GoCardless has been selected by Data Energy, an independent heat network specialist, to automate flexible energy meter top-up payments using its Recurring Pay by Bank product. The deployment runs on the account-to-account (A2A) payment scheme launched by the UK Payments Initiative, and represents one of the first live commercial implementations of recurring open banking payments in the UK utilities sector.

Data Energy had already rolled out GoCardless’ one-off Pay by Bank product for single transactions, achieving an 82% customer adoption rate within weeks of launch, a figure the company says has since risen above 90%. That adoption rate provided the commercial confidence to extend the relationship into recurring billing, replacing a manual meter top-up process that the company said consumed significant administrative resource.

The deal

Under the new arrangement, Data Energy’s customers will have meter top-ups collected automatically through bank-to-bank payments rather than card rails. GoCardless described the product as carrying “intelligent routing” that falls back to Direct Debit if open banking connectivity is unavailable for a given payer, which effectively removes coverage risk for early adopters. The platform also uses customer identification data from GoCardless’ base of UK payers to pre-fill bank details at checkout.

Aaron Beadle, director of IT and technical services at Data Energy, said: “Moving to an A2A provider and recurring payments was the obvious next step. It gives customers more control and peace of mind, while allowing our team to spend less time managing payments and more time supporting the people who rely on our service.”

Pat Phelan, GoCardless’ chief revenue officer, described the launch as capable of transforming energy sector billing, though that claim rests on broader adoption beyond a single early deployment.

Market context

The announcement sits within a broader competitive shift in UK payments infrastructure. Variable recurring payments (VRP) have been in commercial development for several years, with the open banking ecosystem, shaped by the FCA and the Payment Systems Regulator, moving toward a framework that extends VRP beyond the sweeping use case mandated for the major banks. The launch of the UK Payments Initiative’s A2A scheme represents the structural layer that commercial VRP products like GoCardless’ now sit on top of.

For utility providers, the case for open banking recurring payments is primarily operational: card-on-file billing carries churn risk from expiry and loss, while Direct Debit, though reliable, involves slower settlement and a fixed mandate model ill-suited to variable consumption billing such as heat network metering. An A2A recurring model that adjusts to actual usage is a cleaner fit for that billing structure.

GoCardless processes over $130 billion in payments annually across more than 30 countries and counts more than 100,000 business customers. Heat network billing is a niche vertical, but the Ofgem Market Framework currently reshaping the sector is pushing operators toward greater metering accuracy and resident transparency, creating a structural opening for modernised payment collection. Data Energy’s early adoption gives GoCardless a reference case in a regulated utility segment where incumbent billing providers have historically dominated.

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