Mollie-owned GoCardless runs the UK's first agentic account-to-account payment in the FCA's AI testing programme

GoCardless, which Mollie acquired in a deal that closed on 1 September 2026, processed what it describes as the UK's first agentic account-to-account transaction on 22 September 2026: a donation to the charity Trussell in which an AI agent took the payer through choosing an amount, entering bank details and setting up a Direct Debit mandate through a conversational interface. The run sits inside the Financial Conduct Authority's AI Live Testing programme, and GoCardless says the design keeps the payer in control of the transaction throughout rather than handing the agent full authority.

Agentic checkout has so far been demonstrated on card rails — Mastercard's Agent Pay, Visa's passkey work with Revolut, BLIK's first agent-completed payment. This puts the same pattern on bank debit, the rail where a mandate rather than a token carries the authority, and it does so inside a regulator's sandbox rather than as a vendor demo.

For Mollie it is the first visible product output of the GoCardless deal that created a 350,000-merchant European group.

Whether the FCA publishes findings from the AI Live Testing cohort, and whether GoCardless extends agent-initiated mandates to commercial merchants rather than charity donations.

• thepaypers.com
• Finextra, 22 September 2026