The Future of Payments: An interview with Guillaume Pousaz (Checkout.com)

Why you should watch: Checkout.com is (as everyone from Forbes to the BBC has pointed out) one of the most important companies you have probably never heard of. After its B round of funding earlier this year, its valuation leaped to US$5.5 billion - making it one of the very biggest UK-based FinTechs. It is now eyeing an IPO - almost certainly in NY, given that most of its VC investors are US. But its aspirations are global - with licenses in the UK, France, Brazil, Singapore and Dubai - among others. So, what does it do? It provides the back-end payments for e-commerce, almost exclusively at an enterprise (ie B2B) level - which differentiates it from Worldpay, PayPal and most of its other competitors. It also does it faster, which may count for something. Its Swiss founder, Guillaume Pousaz, is still CEO, (though he is based in Dubai) and is driving its very aggressive, tech-led expansion. He is also a genuinely innovative thinker about FinTech in general, and about what the financial ecosphere is going to look like as the Covid crisis recedes. Well worth listening to.

Moderators: Andrew Hilton (Director, CSFI) & Leighton Hughes (FinTech Lead, CSFI)

Guillaume Pousaz dropped out of University in Lausanne, went to California to surf, ended up working in a payments company - and then quit. With a partner, he set up NetMerchant in 2007. When the two went their separate ways, he set up Checkout.com - and has (he says) been consistently profitable since 2012. His A round funding brought in US$230 million; the B round added another US$150 million. He was listed as one of Fortune's '40 under 40' this year, and was a winner of Deloitte's FinTech award.

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Edited by Alex Treptow