Hiroki Takeuchi is a British-Japanese entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of GoCardless, a fintech company established in 2011 with the ambition to simplify the way businesses collect recurring payments. He studied mathematics at the University of Oxford and began his career as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company, gaining early experience in strategy and problem solving.

Seeing how traditional payment systems were poorly aligned with the needs of subscription, membership and invoice-driven businesses, Takeuchi and his co-founders built GoCardless as a bank-payment network alternative to cards and cheques. Under his leadership, the business achieved global scale with offices in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Munich and Melbourne, serving more than 70,000 businesses and processing billions of dollars in payment volume each year.

In recent years Takeuchi has emphasised shifting the company’s focus from growth-at-all-costs toward profitability and operational discipline in a changing fintech environment. He noted publicly the company’s determination “to get to profitability quickly” as it navigates international expansion and developments in open-banking payment rails. Takeuchi’s professional journey combines strong analytical foundations with entrepreneurial ambition.

His stewardship of GoCardless reflects an ability to identify structural inefficiencies in payments infrastructure and build a technology business that addresses them at scale. As the company continues to evolve, he remains at the helm shaping strategy, global growth and the future of bank-based payments.