2025 Annual Letter: The Power of the Long View

This February marks my 20th year in payments and 15 years at the helm of Checkout.com. That’s two decades of falling, learning, and moving forward. As a CEO and as a company, nothing matters more than compounding learnings. If you take the long view, every failure, every success is just a data point that helps you create more value for our merchants and our employees.

Early on, I didn’t know if I’d run Checkout forever. Today, it’s one of the only things I’m very certain of. Our mission hasn't changed: we partner with merchants to solve their most complex payment problems. We do this by building our own infrastructure from scratch and moving faster than the competition.

Today, we power the merchants who define how the world shops, travels, eats, and manages money. We are obsessed with performance because, in the digital economy, payments are not a utility, they are a key revenue driver.

And because we push boundaries, because we innovate, because we drive change, we don't get every point right. As Roger Federer noted in his Dartmouth address: he won 80% of his matches, but only 54% of his points. At Checkout, we play a lot of points. We win more than we lose, but we never let a lost point define the match. Progress is never a straight line; it’s a series of learnings that compound over time.

By picking ourselves up and learning from every missed point, we have now reached a new level of scale, growth, and value.

Today, Checkout is stronger, leaner, and has returned to profit. More importantly, we are all more committed than ever.

Thesis: what makes exceptional companies

I often reflect on what defines an exceptional company and where I should spend my time. Twenty years in, I may not have a perfect answer, but this is my take – I observe three core attributes in every generational business:

• Strong Core: Obvious, but you need true product-market fit in a large addressable market, combined with great unit economics and plenty of operating leverage. Payments is a good example of this.
• Human Operating System: High performance is a science, not an accident. Generational companies don't just hire talent; they build an environment that removes friction and allows people to turn potential into impact. It’s about creating a culture where people can outdo themselves (the athlete mindset!) and build a career that truly matters. For this reason, we have our own purpose-built and proprietary software called Fabric.
• Reinvestment: Generational companies are capital allocation experts. They use core profits to fund the future, diversify revenue and master the art of playing both the short and the long game.

1. The Core Business: 2025 Performance

Our core business is not just growing; it is compounding and back to full year EBITDA profitability, with no adjustments. In 2025, we processed over $300 billion in total volume, a 64% increase year-over-year. We handled nearly one billion unique consumer cards (up 32%) across nine billion transactions. Net revenue grew above 30% for the second consecutive year. 

The true measure of our success is our merchants' success. We measure our scale by those who grow with Checkout. We now support over 1,000 enterprise merchants globally, and we are proud to announce the expansion of our 'Billion Dollar Club', a group of 63 industry leaders who each process over $1 billion annually, up from 39 just a year ago. This club includes merchants from every corner of the globe and every industry – from eBay to Vinted, and from Amex to ASOS to Temu. We have broad appeal of our high-performance proposition across verticals, from retail and digital goods to fintech and travel.

Our revenue is robust and diversified. Our top ten merchants account for just 18% of revenues, and none of our six commercial territories represent more than 20% of the total. We now operate in every major market around the globe, and will continue to invest and grow in new regions.

In a year of record volume, we delivered 99.999% uptime. Reliability is the bedrock of trust and payments are all about trust. For this reason, we treat every minute of every day as peak season. We had a record-breaking Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend, 300 of our merchants processed over $1 million in a single weekend. We handled $5.2 billion in total payment volume over those four days. We processed nearly 100 million transactions, with 95% of them completing in under one second – 30% faster than the previous year.

To ensure this resilience scales indefinitely, we made a major infrastructure leap in 2025. In December, we processed our first transaction on Microsoft Azure, marking our transition to a multi-region, multi-cloud model.

When I look now at the merchants we serve, with the technology we’ve built, we now have the right to win in any category and every geography. We have earned this privilege by staying true to the principles we developed when we founded the company – to relentlessly move forward, deliver value to merchants, and compound learnings to drive growth.

The Core Business – the three phases of falling and learning

To explain where Checkout is going, I need to share the reflections on where we have come from, and highlight the learnings that shaped and compounded along the way.

