Checkout.com, a payment processor and merchant acquirer based in London, is beginning the new year with an executive shuffle and plans to get more aggressive as it battles other payment firms on a global scale.
"2023 is about doubling down on innovation," said Zack Levine, vice president and head of revenue in North America for Checkout.com.
Celine Dufetel, Checkout.com's former chief financial officer and chief operating officer, last week was appointed president and COO of Checkout.com, overseeing operations, go-to-market, finance and marketing. And Nirupam Sinha, senior vice president in corporate finance and strategy, was promoted to CFO. Guillaume Pousaz, who founded the company in 2012, remains CEO.
The leadership moves were cast as part of the company's expansion in the U.S. and other markets. Checkout.com entered a series of partnerships late in 2022 to diversify its geography and products. Payment fintechs and traditional firms such as the card networks are adding more services adjacent to transaction acceptance as the battle to reach merchants becomes more competitive.
"There are some functions that are really close to the payment value chain but are just beyond the transaction," Levine said.
Checkout.com allows sellers to offer payments via their own site or through links to mobile wallets, occupying a market that includes payment technology firms such as PayPal, Block and Stripe. Stripe's core product allows merchants to support online payments, and it has built ancillary services to capture a greater share of its clients' business. Block and PayPal serve a "two sided market" with products for both consumers and merchants.
Near the end of 2022, Checkout.com partnered with Xiaomi, a mobile technology company based in China, to cover the full payment processing path for merchants in Hong Kong and Macau. Checkout.com additionally partnered with the point-of-sale firm
At around the same time, Checkout.com opened a research and development hub in Tel Aviv, hoping to reach a local technology community that has contributed to nearly 100 technology unicorns, making it one of the world's largest technology centers.
Other moves near the end of the year include a new product to enable payments for sellers in online marketplaces, and to mitigate fraud by deploying machine learning to study billions of transactions.
"There are pretty complex use cases that are emerging, like fintech payments, gaming and crypto that have sophisticated needs," Levine said of the potential to offer both payment processing and value-added services.
Like many
Checkout.com did not provide comment on the valuation reduction or layoffs for this story. In other coverage, Checkout.com attributed the layoffs to a focus on "strategic priorities." It told
The company is growing quickly in the U.S., and Checkout.com plans to "double down" in payments innovation in the year ahead, Levine said. Checkout.com did not release data on its customer base in the U.S.
One of Checkout.com's primary competitors, Stripe, has seen its valuation fall from about $95 billion to around $63 billion, according to the
Companies in the payment technology category need to deal with a rapidly changing payments ecosystem; with alternative payment offerings, new acceptance vehicles like smartphone payment acceptance, cross-border payments and larger players targeting small business clients, said Thad Peterson, a strategic advisor for Aite-Novarica.
"The degree of activity and the rate of change makes aggressive pursuit of new clients and new markets almost imperative," Peterson said.
Technology-focused payment companies are going to continue to innovate in the short term but will focus more on areas that can generate revenue quickly, according to Marco Salazar, director of payments for Javelin Strategy & Research.
"There may be a pullback from more exploratory areas," including areas like forward-looking digital-asset projects, he said.
Most new payment technology projects will focus on improving in-store payments or the shopping experience, or linking payments to other business functions.
"This type of focus opens up opportunities for these firms that aren't just about payments," Salazar said.
In that way, payment fintechs are on the same path as Visa and Mastercard, which for years have developed service strategies that take advantage of their scale to establish alternative revenue sources as payment fees get squeezed by competition and regulatory moves that restrict interchange fees.
Mastercard's
"That's why embedded finance is the hot topic today," Salazar said. "The payment is in the background."
