Taking the Pain Out of Payments - Hiroki Takeuchi, Co-Founder and CEO GoCardless [S8.E1]

Scaling up: Lessons from the world's best CEOs and Founders

Hiroki Takeuchi, the co-founder and CEO of GoCardless started in 2011. GoCardless is a star of the blossoming UK FinTech scene- last valued at $2.1b, the business is on a mission to take the pain out of payments for businesses of all shapes and sizes – from your local gym collecting monthly membership right through to the Uk’s biggest utility companies.

Payment collection is a problem as old as time, and in creating a bank payment network to rival the card networks like Visa and Mastercard , it is also an incredibly complex ecosystem to navigate and operate in. But Go Cardless has seen tremendous success – it currently processes over $35b in payments annually from close to 100,000 customers.

Aside from regulatory complexity that is only heightened when you throw cross border payments into the mix, the challenge of scaling a business that form day one has had such a variety of customer shapes and sizes gives rise to some wonderful lessons for operators.

Hiroki’s personal story is incredibly inspiring. The founder’s journey always involves a level of grit and determination to overcome adversity, but Hiroki takes it to a new level; five years into the Go Cardless journey, a bike accident resulted in a spinal cord injury. If anything, it gave him a him a perspective on life and leadership that has enabled Go Cardless to flourish like it has.

Show Notes:

(02:12): Founding Story

(06:45): Why direct debit?

(10:03): Unraveling the complexity around cloud-based payments

(12:31): Navigating the rules and regulations on collecting payments

(14:02): GoCardless’ competitive advantage

(19:00): Scaling challenges when expanding internationally

(21:52): G2M success via partnerships

(24:21): GoCardless’ culture journey

(26:55): Embedding and living company values

(28:26): Leading the business post bicycle accident

(31:10): Evolution of leadership when scaling a business