Phase 1: The Contrarian Bet (2009-2019) 

While the industry patched together fragmented legacy systems, we spent a decade building a single, integrated stack from scratch. We didn't buy platforms; we wrote code.

• The Learning: Relentless execution and our architectural purity delivered a strong proposition to our enterprise merchants. By 2013, we were a principal member of both Visa and Mastercard; by 2015, a fully certified payment processor. We have spent over a decade operating and refining a single, unified platform. More importantly, we were always customer first and early innovators like Wise and Deliveroo took this contrarian bet with us and helped us prove this architecture could outmatch legacy providers on performance and cost. Ten years later they are still growing with us, I thank them for their partnership and the learnings they provided.

Phase 2: The Velocity Years (2019-2024) 

Fueled by $1.8B in capital, we scaled at a 50% net revenue CAGR, expanding to 56 countries and securing ten direct acquiring licenses, including our recent US bank charter. Today, our monthly net revenue exceeds our total annual run rate revenue at the time of our Series A. However, in this period of hyper-growth, we learned that velocity can sometimes come at the expense of focus and the right culture. We moved too fast into new product categories and our hiring (across 2020 and 2021 we added more than 1,500 new employees!) risked diluting what made Checkout special in the first place.

• The Learning: Rapid growth is a gift, but it requires a ruthless focus on where you add the most value. Heeding my mother’s advice, we returned to “playing the game we are good at”: solving the most complex problems for the world’s largest merchants. We pivoted bacxk to the “basis point hunt,” traded vanity metrics for ruthless execution, and turned discipline back into our primary edge.

Phase 3: Compounding at Scale (2025-2065) 

As we enter 2026 with this thousand-strong enterprise base, we are full-year EBITDA profitable again, with an adjusted EBITDA margin exceeding 10%. This proves our model works at scale. We grew our enterprise merchant base by 20% last year, demonstrating that we can maintain high velocity while building a disciplined, self-sustaining business.

• The Learning: AI and machine learning are no longer "features"; they are the core engine for real-time optimization across our ecosystem. The world's most ambitious digital brands including Spotify, Uber, Netflix, Pinterest, and TikTok are using our services and have validated the impact of AI in our payment processing performance. 

Today, our core business is healthy and built for the next 40 years.

The Core Business – the physics of acceptance

I have always believed that payments is a game of physics – a constant battle against friction, time, and fraud. There is no room for approximation, and to win you have to obsess about the data and chase basis points.

We use a proprietary hierarchical contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm. While the name is complex, the concept is simple: leverage AI to test multiple routing paths for each transaction in real-time, learning instantly which path is most likely to succeed. It is powered by data. Our data scientists code optimization ideas in the morning and run live tests by the afternoon. We expect experiments to fail; without that risk, we aren't pushing the boundaries. We compound: the more we grow, the more data we have, the better our algorithms are, and the stronger our performance becomes.

We combine this with deep issuer partnerships. By sharing data, continuously improving on risk models, we lower fraud and raise trust. We feed this ecosystem into our reinforcement learning algorithm so that it learns from millions of sequential network interactions to maximize merchant revenue. Sharing data with issuers is already raising approval rates, and soon, with re-directionless 3DS, we will remove one of the biggest blockers to conversion entirely.

All of our data powers Intelligent Acceptance. It optimizes every transaction and injects AI intelligence into Authentication, Network Tokens, Real-Time Account Updater, Least Cost Routing and Smart Dunning to make them more effective.

Here are just some good examples of acceptance rate gains in 2025:

• Pinterest improved global performance by 138 basis points.
• Fanduel improved by 60 basis points in just a few months in their core US market.
• Fever improved by more than 100 basis points through a series of custom optimizations.

Here is what the incremental revenue for our merchants looks like in aggregate:

The Core Business – what we shipped 

We have significantly invested in the North American payments market. In the US, our license application for a MALPB (Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank) in Georgia was approved, marking a critical step toward direct acquiring, offering merchants greater control and higher approval rates in the world's largest economy. Oscar Health and HomeBase are among many merchants taking advantage of same-day ACH services (the ability to settle debits and credits in the same day using Nacha) and we are now working with Pathward as a second sponsor bank for the US market. We worked with regulators in Canada to secure a new license and launch our own domestic acquiring service –  HelloFresh and eBay are already benefiting from better control and higher payment performance.

