Last week, I spent two days in Venice at Checkout.com’s customer conference. It was a rare opportunity to see inside their strategy, hear real merchant feedback from 300 global, digital brands and ride a gondola. I came away rather impressed.
1. Checkout is scaling fast (but quietly)
Over the past five years, volumes have grown 8×, and the company is projecting $300 billion in processed volume in 2025, rising to $450 billion in 2026. This is well behind Stripe and Adyen (c.$1.3-1.4 trillion in 2024) but enough to position Checkout as a credible challenger to this emerging duopoly.
In 2024, 40 of Checkout’s merchants processed over $1 billion – roughly the same as Adyen – but in 2025, that number is expected to hit 60. Checkout’s net revenue was said to be up ~30% (though no deeper financials were shared) and the business has implied a $12 billion valuation via an employee share buyback. By comparison, Adyen is worth $55bn today.
Although Checkout competes most closely with Adyen, Stripe and, less frequently, Nuvei, I suspect that most of its volume growth comes from the legacy players. As a stark illustration of the gulf in performance in the payment market, Worldline processed $495bn in 2024 and has a market capitalisation of under €1bn. The fintechs are sweeping the board.
2. The payments landscape is getting more complex, providing more opportunity for Checkout.
Global, digital merchants have an increasing number of alternative payment methods (APMs) to support – each with its own systems, rule and refund processes – more fraud vectors to defend against, and more pressure to optimise acceptance. Where there is complexity, there is margin and Checkout is clearly positioning itself as the toolkit for enterprise merchants to manage the often baffling trade-off between higher acceptance, lower fraud and reducing costs.
3. From crypto roots to mainstream enterprise digital commerce
It was striking to hear how far Checkout has come. Its early life was built on crypto volume (notably via Binance), but Guillame Pousaz – founder and CEO – has wisely recognised that the volatility and reputational risk were harming Checkout’s long-term prospects. Today, Checkout has moved into the mainstream with clients including eBay, Delivery Hero, Sony and Sainsbury’s. Unusually for a payment business, Checkout remains 100% focused on enterprise and digital. Pousaz (below) still rules out offering POS or SME products. His strategy is global, high value – deep rather than broad – which still offers plenty of runway and keeps the product teams focused.
4. The customers are happy
As the Aperol Spritz flowed, I was able to speak to many of Checkout’s merchants. The praise was consistent: “Checkout has caught up with Stripe and Adyen on optimisation, but often offers better commercial terms and superior service.” Merchants told me that they had strong personal relationships with Checkout’s senior leaders and that their account teams took real responsibility for outcomes. Customers contrasted this with Stripe and Adyen whose one-size fits all approach can grate with the fast-changing needs of enterprise merchants. Checkout’s relational depth is rare at scale and it will need to work had to maintain this as it continues its fast paced growth into new geographies..
5. Acquiring is still the core
The bulk of Checkout’s revenue still comes via acquiring. The business has launched local acquiring in Japan and Canada, and is moving through regulatory milestones in the US. In particular, passing the preliminary regulatory review in Georgia (USA) was flagged as paving the way for an acquiring banking charter, enabling Checkout to compete as a full-stack PSP domestically. This would be a big win. Although the Checkout’s balance sheet and P&L remain private, clearance by the Atlanta Fed suggests no obvious red flags.
6. The product stack is now enterprise ready
Checkout is operating at a scale where its data lake is processing 2.3 petabytes, with 1 million new transaction data points per second. That enables AI-driven optimization at a serious scale. Some highlights:
- Flow (hosted checkout) is live in 190 countries, and is adopted by ~70% of new merchants, embedding 35 APs. It claims a 22% reduction in authentication friction over API-based alternatives.
- Remember Me is Checkout’s one-click solution (analogous to Stripe’s Link) which has tokenised 630 million cards in the past year. In merchant trials, it is delivering ~+7 ppt in conversion. Committed to a fully modular product set, Checkout plans to allow merchants to use these token when processing third parties.
- Boost (the payment optimization engine) is processing ~10 million transactions daily. It reportedly increases acceptance by ~3 ppts via intelligent retries and, increasingly, with issuer partnerships. In tests, directly passing good transaction signals to issuers has reduced declines by ~2.5× (c.0.5 ppt net acceptance uplift).
- New merchant dashboards look very cool and support natural language querying (e.g. “how do I reduce declines on Mastercard business debit in Germany?”). We were told that guardrails are in place to prevent hallucinations although there is potential for disaster in the hands of junior employees. Despite the new dashboard, merchants told me they still spent most of their time sifting through the API / report-based workflows working on reconciliations. The first vendor that can automate reconciliations at scale will win the hearts of a tens of thousand heads of payments across the world.
7. Stablecoins not ready for prime time merchant payments
Despite strong buzz across fintech, there was consensus from merchants I spoke to that stablecoins are not yet ready for merchant acceptance in Europe. One large digital merchant told me it ran an extensive study and found no clear use case. The conclusion: stablecoin UX is clunky, regulation uneven, and dispute management unclear. With no strong consumer demand, this is one to put aside for next year.
8. Agentic commerce is promising but very confusing
It’s no surprise that agentic commerce (enabling AI to act on behalf of shoppers) was much discussed. Checkout announced a pilot with a major UK retailer to place orders via Microsoft Co-Pilot but I suspect the bigger question isn’t technology, it’s business: who pays whom, and how value is shared between merchant, agent (Microsoft), and Checkout. Guillaume Pousaz was clear: Checkout’s interest is not in charging higher fees, but in enabling increased volume.
Merchants are cautious. With vendor announcements coming thick and fast, one very large global marketplace said: “If we have to integrate to 20 different platforms, adoption will stall.” But with 500M+ ChatGPT users globally, the pressure is mounting: AI recommendations (and how product feeds are exposed) may become as critical as SEO.
9. Even payments veterans bond over hating PayPal
In quiet moments, heads of payments swap war stories. The subject that lit up the room? PayPal. As a consumer, I love PayPal and used it a number of times while I was in Venice but merchants feel otherwise. It remains deeply loathed: expensive, rigid, high operational burden; yet impossible to fully replace. While vendors normally focus on the latest technology trends, merchants spend most of their time dealing legacy friction in payments.
