2022 reflections: Navigating change and thriving together

At Checkout.com we come together every month at our company-wide meeting to talk about our progress—it’s part of our #unite value which drives us to think and act like one team. When I spoke to my team at our last company-wide meeting of the year earlier this month, I summed 2022 up in one word: Unexpected.

Like many of our peers, we find ourselves reflecting on 2022 as a year that turned out to be markedly different than we thought it would be back in January. While 2022 was a uniquely challenging year for our whole ecosystem, it has also been an important year for Checkout.com—it marks 10 years since we got our financial license in the UK, our flagship market and company headquarters. A lot has changed in 10 years but one thing remains the same—year after year we work hard to execute on our mission of empowering businesses and communities across the world to thrive in the digital economy.

Our vision at Checkout is to be a fully international company serving merchants around the globe, and in pursuit of that, we’ve added some exciting new members to our community this year. Sony Electronics, Frasers Group, and Sainsbury’s partnered with Checkout.com in the UK this year, showing that iconic global brands are increasingly turning to us in favor of traditional banking partners for fast, reliable, and secure payments processing. We began serving Xiaomi and Temu (Pinduoduo's subsidiary) in APAC as we continue our commitment to deepening our relationships in the region, and also announced Western Union, Starbucks in the UAE, and Burger King in Saudi Arabia.

2022 was a foundational year for our US expansion plans. After hearing from merchants who we already serve internationally that they would benefit from US coverage with Checkout.com, we invested to scale our team in the US—with new offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. We made some exceptional hires to help us serve what represents the second-largest ecommerce market globally. That strategic investment has started to pay off: Next month we’ll announce that we’ve won the business of a longtime Fortune 50 company as a Checkout merchant in North America, and have a strong pipeline of merchants as we look to scale our presence across North America in 2023.

Our commitment to building a global business does not end with our merchants. In 2022 we continued expanding the international footprint of our team, including opening a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel to tap into some of the best engineering talent in the world and better serve our merchants locally. We also prioritized meeting merchants where they are by making our website readily available in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and simplified Chinese. Finally, looking forward to 2023 we are working hard to secure additional regulatory licenses in the regions that matter most to our merchants as we continue expanding our global footprint.

In 2022 we strived to establish a community that brings together the brightest minds in payments to tackle common challenges and navigate an increasingly uncertain macroeconomic environment. To that end, we launched our first merchant advisory council in May and convened meetings throughout the year. We invited a cross-section of customers to participate in the council with their peers and share their challenges and goals for 2023. We also published the second series of our “My Path in Payments” blog interviews where we spotlight payments professionals from across the Checkout.com ecosystem to share their stories. We’ll continue building out a strong community of payments professionals in 2023 because we believe that we will drive better outcomes for our entire ecosystem by creating environments for collaboration. With that in mind, we’ll be delivering the first edition of our conference, Thrive…but more on that in the new year.

We’ve made some great progress toward becoming a multi-product company this year in order to offer our customers the most impactful solutions. For us to deliver on our mission, we needed to diversify beyond acquiring in order to help businesses and their communities harness payments as a strategic lever and lean into the opportunity holistically. In 2023 we are prioritizing performance and transparency, and our product roadmap for 2023 reflects that—for example, we’ll be launching an issuing product for which we have already issued over a million cards in private beta this year.

Our launches in 2022 took decisive steps toward our multi-product goal. We launched Integrated Platforms to support the growth of marketplaces like Zomato globally—up to 70% of ecommerce is expected to take place on marketplaces by 2025, according to a recent McKinsey report. We also launched Fraud Detection Pro which will protect merchants against the evolving threat of payments fraud through the use of our state-of-the-art machine learning, Authentication—which enables merchants to take complete control of their payment authentication strategy—and Stablecoin settlements, the first in market solution offering merchants the flexibility of 24/7 settlement.

We completed our acquisition of video-based identity verification company Ubble this year—our largest acquisition to date. By bringing them onboard, Checkout.com will expand our security and fraud detection capabilities and reduce the time, cost and friction merchants experience with existing IDV solutions. I look forward to working closely with the Ubble team in 2023 and beyond, as the importance of IDV in ecommerce becomes increasingly clear.

Our product journey doesn’t stop there though, and we have lots of valuable new products in the pipeline that we expect to launch in H1 2023 that will help unlock new revenue drivers for merchants through higher acceptance rates and card programmes.

As always, we also focused on making Checkout.com a great place to work and grow a career in 2022. We launched our Manager Galaxy—a one stop shop for all manager training needs, in pursuit of creating world-class managers who bring out the best in their teams. We also recently announced that our CFO/COO Céline Dufétel would be taking on the role of executive sponsor for DEIB, and our DEIB team partnered with our Talent Acquisition team to implement inclusive hiring practices in support of one of our company-wide goals. Finally, we re-launched our LeadX program—our custom management skills learning journey for leaders that was selected as a finalist in the Learning Excellence Awards—to double down on our investment in our top performers. We believe that we serve our customers the best when our team has the support they need to thrive.

Looking forward to 2023, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. We will remain a steadfast and stable partner to our merchants through unstable times. We’ll do this by doubling down on our core beliefs and living our values: #unite, #aspire, and #excel.  I want to say a huge thank you to Checkout’s partners, merchants, and employees for your impact this year. From starting the year with our Series D fundraising round in January to everything we have navigated since, we have accomplished a tremendous amount together. We believe that by focussing on our mission and relentlessly putting customers first, we’ll continue to succeed together.

At Checkout.com we believe that the best businesses are born out of challenging times. We know we face uncertain macroeconomic circumstances in 2023, but we see that as an opportunity to step up and be an even stronger partner to our merchants. We will continue to abstract away complexity in payments across ecommerce, fintech, crypto, and beyond to help all our customers better serve their communities. Thank you again to all of you who have been on this journey with us. Together, we will make 2023 a great year.