As we scale, we must accept that not every launch will meet our standards on day one. A recent example is our expansion into Brazil. While our team moved with incredible pace, securing our local license from the regulator on December 26th, 2025, we realized upon closer inspection that our initial proposition wasn't yet “best-in-class” for that specific market. We aimed for velocity, but we underestimated the depth of local nuance required to truly win. Rather than launching a compromise, we’ve chosen to pause, listen to our merchants, and redouble our efforts. We don't just want to be live in Brazil; we want to set the benchmark. This is the compounding effect in action: the maturity to recognize a ”missed point” today is exactly what ensures we win the match for our merchants tomorrow.

We support the payment methods that matter to our merchants – more than 50 in total, making sure that consumers can pay using the method they prefer. Alternative payment volumes grew 104% this year. We added depth to our payment method portfolio with Tabby, Twint, SEPA B2B, PayNow, Vipps MobilePay, and Swish. 

We partnered with Google to deliver Secure Payment Authentication (SPA) for Visa on Android. This biometric solution replaces clunky passwords. In just 30 days, it supported 500 merchants, delivering a 16% increase in authentication success versus traditional 3D Secure.

Industry leaders like Ticketmaster leverage our standalone Authentication service to triage fraud and the management of demand spikes. They distinguish genuine fans from malicious scripts in real-time, ensuring tickets end up in the hands of customers, all while optimizing conversion. 

Flow, our AI-driven hosted checkout payment page, is now the choice for 52% of new merchants. Its AI engine dynamically presents the right payment methods to maximize conversion. Flow serves the full economy: from digital natives Virgin Active to institutions like The Royal Mint (the oldest surviving business in the United Kingdom) and The Financial Times. Regardless of vintage, merchants deploying Flow and our "Remember Me" one-click service achieve an average 7% increase in acceptance and an 88% faster checkout.

Our Vault allows merchants to manage the full lifecycle of consumer credentials, with nearly 8.6 billion unique payment instruments stored, and counting. Tabby, the leading BNPL provider in UAE and KSA uses the Checkout vault to improve first-attempt and subsequent acceptance rates. On average, vault users see an 11% higher success rate after a card is stored and 7% lift in subsequent success rates. Over the last 12 months, our forward API technology processed over one billion transactions to more than 40 third-party acquirers across the globe from Kenya to Mexico.

Our new, more accurate AI-powered fraud models within Fraud Detection Pro have helped merchants reduce fraud by up to 75%. Papa Johns benefited from Autopilot mode and halved their fraud rate while maintaining their average block rate, all managed entirely by Checkout.

We overhauled our merchant dashboard, embedding AI-powered lifecycle analytics, renewing the home page and adding new reporting services including batch payment processing. The majority of merchant change requests are now available via the dashboard alongside a BETA AI chatbot delivering CSAT scores of 78.4%.

Our Identity Verification Service (IDV) has also been added to our dashboard, delivering a single portal for all Checkout services. We added Face Authentication to IDV in 2025. In the logistics sector, it’s used to validate that appropriate drivers are using the correct services. In Banking-as-a-Service, customers like Swan, use Face Authentication to improve password recovery and prevent fraudulent access to accounts.

Our Issuing business hit a $5 billion run rate in Q4. We are now a card issuer of both Visa and Mastercard in the UK and Europe, with US and UAE expansion planned for 2026. Innovators like eSky, Jow, and Headout are already live. We helped Holiday Extras replace slow bank wires with instant virtual cards for partners like Hilton, saving them 12.5 hours of processing time weekly.

We have partnered with Sunday to design and optimize omni-channel journeys for 3,500 restaurants and 80 million diners worldwide. In the second half of 2026, we will apply these and many more learnings to launch a new Platforms service specifically for the US market where marketplace and ISV innovation outpaces the rest of the world.

