Mollie Relaunches Pay by Bank After Buying GoCardless, Starting in the Netherlands and U.K.
The new service uses GoCardless’s open-banking connections to reach more than 2,500 banks, giving Mollie merchants a direct-account payment option for one-off and recurring checkout flows.
AMSTERDAM — Mollie has launched a new version of its Pay by Bank service, the first major product release following its acquisition of GoCardless earlier this year. The service uses GoCardless’s open-banking technology to connect merchants to more than 2,500 banks, allowing customers to approve an account-to-account payment directly from checkout.
The initial rollout covers the Netherlands and the U.K. and supports both one-off payments and recurring collections. Mollie said the flow is designed to take three steps: the customer selects their bank, authenticates with that bank, and approves the payment. A wider European expansion is planned throughout 2027.
The product gives Mollie a way to offer merchants an alternative to cards without requiring a separate payment provider or a separate integration. For recurring payments in particular, the economics can be attractive because account-to-account transfers do not carry the same interchange structure as card payments. The tradeoff is that bank authentication and authorization flows vary by market, and the customer still has to leave the familiar card form to approve the transaction through their bank.
The launch also clarifies the strategic rationale for Mollie’s GoCardless acquisition. GoCardless brought direct-debit and open-banking capabilities that sat alongside Mollie’s card-acquiring business; the new service puts those capabilities directly inside Mollie’s merchant checkout and billing stack rather than leaving them as a separate product line.