said the firm is “actively looking,” adding: “We’re seeing lots of opportunities come up.”

Following its acquisition of Nuapay, Takeuchi said GoCardless is currently testing a new feature that allows clients to distribute funds to their own customers.

“If you take something like energy, the vast majority of the payments are about collecting money,” he told CNBC.

“But then you might have some of your customers that have solar panels on their roof and they’re sending energy back to the grid, and they need to get paid for that energy that they’re generating.”

GoCardless, which is backed by Alphabet’s venture arm GV, Accel and BlackRock, was last privately valued by investors at $2.1 billion in February 2022.

Takeuchi said the firm had no need for external capital and that there are “no plans” for an initial public offering in the near term.

Fintechs have been watching Swedish fintech Klarna’s plan to go public closely — but many are waiting to see how it goes before deciding on their own plans.

With technology IPOs at historic lows, several startups have instead opted to provide employees and early shareholders liquidity by selling shares in the secondary market.

In November, Bloomberg reported that GoCardless had chosen investment bank Lazard to advise it on a $200 million secondary share sale. GoCardless declined to comment on the report.

Finance

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Finance

Digital bank Bunq accelerates US expansion effort as profit jumps

Published

4 hours ago

April 15, 2025

Business Finance News

Dutch digital bank Bunq is plotting re-entry into the U.K. to tap into a “large and underserved” market of some 2.8 million British “digital nomads.”

Pavlo Gonchar | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Dutch digital bank Bunq on Tuesday said it’s filed for broker-dealer registration in the U.S. as it looks to further expand across the Atlantic.

Bunq CEO Ali Niknam said the broker-dealer application will be an initial step toward securing a full banking license. He couldn’t offer a firm timeline for when Bunq will secure this authorization in the U.S. — but said he’s excited for its growth prospects in the country.

Obtaining a broker-dealer license will mean Bunq “can offer our users who have an international footprint — which is the user demography we’re aiming for — a great number of our services,” Niknam told CNBC. Bunq mainly caters for “digital nomads,” individuals who can live and work from anywhere remotely.

Bunq will be able to offer most of its services in the U.S. with the exception of a savings account after securing broker-dealer authorization, Niknam added.

Bunq, which touts itself as a bank for “digital nomads,” currently has a banking license in the European Union. It has applied for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) in the U.K. Bunq previously had operations in Britain but forced to withdraw from the country in 2020 due to Brexit.

Bunq initially filed for a U.S. Federal bank charter in April 2023. However, it withdrew the application a year later, citing issues between its Dutch regulator and U.S. agencies. The company plans to resubmit its application for a full U.S. banking license later this year.

65% jump in profit

Beyond the update on international expansion, Bunq also on Tuesday reported a 65% year-over-year jump in profit to 85.3 million euros ($97.2 million). That jump was primarily driven by a 55% increase in net interest income, while net fee income also grew 35%.

Similarly to fintech peers such as N26 and Monzo, Bunq has benefited from a high interest rate environment by pocketing yields on customer deposits sat at the central bank.

Bunq’s CEO told CNBC that, while high interest rates have certainly helped, more generally Bunq is seeing increased usage of the platform and has been focused on cost efficiency from an operational perspective.

“Because we are so lean and mean, and because we have set up all of our systems from scratch … we have been able to not only increase our profits, but also offer very good interest rates in the European market in general, and in the Netherlands specifically,” Niknam said.

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More recently, central banks in the EU and U.K. and U.S. have moved to slash interest rates in response to falling inflation and concerns of an economic slowdown, which can bite into bank earnings.

Niknam said he’s not concerned by the prospect of rates coming down and expects potential declines in interest income to be offset by a “diversified” revenue mix that includes income from paid subscription products, as well as new features. Bunq recently launched a tool that lets users trade stocks.

“This is different in continental Europe to the U.K. We had negative interest rates for long,” Niknam told CNBC. “So as we were growing, actually our cost base was also growing because we had to pay for all the deposits that people deposited a Bunq so I think we’re in a great position in 2025

Bunq is coming up against heaps of competition, especially in the U.S. market. America is already served by established consumer banking giants, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. It’s also home to several major fintech brands, such as Chime and Robinhood.