Because of our global scale, we have invested in new methods to accelerate settlement flows. Merchants like TapTap Send can access their acquiring funds instantly and get settled up to three times a day, resulting in more efficient working capital management.  We have put the Checkout Business Account at the heart of our payment platform, embedding money flows so that merchants will be able to receive, store, and move money while improving their working capital.

More than 75% of our merchants now use multiple products, proving that while our modular services are powerful alone, they work best together. That said, we remain relentlessly focused on one thing: improving digital payment performance. It’s why we focus on mastering the physics of acceptance and deploying the learnings to all merchants on our network. 

The Core Business – AI and the dawn of agentic commerce

In payments, licenses are the foundation, they provide access to better performance and control. AI cannot obtain a license, but it can accelerate value for enterprise merchants. 

AI is fully embedded at Checkout. 97% of our team uses it daily. In December alone, we generated two million interactions with AI and now add 2.7 million lines of AI-generated code monthly. This isn't about hype; it’s about shipping velocity. 

We have deployed AI to ruthlessly remove friction from the core:

• Compliance: AI-driven policy reviews cut due diligence time by 83% (from 60 minutes to 10) without compromising accuracy.
• ‍Disputes: AI now automates 100% of rejected transaction distribution, previously a manual task.‍
• Care: After a very successful pilot, we expect AI agents to autonomously resolve more than 50% of our support volume in 2026, allowing our team to spend all their time on the complex tickets from our enterprise merchants.

The Next Frontier: Agentic Commerce

2025 marked the transition from AI search to AI agents. We are moving toward a world where AI agents can become primary consumers, purchasing autonomously on behalf of humans. This is a fundamental shift in the equilibrium of the internet, abstracting humans away from the point of purchase and creating an entirely new commerce channel.

The agentic landscape is currently fragmented. Our strategy is built on the same interoperability principle that powered the payment gateway in the first era of ecommerce. Checkout allows merchants to unify access to agentic channels by going through one payment provider to multiple platforms (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI) and the schemes’ (Visa, Mastercard) credential frameworks.

And we have already started delivering this vision: 

• We are currently live with Google’s new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
• We support both Visa Intelligent Commerce product suite and the Secure Card on File (SCOF) framework, which enables Mastercard AgentPay.
• We are in advanced discussions with OpenAI, Microsoft (Copilot), and other digital wallet providers to integrate agentic flows across their ecosystems.

We are building the tools to make agentic commerce a reality, attaching verifiable user intent to agent transactions and solving the inherent challenges in approvals and disputes. By the end of 2026, we expect dozens of our largest enterprise merchants to be live across multiple agentic protocols.

Our role remains constant, we provide the engineering and expertise to ensure our merchants don't just survive the shift to agents, they lead it.

2. The Human Operating System: culture is code

Technology can be copied; culture cannot. I spent the last couple of years thinking deeply about how to design the most efficient Human OS – the science behind high performance. People are any company's greatest asset. I believe that we must develop the organization, the systems, the processes and the data to power continued high performance. This is deliberate, mathematical, and scientific. 

At Checkout we needed our own high-performance people management software, and so I decided to build Fabric. I’ve enjoyed being personally involved in the product reviews. I wanted to make sure all our performance learnings were institutionalized in the software. The athlete mindset is to set ambitious goals, apply rigour and strive for personal bests.  Athletes are accountable for their goals and their performance. I wanted the same rigour at Checkout. Today, Fabric enables company goals to be cascaded to each department, every individual goal ladders up to departmental goals. Every team member has a target number of quantifiable goals that they track with their manager monthly as they update in real-time dashboards. Our reward models are scientific and explainable, with the highest-performing employees, rewarded exponentially for the outcomes they drive.
Feedback drives compounding learning and all improvement at Checkout. Fabric offers 360 degree positive and constructive feedback signals. This year we’ve captured more than 10,000 pieces of employee feedback. All our performance, calibration, and talent reviews are implemented in Fabric and supported by pre-packaged AI analytics. I am committed to developing and investing in Fabric. 

