Acquired has launched Acquired Billing, a billing engine built to help businesses manage recurring payments across the full customer lifecycle, from initial onboarding through to collection, recovery and retention. The company says Acquired Billing recurring payments management sits at the centre of a broader platform play, bringing together three distinct products under one roof.
What Acquired Billing actually does
The core claim is straightforward: businesses relying on repeat revenue too often manage billing and payments through separate systems, creating friction at every stage. Acquired says its new engine addresses this by letting merchants host and manage billing, create flexible subscription plans, set custom start dates and payment intervals, manage free trials and discounts, and update active subscriptions, all within a single integration and without disrupting the customer experience.
The company frames Acquired Billing as one of three components in its recurring payments platform. The other two are Acquired Acceptance, which handles payment capture, and Recover, which targets failed payment recovery. Together, the company says, they are designed to cover the moments where recurring revenue is most at risk: onboarding, collection, failure and churn.
Greg Cox, co-founder and chief executive officer of Acquired and Quint Group, put it plainly: ‘Recurring payments have the potential to create significant value for businesses, but too often that value is lost through fragmented systems, failed payments and poor customer experiences.’ His case is that consolidating these capabilities into one platform gives merchants more control over the entire recurring payments lifecycle.
Matt Whetton, chief technology officer at Acquired, made a similar point from the infrastructure side: ‘Billing should not sit separately from payments.’ Whetton described Acquired Billing as providing businesses with ‘the flexibility to manage subscriptions and repeat payments, the intelligence to optimise collection, and the tools to recover more revenue when payments fail.’
These are claims worth watching. The company’s proposition, that a unified platform materially outperforms separate best-in-class tools stitched together, is a familiar pitch in payments. Whether the execution holds under load, and at scale across different billing models, is a question the launch alone cannot answer.
Acquired Billing and the broader recurring payments platform
Acquired’s platform supports card payments, direct debit, Open Banking, Pay by Bank and variable recurring payments (VRPs). The company says this breadth allows merchants to offer customers the right payment method at the right moment, a positioning that places Acquired alongside other players competing in the account-to-account and Open Banking infrastructure space.
Founded in 2016 in London, according to Tracxn, the company has been building its recurring payments infrastructure over several years. The Acquired Billing launch, then, is less a pivot than an articulation of a platform that has been taking shape for some time.
In June, Acquired announced its role as a founding shareholder of the UK Payments Initiative (UKPI), which is establishing a new framework for recurring account-to-account payments and is aligned with the UK Government’s National Payments Vision. The UKPI involvement matters in context: it places Acquired inside the governance structure of a scheme that, if it develops as intended, could meaningfully expand the addressable market for exactly the kind of infrastructure Acquired is now packaging under the Acquired Billing banner.
The company’s recurring payments platform targets sectors including financial services, lending, subscriptions, memberships and recurring commerce. These are markets where failed payments are a persistent and quantifiable problem, which gives the recovery component of the platform its clearest commercial rationale.
Acquired is an event partner of Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026, taking place on 13-14 October at the Business Design Centre in London, where the company’s platform and its UKPI role are likely to feature in discussions about the future of account-to-account and recurring payment infrastructure.
