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- Over £1 million in annualized savings since migrating three APAC entities to Checkout
As the 2025 winner of multiple industry awards, CMC Markets is the online multi-asset trading platform with 2 million+ global traders and investors. With 35+years of experience and 12 offices worldwide, CMC Markets has earned its clients’ trust through highly reliable technology.
When trading online, even a second of downtime can have real financial consequences. Knowing this, CMC Markets looked for a payments provider that would put its clients at the center and power always-on payments around the world.
To maintain its position as a global leader in online multi-asset trading, CMC Markets must have secure, low-latency payments. Partnering with Checkout.com, the platform now has faster, smoother card payments around the clock. This is powering geographical and product expansion, as CMC Markets explores issuing as a way to better serve clients.
Challenge: Seeking a best-in-class payment gateway
Beyond basic gateway reliability, CMC Markets needed a payments partner capable of improving how transactions were authorized. At global scale, marginal gains in card acceptance translate directly into client experience, revenue retention, and reduced operational friction.
Having completed a series of mandated platform and regulatory changes, the focus shifted to modernizing card acceptance itself, such as adopting technologies such as network tokenization, advanced authorization flows, and account-to-card capabilities, rather than relying on legacy, static card processing models.
“After completing our mandated changes, we were excited to focus on the new products coming into the market,” explains Alexander Praill, Head of Payment Services, CMC Markets.
A core challenge was false declines: transactions rejected not because of genuine risk, but due to incomplete data, authorization parameters, or rigid retry logic. CMC Markets required deeper, real-time visibility into transaction-level data and the ability to actively tune acceptance strategies across regions, issuers, and card schemes.
Transparency and control were, therefore, critical. The right partner would need to support configurable payment flows, intelligent retries, and issuer-aware optimization, enabling CMC Markets to evolve its acceptance strategy over time, rather than being constrained by a one-size-fits-all gateway that obscures decisioning and resists adjustment.
Solution: A partner that empowers and explains, not sells and disappears
The CMC Markets team considered many providers in their payments partner search. They needed a unified solution – a processor, gateway, and acquiring all in one.
Checkout.com stood out thanks to its team members’ deep industry knowledge, as well as the platform’s global network coverage. “The Checkout.com team made a great impression right away, they were transparent and shared their knowledge generously,” Alexander Praill says. “They really understood our line of business and allowed us to progress the process at a pace that suited us. We could see straight away that they would be able to give us the insights that we needed to make the right optimizations.”
After careful consideration, CMC Markets chose Checkout.com for acquiring, improved payment flows with Intelligent Acceptance, as well as Network Tokens, Authentication, and Pay to Card across the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Canada.
Solving problems together, at speed
Once CMC Markets had given Checkout.com the green light, the two teams worked in lockstep to ensure the integration deadline was met. “The Checkout.com team was good to their word, and we were live before our previous platform went offline. The team was very reactive, knowledgeable, and personable – helping us quickly rectify any challenges we faced during the integration,” says Praill.
Through Checkout.com’s unified API, CMC Markets now has one provider for their entire payments flow,simplifying CMC’s technical and commercial setup into a single integration with consistent reporting and settlement flows across regions. “This unified solution has streamlined our operations and given us access to more APMs and products – including rapid customer payouts through both Visa and Mastercard’s rails. And we have a single point of contact, with whom we’ve built a strong relationship.”
Fast settlement speeds and a wide range of currencies were key advantages, too. “Our traders can deposit in up to nine currencies. As soon as they do, their funds are available immediately. So Checkout.com’s ability to settle T+1 and in a broad range of settlement currencies would prevent potential exposure we could face from a cash flow client money and FX perspective,” explains Alexander Praill.
Results: Actionable data guides acceptance rates upwards
Since onboarding Checkout.com, CMC Markets has achieved significant cost optimization in APAC. At the current run rate, the technology platform is delivering annualized cost savings of over £1 million across New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore.
CMC Markets now has access to more data that makes a difference to revenue. “Now we have total visibility of our costs across all markets in a single place thanks to Checkout’s reconciliation API.”
Checkout.com’s Intelligent Acceptance and real-time data optimization significantly improved card approval rates and retry logic, reducing failed deposit attempts and client friction – a critical KPI for CMC’s retail trading platform.
“We can now track our acceptance rate across all regions, and with the support of the Checkout.com team, we’ve already seen an uplift of 4% since going live. They’ve provided strategic recommendations and helped us better understand issuer preferences to boost our performance” Praill explains.
In addition, fast card withdrawals are a big benefit from Checkout.com’s Pay to Card offering. “When clients want their money out of their trading account for other uses, Checkout processes the payments quickly and reliably,” notes Praill.
A strategic partnership built to last
For a fast-paced business like CMC Markets, it’s important to have a partner with a good understanding of the card schemes, who’s available to give advice on the latest payment trends.
Checkout.com emerged as this partner, and CMC Markets has unlocked new opportunities in their markets, including local processing for low cost and instant funding for CMC’s new regions. Checkout.com and CMC Markets also discuss how best to use network tokens to reduce scheme fees and further improve performance.
“We're extremely proud of the partnership we've established with CMC Markets,” explains Louis Taupin, Commercial Director at Checkout.com. “It’s great to see how our platform and industry knowledge has made a tangible impact on CMC Markets, especially in their time of need. It’s always extra exciting to support a fellow fintech, and we look forward to working together for many years to come.”
Praill shares Taupin’s optimism about the future. The two companies have a collaborative roadmap across new projects like Apple Pay and card payments. “We’re excited to continue working with Checkout.com, and we see them as our long-term growth partner.” Praill concludes. “With their support, we’re confident we’ll be able to capitalize on new business opportunities, whenever and wherever they may arise – with the ability to switch on new regions, features and payment methods within our existing integration.”
David Hernandez Garcia, Senior Director, Visa Direct Enterprise Accounts - Europe said: “Checkout is a respected partner in our ambition to serve the financial sector across both card acceptance and pay-to-card. By combining the speed, security, and reliability of Visa’s rails with Checkout’s performance DNA, merchants like CMC Markets are realizing tangible business advantages.”