In 2025, we grew our team by 15% to 2,000 staff, opening new hubs in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Sao Paulo. We received 208,000 applications for over 700 open roles. Hiring in the US is up 80%, reflecting our MALPB investments. We increased female hiring to 43%. Our total population is 39% female, 61% male. We strengthened our leadership team – Jenny Hadlow was named Chief Operating Officer and Emilie Mathieu appointed General Counsel and board member. 15% of all roles were filled internally, notably, more than 60% of our executive roles were filled by internal candidates, proving our commitment to develop our own. Exceptional people can build exceptional careers at Checkout. We are thankful to all our team members who trust Checkout with their careers. 

We took the learnings from our velocity years, and we redoubled our efforts on our brand as an employer. I updated all our Operating Principles (OPs) and worked with my leadership team to communicate them at every touchpoint, so that every team member understood the culture we were building at Checkout. Each word of the OPs is carefully crafted from the learnings of the early years. They frame how we work, how we behave and form an integral part of our daily operation. Employee NPS grew to 39 (+16 from 2024), placing us in the top quartile of technology businesses. Our Glassdoor rating is 4.1 – one of the highest in our industry. Engagement with employer brand content on LinkedIn is almost 30%.  

This culture is underpinned by true ownership. In 2025, we completed our second share buyback in 12 months at a $12 billion valuation, ensuring that our team participates in the value they create. Over half our team holds equity. Our ownership structure is fundamentally different to most companies. We want every employee to be the owner, take the initiative and be accountable for results. For that reason, we are 80% employee and founder-owned, which makes us unique in the technology sector and allows us to truly take the long view.

3. Reinvestment: taking the long view

The return to profitability allows us to reinvest for future growth – to try, fall, and learn even more. I ask the teams to be more and more ambitious, so that we compound learning and growth for the long term.

We are doubling down on the core business to maintain our edge. Performance in digital payments remains at the heart of our proposition; we will continue to balance experimentation and innovation in machine learning and AI to optimize acceptance rates. This game is simply never done, there will be no finish line. Payments keep localizing, they fragment, and more and more regulation will increase complexity. We will leverage our new Georgia banking license to offer local acquiring with greater control and performance for our merchants. I am so excited about growth in the US market. Our investments in PSD3, open banking, stablecoins and other digital licenses will continue to remove the challenges presented to our merchants.

Agentic commerce will undoubtedly offer merchants a new channel, one that puts the consumer in control and amplifies business fundamentals like pricing and availability. Business models, as they always do, will determine the winners. While it is not only about technology, we will be ready to abstract complexity for our merchants and deliver tangible value. 

We are reallocating capital investment to deliver innovation in marketplaces, issuing, financial experiences, and agentic commerce. We will accelerate the development of our software portfolio and services business lines, using AI to develop and deploy software that augments acquiring to manage fraud, risk, and compliance. We will invest in platform solutions that embed payments and financial services inside of software platforms, accelerating new routes to market and serving new segments. We will leverage our end-to-end infrastructure, acquiring, issuing, and global pay-ins and payouts, to optimize the movement of money. By unifying these flows, we allow merchants to store, grow, and deploy capital within a single ecosystem. There are many investments I’m excited about that add value to merchants we serve today, and merchants we will serve in the future.

The digital economy is still only a fraction of global GDP. We have never been here for quick wins; we are building for the next 40 years. As I close my first 20-year chapter, I can confidently declare that Checkout will be my life-long journey. I want to dedicate all my energy to compounding every learning, to further our mission and create value for our merchants. 

By the end of 2026, Checkout.com will grow to 2,500 professionals worldwide, all deeply trained in payments, AI, financial technology, and our Human OS. I believe it takes expertise, humility, ambition, and a touch of the unconventional to deliver greatness. 

To our merchants, shareholders, and the worldwide Checkout team: thank you for your trust. I remain fundamentally positive. I have learned how to fall, how to pick myself up, to be better every day, and I have never been more ready to work tirelessly on your behalf.  

Now, let’s get back to work.

Warmly, 

Guillaume Pousaz