Bank aggregators · pivoted

GoCardless Bank Account Data

A PSD2 account-information API for EEA and UK banks, formerly the free Nordigen feed, closed to new sign-ups since July 2025.

gocardless.com/bank-account-data · founded Nordigen founded in Riga, Latvia, 2016 [unverified]; GoCardless founded 24 February 2011 · London, United Kingdom (GoCardless); Nordigen from Riga, Latvia · researched 2026-10-10

Scope: It reads account details, balances and up to 24 months of transactions from banks in the EEA and the UK, on the account holder's consent, through a small self-serve REST API. Its free tier made it the bank feed of choice for self-hosted budgeting tools. It does not initiate payments (that is GoCardless's Pay by Bank) and it keeps no ledger. It has not accepted new accounts since July 2025; existing accounts still work.
Backing: GoCardless raised $312M at a $2.1B valuation in 2022 and was acquired by Mollie, announced 11 December 2025 (reported at €1.05B, mostly in stock) and completed 1 September 2026. It now operates as 'GoCardless, a Mollie company'. GoCardless announced the Nordigen acquisition on 1 July 2022.
Serves: developers, consumer, smb
Covers: bank, personal, integration
To ownpurse: Cautionary tale. The free bank feed that self-hosted tools built on, then closed to newcomers: a reminder that an owner's bank connector must not depend on one aggregator's goodwill, and that what was fetched must be kept locally.

What it is

GoCardless Bank Account Data is a PSD2 account-information API. It reads account details, balances and transactions from banks across the European Economic Area and the UK on the account holder’s consent. It started as Nordigen, a Latvian provider whose free tier covered more than 2,300 banks in 31 countries. GoCardless announced it would buy Nordigen on 1 July 2022 and promised “free open banking connectivity at scale”. For three years that promise held, and it became the default bank feed for self-hosted budgeting.

What it did well: it was simple and it was free. A person could sign up, get a secret_id and secret_key, and pull their own bank lines from their own server, with no business, no contract and no app in the middle.

How it works

The quick-start guide is four calls. Exchange the secrets for a refresh token (30 days) and an access token (24 hours). List institutions by country. Create an end-user agreement and a requisition that returns a bank login link. Then read details, balances and transactions per account. By default an agreement grants 90 days of history and 90 days of access. You can set max_historical_days and access_valid_for_days, and the overview promises “up to 24 months of transaction history”. Banks may cap reads at four calls a day per account, per endpoint.

Data and access

In July 2025 GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts. Actual Budget’s docs say “GoCardless has stopped accepting new Bank Account Data accounts”, and that existing accounts “should continue to work”. Its bank-sync page marks it “not accepting new accounts” and points European users to Enable Banking. The free tier allowed up to 50 bank connections a month. Paid, verified accounts are arranged through sales, and GoCardless’s pricing page lists only its payment plans. nordigen.com no longer resolves, and the product URL now shows Pay by Bank marketing.

Agents

There is no MCP server and there are no agent features. The API is small enough that an agent could drive it easily. The 90-day re-consent is a human checkpoint, but it gates reads, not writes.

Customers

Self-hosters and small developers: Actual Budget, Firefly III’s data importer (which had to add handling when “GoCardless introduced rate limits”), and many hobby projects, plus fintechs on paid terms. GoCardless’s Trustpilot score (2.3 from 2,492 reviews) is almost entirely about direct debits, not this product.

History

GoCardless was founded in London in 2011 and raised $312M at a $2.1B valuation in 2022 (Wikipedia). Mollie agreed to buy it on 11 December 2025 and completed the deal on 1 September 2026. The announcements talk about Pay by Bank and do not mention account data. The pattern is a familiar one: a free data feed bought to win developers, then closed once the buyer’s focus moved to payments.

For ownpurse

This is the cautionary tale for ownpurse’s bank connectors. The API shape is worth copying: explicit consent windows, per-account reads and honest rate-limit headers. The dependency is not. Treat any aggregator as one replaceable path to a bank. Record which path each line came through, and keep every line fetched, because the source forgets after the consent window.

