GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi announces 17% reduction in headcount

More pain for the fintech sector this week as GoCardless became the latest company to swing the axe and announce job cuts.

CEO Hiroki Takeuchi wrote in an all-hands memo yesterday that the decision had been made to reduce the company’s headcount from 900 to below 800.

“We are going to realign our business by focusing on fewer things and reducing our cost base,” he wrote.

“Our strategy won’t be changing fundamentally, however, we will do more in sequence vs parallel.”

Takeuchi also explained that there are some cultural changes that will need to happen inside GoCardless, including “setting higher expectations for each other and taking more accountability to deliver results” and being “more ruthless about stopping things when they aren’t working so that we can focus our efforts on the things that do work.”

As well as those involved in the redundancy process which GoCardless has triggered in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, the company is also offering voluntary redundancy to anyone who feels this new culture isn’t what they signed up for.

“This will be a harder culture to be part of as the expectations will generally increase,” wrote Takeuchi. 

“However, I also believe that it will be a more rewarding culture to be part of too. I strongly believe that it isn’t possible to have a meaningful impact without the journey being challenging.”

Looking ahead, Takeuchi says he still feels “really good” about the prospects for GoCardless, with these changes putting the company “within touching distance” of profitability in the near future.

“There is more and more focus on A2A payments as a disruptive change in the world of payments. Over time, I’m really confident that these tailwinds will prevail - we just need to make sure we position ourselves to take advantage of them.”

While initially focused on direct debits, GoCardless last year dove aggressively into the open banking payments (or account-to-account payments/A2A) space with its acquisition of Nordigen.

Since then it became one of the first providers to launch variable recurring payments, expanded its open banking features to Germany, and has won a number of new clients.

Gocardless became a unicorn in February 2022 when it raised $312m as part of a Series G funding round that included a valuation of $2.1bn.