Welcoming our new Checkout.com CTO and CRO
Our people are at the very core of the Checkout.com business. As CEO, I continuously strive to find the perfect balance of bringing in deep expertise to complement and develop our awesome existing teams. That’s why today I’m very happy to share two new additions to the Checkout.com C-Suite: Ott Kaukver and Nick Worswick, who have joined the business as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Revenue Officer respectively.
Ott joins us having been CTO at leading cloud communication platform Twilio, where he led the company’s engineering platforms and technical architecture, and was an early employee at Skype where he launched SkypeOut and grew the business into a $1 billion product line. With such extensive scaling experience, both from a team and architecture experience, I am confident that Ott will help drive our technology organization to be truly best-in-class. What was most striking to me when I met Ott was his continuous advocacy for the merchant and his teams, which deeply resonates with our merchant-first philosophy.
Nick Worswick joins us with an extensive commercial background at Grubhub, Intralinks, Bullhorn and, most recently, WeWork. He will take over our commercial and marketing departments as Chief Revenue Officer. Nick has extensive global experience, but, in particular, being based in New York, he will work closely with our US commercial teams to strengthen our North American footprint. He also brings deep experience in scaling and upskilling all areas of our revenue functions including building best-in-class marketing, partnerships and customer success teams. Nick seems to be simultaneously both a rigorous, metrics driven executive as well as a caring and empathetic leader who I hope will help us deepen our global and local go-to-market approach.
2020 was a transformative year for the payments industry and, by extension, Checkout.com. We tripled our payment volumes and added over 500 new merchants. More than ever before we see progressive merchants’ mindset shifting from payments being an operational afterthought to a key part of their value creation strategy. In 2021, we expect this to continue and we are excited to work in partnership with our merchants to drive better value through connected payments.
The decision to bring in new leadership to Checkout.com is not an easy one. We are an organization that values our people, likes to promote from within and provide long term career opportunities for each and every Checkout.com team member. That’s why I am delighted that Riaz Bordie, our incumbent Chief Technology Officer, is staying with the business and Bradley Riss, our incumbent Chief Commercial Officer, will become Head of Commercial for Americas. They have both made such significant contributions to our growth and I am grateful for their continued partnership.