Data and access

Public API: Yes. REST (JSON), /api/v2: institutions, agreements, requisitions, accounts
Auth: secret_id and secret_key from the portal, exchanged at /token/new for a refresh token (30 days) and at /token/refresh for an access token (24 hours)
Limits: Banks may limit calls to as few as 4 a day per account, per endpoint (details, balances, transactions); 429 with a reset header
What access costs: Free tier of up to 50 bank connections a month (per Actual Budget's docs); verification and higher volumes for paying customers, prices by contact
Export: No bulk export; the caller fetches transactions per account within the consent window and must store them itself.
Notes: Default agreement is 90 days of history and 90 days of access; max_historical_days and access_valid_for_days can be set (up to 24 months of history per the docs). Coverage is all EEA countries under PSD2, plus the UK; in 2022 Nordigen counted 2,300+ banks in 31 countries.

Price

Model: Freemium, then contract
Entry: Free: up to 50 bank connections a month (existing accounts only since July 2025)
Top: Negotiated for verified, paying customers
Notes: GoCardless's pricing page lists only payment plans; Bank Account Data has no public price list.

Agents

MCP: none
AI features: None.
Agent writes: No; account information only.
Approval: Bank-side consent (strong customer authentication) at each requisition, which lapses after the access period (90 days by default), so a person must reconnect periodically.
Notes: The periodic re-consent is a built-in human checkpoint, but it gates reads, not writes.

Integration and customers

Connects to: EEA banks under PSD2 plus the UK; 2,300+ banks in 31 countries (Nordigen, July 2022); GoCardless cites >100 UK banks covering 99% of accounts.
Notes: Integrated by Actual Budget, Firefly III's data importer and many hobby projects. Actual now lists it as 'not accepting new accounts' and points to Enable Banking for European banks.
Scale: GoCardless as a whole: over 350,000 businesses across 30+ markets for the combined Mollie group (September 2026). No Bank Account Data user count found.
Ratings: GoCardless Trustpilot 2.3/5 from 2,492 reviews (October 2026), almost all about direct debit payments, not Bank Account Data.
What customers say: Self-hosters valued the free tier and the simple API; the complaints were rate limits introduced later (Firefly III had to add handling for them), limits that did not reset, the 90-day re-consent, and then the closure to new users.

Timeline

2011-02-24
GoCardless founded in London
2016
Nordigen founded in Riga [unverified]
2022-07-01
GoCardless announces it will acquire Nordigen (2,300+ banks, 31 countries) and promises free open-banking connectivity at scale
2022
GoCardless raises $312M at a $2.1B valuation
2025-07
GoCardless stops accepting new Bank Account Data accounts; existing accounts continue
2025-12-11
Mollie agrees to acquire GoCardless
2026-09-01
Mollie completes the acquisition; GoCardless becomes 'a Mollie company'
2026-10
nordigen.com no longer resolves; gocardless.com/bank-account-data shows Pay by Bank marketing

Borrow and avoid

Borrow: The API shape: institutions, a consent agreement with explicit history and access windows, a requisition that yields accounts, then per-account reads. Its rate-limit headers and windows map directly onto ownpurse's rule of respecting each source's limits.
Avoid: Building a connector that only works while a vendor's free tier lasts. Treat any aggregator as one replaceable path to a bank, and keep every fetched line in the record, because the consent window (90 days by default) means the source forgets what it once returned.

Sources

Not confirmed against a primary source

Exact day in July 2025 that sign-ups closed, and GoCardless's own announcement of it (taken from Actual Budget's docs)
Nordigen's founding year (2016) and its launch date for the free tier
Mollie deal price of €1.05B (from Wikipedia; not stated on Mollie's pages)
Current bank count and country count
What Mollie plans for Bank Account Data after the merger
Prices for verified, paid accounts

On the spectrum

0 to 4. The grey tick is ownpurse.

Custody: 1
Where it runs: 1
History: 1
Openness: 2
Breadth: 1
Autonomy: 0
Agent-ready: 2
Easy to connect: 1
Market: 1

See it on the map

Also in bank aggregators

ownpurse is not affiliated with GoCardless Bank Account Data or any company named here. Names are their owners' trademarks. Figures come from the company's own pages and the press, as linked, as of 2026-10-10; scores are our reading of them against the definitions in the landscape. This is not legal or financial advice.