GoCardless is one of a growing number of fintech organisations disrupting a staid and traditionally non-customer centric sector.

Founded by Tom Blomfield, Matt Robinson and Hiroki Takeuchi after they met at the University of Oxford, the company was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator and soon secured a $1.5m (£1.1m) investment from Accel Partners and Passion Capital. As of 2017, GoCardless had raised $24.8m (£19m). Takeuchi is now CEO of the business and the other two founders have moved on.

GoCardless builds on top of the existing Direct Debit infrastructure to create a new, international payments network to rival credit cards. It now processes £2bn worth of transactions for tens of thousands of businesses, including Thomas Cook and The Guardian, as well as startups such as SmartPension and Nutmeg.

The company has partnerships with all the major billing and CRM providers, including Xero, Sage and Zuora, and the flexible API is also available to developers, allowing them to build GoCardless into any existing system.