Grateful and Growing: Checkout.com's 2023 Year in Review

As 2023 draws to a close, I want to extend my sincere thanks to all of our merchants, employees, and partners for the trust and confidence you have shown us. This year has been a remarkable chapter in our journey, made possible by you. 

I’m immensely proud to report over 40% YoY growth across our Commerce and Fintech segment. This has been fueled by signing many of the world’s largest brands to our platform, including Vinted, Temu, XE.com, Sainsbury’s, Stubhub, Henkel, Lastminute.com, NewDay, NetEase, Fever, Crowdcube, Carolina Herrera, Paco Rabanne and more than 500 other enterprise names. We have also strengthened our relationships with existing customers such as Shein, Netflix, TikTok, Grab, The Financial Times, Bayer, Chrono24, Patreon and GE Healthcare.

But nothing gives us more satisfaction than serving our customers reliably, especially during critical periods for them like Black Friday & Cyber Monday. We were delighted to see so many of our merchants thrive online during this period and that our teams were able to provide the platform stability to help them maximise their performance with 99.999% uptime over the four days. 

Over the year, we expanded our product offering to better enable merchants to move and manage their payments. We are thankful to our merchants who have adopted our Intelligent Acceptance product, and have collectively generated over $1.5bn in incremental sales for their businesses in just the last six months. 

At our Thrive conference in Lisbon, we launched Issuing, enabling businesses to issue fully customizable virtual and physical cards. The digital economy is increasingly influencing in-person payments, and Issuing will facilitate emerging trends like wearables alongside enabling businesses to offer financial services offerings to their customers. Since launch, we’ve created over 2.6mn virtual cards for our customers and have a strong pipeline to look up to.

We are also thankful to partners like UberEats and DocuSign for trusting us with their identity verification. Following the completion of our integration with Ubble. We launched Identity Verification, a video-based AI solution that enables customer onboarding in under 120 seconds, seven days a week from anywhere in the world. A key part of the customer journey, Checkout.com now optimises the performance of the onboarding process for businesses in the digital economy. 

We have also consolidated our leadership position in MENA, notably we were the first global payment service provider to receive an acquiring licence from the UAE Central Bank. Furthermore our investment in Tamara continues to compound with a new unicorn valuation for our BNPL in Saudi, and a >15x TVPI for Checkout as I type this blog post.

Change is a springboard for opportunity. For many businesses that we serve, our ability to keep pace with the payment rate of innovation and new consumer preferences is why they choose Checkout. On this basis we were proud to announce to our customer base that they would be the first ones to operate with our 3DS 2.3.1 certification. 

As we enter 2024, we start a new chapter in our growth. We will continue to develop and evolve our business and teams to ensure we are focused on what matters most. In the year ahead, we are doubling down on where we think we can add the most value to our merchants – that is driving better payment performance. 

Finally a massive thank you to our employees for being #customer_first in everything they do. Their passion and curiosity are the lifeblood of our business. The collaborative and creative efforts of our team have not only enhanced our operations but have also been pivotal in achieving key milestones.

As we step into 2024, I’m more optimistic than ever. Our pace is accelerating, bringing a new level of velocity to deliver on our mission to help businesses and their communities thrive faster and more effectively. This could not happen without you. 

Wishing everyone a great festive period and will look forward to continuing the journey together in 2024. 

Guillaume