How we build at Checkout.com

Checkout.com was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Merchant Payment Providers, Q1 2026. It's a meaningful moment, and our team,  myself included, is proud of it.

For us, this recognition reflects something that predates the report by a long way. It's the output of 15 years of compounding hard choices. And I want to talk about a few of them, specifically the product principles that shaped how we build.

None of these are novel ideas. You will recognise most of them. But I've learned that a principle’s value lies not in the act of writing it down, but in the actions it demands when the easier option is right in front of you.

Before I get into the principles themselves, I want to say something about how we think about customers, because it underpins everything else. We are not the only company that talks about being customer-centric, or even obsessed. But what we genuinely try to do, and what I hold the team accountable for, is identifying a real customer problem and solving it holistically. Not a surface fix. Not a workaround dressed up as a feature. The whole problem. That intent shapes every principle below.

Single stack

This is our bedrock, and also the principle that requires the most discipline to protect.

A single stack means exactly what it says. If a functional component exists, there is only one of it in our system. One clearing solution across every card network we integrate with. One truth, not many versions of it.

The reason this matters: when we improve performance, security, or cost anywhere in that stack, every merchant on our platform benefits immediately. No exceptions, no tiers. It compounds in a way that fragmentation simply cannot.

Many of our competitors grew through acquisition. That means maintaining multiple stacks doing the same thing, which slows everything down and makes a single, coherent integration nearly impossible to offer. We made the harder choice early, and we've protected it since.

The temptation to fragment is constant. The quick path is always available. Saying no to it, consistently, over many years, that's the actual work.

Default to direct

In payments, network size matters. But depth is what wins.

When we enter a market, we lean toward direct membership and local regulatory licenses rather than routing through aggregators. It takes years. It's expensive. It's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to defer. But it's also what gives us the ability to drive better performance and lower costs, because we're not dependent on a middleman's latency or margin. After all, all payments are local.

It also makes us genuinely expert in what we do. You only develop deep knowledge of a market by being directly embedded in it, understanding the regulations, the nuances, and the ecosystem relationships. That expertise is what merchants are buying when they work with us.

The moat isn't technology. It's patience.

Abstract complexity

Payments are inherently messy. Regulations vary. Payment types vary. Regional quirks are infinite. Our job is to absorb all of that complexity so our merchants don't have to.

If it's easier to work with us than to build the connection yourself, we've done our job. That's the bar we set for every API, every UI, and every integration point. And it connects directly back to what I said about customer centricity: we're not done when we've exposed the capability. We're done when the problem is actually solved.

Transparent with data

We don't monetize ignorance.

If a merchant wants to see their data, we give it to them, it's their data and we help them understand it. When we define a metric, we define it in a way that's meaningful to them, not in a way that makes our numbers look better. That kind of transparency is the foundation of partnerships that last a decade, not just a contract cycle.

There's also a less obvious benefit here: transparency makes us build better products. When the data is visible to everyone, merchants, partners, and us, it's easier to identify where we're underperforming and fix it. Hiding poor performance only delays the conversation. We'd rather have it early.

All interfaces are made equal

Whether a merchant integrates via our Unified Payments API, our Mobile SDKs, or Flow (our no-code UI), every feature we build should be available across all of them. Not eventually. Not "coming soon to the API." 

The choice of how to integrate with us should never limit what you can do with us. That's the commitment.

Different customers need different levels of control

Many of our products (e.g., Fraud Detection, Intelligent Acceptance, Authentication) make decisions on behalf of merchants, often at the individual transaction level. And one of the things we've learned is that not every merchant wants the same relationship with that decision-making.

Some want full control. They want to set the rules, define the logic, and have us execute exactly what they ask without interference. These are typically sophisticated merchants operating across multiple payment providers who know precisely what they want.

Some value predictability over improvement. They want to know exactly what will happen, a reliable, deterministic set of rules that delivers consistent performance they can plan around. There's real value in that, and we build for it deliberately.

And then there are those who just want the best outcome. For these merchants we bring everything we have, network data, machine learning, and dynamic enhancement, to consistently outperform what even the most sophisticated manual configuration could achieve. This is where the majority of our merchants end up, and it's where we invest the most.

Our objective is to ensure every merchant finds the level of control that is right for them rather than pushing everyone toward the most sophisticated option. It's to make sure every merchant finds the level of control that's right for them, and gets great performance at every tier.

Modular, but better together

Payments shouldn't be an all-or-nothing commitment. We've built our platform so that merchants can solve specific performance gaps, whether that's Authentication, Fraud Detection Pro, or our standalone Vault, without needing a full infrastructure overhaul to get there.

This matters for another reason too: it means merchants who aren't ready to make a full switch can still experience what we build. And when they do, they tend to want more of it.

Because there's something that happens when these pieces work together. The modules talk to each other. Data flows more freely. Acceptance rates improve. The merchant experience gets meaningfully better. More than 75% of our merchants now use multiple products, not because we pushed them to, but because they found the value themselves.

What's next

The Forrester recognition is something we're proud of. But what drives us is being the payments infrastructure that the world's most ambitious brands actually rely on. That's a different kind of accountability.

Our 2026 roadmap is a direct extension of these principles. 

We're building the connective layer for agentic commerce, preparing our platform for a world where AI agents initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers. This shift in digital commerce is characterized by multiple, competing models that handle discovery, checkout, consent and disputes in different ways. Our focus here is to abstract this complexity so merchants can meet their customers confidently in this new world.

We're moving to direct acquiring in the US later this year, which has been years in the making and represents one of the most significant expansions of our direct network to date. 

We're rolling out Issuing in the UAE and the US, and enabling 24/7 withdrawals to stablecoin wallets from the Checkout Business Account. As the definition of what a "payment" is expands, we will too, offering merchants a different level of control with new digital settlement methods.

And we're launching a new service purpose-built for platforms and ISVs, because the needs of marketplaces and software vendors are distinct, and they deserve a modular solution designed specifically for them.

But honestly, what excites me most isn't any single item on that list. It's the moment we're in. Payments are at an inflection point. The way commerce gets initiated, authenticated, and settled is changing faster than at any point in the last decade. 

Agentic AI, new payment rails, stablecoins, and embedded finance, these aren't distant trends, they're arriving now. And the companies that will shape what comes next are the ones who built their foundations deliberately, without shortcuts.

That's the position we've put ourselves in. We've spent 15 years building the foundation, and we're just getting started. The opportunity in front of us, and in front of the merchants and partners we build alongside, is as meaningful as any we've seen.

Let’s get building.

^{Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .}