GoCardless, a global leader in bank payment solutions, has appointed three executives from open banking provider Nordigen, which it acquired last year, to its leadership team.

Rolands Mesters, co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer at Nordigen, is now Vice President of Bank Account Data at GoCardless. Fellow co-founder Roberts Bernans, previously Chief Product Officer at Nordigen, has been named Vice President of Connectivity, and former Nordigen Chief Technology Officer Jake Sebastian-Jones has joined the Product team as a Director of Engineering.

Mesters and Bernans will lead key areas of the business as the fintech unicorn seeks to capitalise on the $400 billion global open banking opportunity and become a leading provider of open banking data solutions. In his new role, Mesters will lead GoCardless’ new Bank Account Data group, helping more businesses to use open banking data to offer new services, make quicker and more efficient decisions and reduce fraud.

Bernans will be responsible for building and scaling GoCardless’ connections to payment schemes around the world and rapidly expanding its open banking connectivity footprint. The ex-Nordigen team will play a pivotal role in transforming GoCardless into a leading open banking provider for any business that wants to tap into open banking data or payments.

By incorporating Nordigen's next-generation open banking connectivity, which already covers more than 2,400 banks across 31 countries, GoCardless expects to significantly accelerate the rollout of its open banking-powered offerings, bringing the benefits of open banking to an even wider audience. Bolstered by its new in-house capabilities to quickly build high-quality connections, in the next 12 months GoCardless plans to:

• Expand its Variable Recurring Payments and PayTo offerings in the UK and Australia, respectively
• Introduce real-time payment capabilities in the US
• Increase the global footprint of  Verified Mandates, its anti-fraud feature already live in the UK, US, France and Germany, by launching in multiple markets
• Launch its open banking data offering

Mesters said: “I’m excited to join GoCardless so we can bring open banking data to even more businesses around the world. By adding open banking data to GoCardless’ offering, we can build a single port of call for all businesses that want to reap the many benefits of open banking, from faster, more secure payments to creating more intelligent decisioning processes.”

Bernans said:“There is no better time to join GoCardless as we set out to build the world's bank payment network. Over the past 18 months, GoCardless has emerged as a major player in the open banking space with the release of features like Instant Bank Pay and Verified Mandates. The next phase is to bring open banking connectivity in-house. This means GoCardless can not only accelerate our speed-to-market for open banking solutions -- we can also provide businesses a way to connect to multiple banks in multiple markets, all in one simple step.”

Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless said: “I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Rolands, Roberts and Jake as they and the rest of the Nordigen employees join the GoCardless team. As we enter the next phase of our growth, open banking will be a key enabler, and data and connectivity will play a massive role. In-house connectivity will open up new revenue streams, taking us toe-to-toe with traditional open banking providers while also helping us move faster and develop even better products and features. Open banking data will underpin and enrich everything we do, delivering more value to our customers and spurring the creation of new products and services.

“The opportunity is huge for any company that can provide both open banking data and payments; in the UK, for example, only 6% of customers use both. That’s why we believe it’s still early days for open banking, and why we’re excited to continue driving its development around the world.”