If they are so successful, why do they need to continuously raise money?
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This seems to be a recurring pattern in the more innovative online payment services. GoCardless is similarly trying to shift how people pay for things online away from the fragile and unreliable card networks.
Unfortunately, at least for some of us, the problems these services are solving are becoming secondary. The biggest pain points now, as a business selling services online from the UK, tend to be about regulatory compliance issues that increasingly conflict with clean, user-friendly payment processes and about the increasing complexity of global VAT/sales tax rules (and the ever more hostile rhetoric combined with often unrealistic demands from many governments in connection with the same).
I'm looking at setting up a new business at the moment, and our initial assumption is that we won't be using services like Stripe and GoCardless at all any more, even though I've built modestly successful businesses with them in the past. We just don't have time for all of the compliance and tax hassle in every country in the world where someone might buy from us, and while Stripe's new samples and guides have helped with showing how to get their new PSD2-friendly API to work, they also serve to show how horrifically complicated the once-simple process of charging a card online is now becoming. In the near future, I suspect this will push many of us into using marketplace or merchant-of-record arrangements and just outsourcing the whole shebang to businesses large enough to deal with those issues properly, who will no doubt take a larger cut of the revenues in return.
You'd think governments would have been solving these problems at an international level decades ago, but many of them aren't even following the general OECD guidelines they've theoretically agreed. It's bizarre that in 2020, it's actually becoming harder for an honest business to sell a decent product or service to a genuine customer online.